"Stop," she said.
"- roast it over a bonfire. Just a regular celebration. Good clean fun. And I'll give them this, it was cleaner fun than burning women they thought were witches. Because the way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to feel inside -" Harry put a hand over his own heart, in the anatomically correct position, then paused and moved his hand up to point toward his head at around the ear level, "- is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise. So, no, it does not indicate that Draco Malfoy was inhuman or even unusually evil, if he grew up believing that it was fun to hurt his enemies -"
"If you believe that," she said with her voice unsteady, "if you can believe that, then you're evil. People are always responsible for what they do. It doesn't matter what anyone tells you to do, you're the one who does it. Everyone knows that -"
"No they don't! You grew up in a post-World-War-Two society where 'I vas only followink orders' is something everyone knows the bad guys said. In the fifteenth century they would've called it honourable fealty." Harry's voice was rising. "Do you think you're, you're just genetically better than everyone who lived back then? Like if you'd been transported back to fifteenth-century London as a baby, you'd realize all on your own that burning cats was wrong, witch-burning was wrong, slavery was wrong, that every sentient being ought to be in your circle of concern? Do you think you'd finish realizing all that by the first day you got to Hogwarts? Nobody ever told Draco he was personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society he grew up in. And despite that, it only took him four months to get to the point where he'd grab a Muggleborn falling off a building." Harry's eyes were as fierce as she'd ever seen him. "I'm not finished corrupting Draco Malfoy, but I think he's done pretty well so far."
The problem with having such a good memory was that she did remember.
She remembered Draco Malfoy grabbing her wrist, so hard she'd had a bruise afterward, while she was falling off the roof of Hogwarts.
She remembered Draco Malfoy helping her up, after that mysterious tripping jinx had sent her stumbling into the Slytherin Quidditch Captain's plate of food.
And she remembered - it was, in fact, the reason she'd brought up the topic in the first place - how she'd felt when she'd heard Draco Malfoy's testimony under Veritaserum.
"Why didn't you tell me any of this?" Hermione said, and despite herself, her voice rose in pitch. "If I'd known -"
"It wasn't my secret to tell you," Harry said. "Draco's the one who would've been at risk, if his father had found out."
"I'm not stupid, Mr. Potter. What's the real reason you didn't tell me, and what were you actually doing with Mr. Malfoy?"
"Ah. Well..." Harry broke eye contact with her, and looked down at the library table.
"Draco Malfoy told the Aurors under Veritaserum that he wanted to know if he could beat me, so he challenged me to a duel to test it empirically. Those were his exact words according to the transcript."
"Right," Harry said, still not meeting her eyes. "Hermione Granger. Of course she'll remember the exact wording. It doesn't matter if she's chained to her chair, on trial for murder in front of the entire Wizengamot -"
"What were you really doing with Draco Malfoy?"
Harry winced, and said, "Probably not quite what you're thinking, but..."
The horror scaled and scaled within her, and finally broke loose.
"You were doing SCIENCE with him?"
"Well -"
"You were doing SCIENCE with him? You were supposed to be doing science with ME!"
"It wasn't like that! It's not like I was doing real science with him! I was just, you know, teaching him some harmless bits of Muggle science, like elementary physics with algebra and so on - it's not like I was doing original magical research with him, the way I was with you -"
"And I suppose you didn't tell him about me, either?"
"Um, of course not?" Harry said. "I've been doing science with him since October, and he wasn't exactly ready to hear about you then -"
The inexpressible sense of betrayal inside her was welling and welling, taking over everything, her rising voice, her glaring eyes, her nose that she was certain was starting to run, the burning in her throat. She shoved herself up from the table and took a step back, the better to look down on her betrayer, and her voice was very nearly screeching as she yelled, "That is not okay! You can't do science with two people at once!"
"Er -"
"I mean, you can't do science with two different people and not tell them about each other!"
"Ah..." Harry said cautiously. "I did think of that, and I was very careful not to get your research mixed together with anything I did with him -"
"You were being careful." She would have hissed it, if it had contained any Ss.
Harry raised a hand and rubbed at his messy hair, and somehow that made her want to scream at him even more. "Miss Granger," said Harry, "I think this conversation has become metaphorical on a level that's, um..."
"What?" she screeched at him, at the top of her lungs inside their Quieting barrier.
Then she realized and got so red that if she'd had an adult level of magical power her hair would have spontaneously caught on fire.
The lone other patron in the library, the Ravenclaw boy sitting in the far opposite corner, was staring wide-eyed at both of them while making a rather sad attempt to conceal it by holding up a book just below his face.
"Right," Harry said with a small sigh. "So, keeping firmly in mind that it was just a bad metaphor, and that real scientists collaborate with each other all the time, I don't think that I was cheating. Scientists often keep quiet about projects they're working on. You and I are doing research that we're keeping secret, and there were reasons not to tell Draco Malfoy in particular - he wouldn't have stayed around me at all, in the beginning, if he'd known I was your friend and not your rival. And Draco would've been the one at risk if I'd told anyone else about him -"
"Is that really all?" she said. "Really, Harry? You didn't want both of us to feel special, like we were the only ones you wanted to be with and the only ones who got to be with you?"
"That was not why I -"
Harry paused.
Harry looked at her.
All the blood was rushing back into her face, there probably should've been steam coming out of her ears, which in turn should've been melting off her head with the liquid flesh running down into her neck, as she realized what she'd just blurted out.
Harry was staring at her in dawning and complete terror.
"Well..." she said in a rather high-pitched voice, "it's... oh, I don't know, Harry! Is it just a metaphor? When a boy spends a hundred thousand Galleons to save a girl from certain doom, she's entitled to wonder, don't you think? It's like being bought flowers, only, you see, rather more so -"
Harry shoved himself up from the table and took a staggering step back, even as he brought up his arms to wave frantically. "That's not why I did it! I did it because we're friends!"
"Just friends?"
Harry Potter's breathing was starting to scale up toward hyperventilation. "Very good friends! Extra-special friends, even! Best friends forever, possibly! But not that kind of friends!"
"Is it really that awful to think about?" she said with a catch in her voice. "I mean - I'm not saying I'm in love with you, but -"
"Oh, you're not? Thank goodness." Harry brought up the sleeve of his robe and wiped across his forehead. "Look, Hermione, please don't misunderstand, I'm sure you're a wonderful person -"
She took a staggering step back.
"- but - even with my dark side -"
"Is that what this is about?" said Hermione. "But I - I wouldn't -"
"No, no, I mean, I have a mysterious dark side and probably other weird magic
stuff going on, you know I'm not a normal child, not really -"
"It's okay to not be normal," she said, feeling increasingly desperate and confused. "I'm okay with it -"
"But even with all that weird magical stuff letting me be more adult than I should be, I haven't gone through puberty yet and there's no hormones in my bloodstream and my brain is physically incapable of falling in love with anyone. So I'm not in love with you! I couldn't possibly be in love with you! For all I know at this point, six months from now my brain is going to wake up and decide to fall in love with Professor Snape! Er, can I take it from this that you have been through puberty?"
"Eep," said Hermione in a high-pitched sound. She swayed where she stood, and a moment later Harry was rushing over to her side and helping lower her to sit on the ground, bracing her body with firm hands.
The fact was that she had staggered over to Professor McGonagall's office back in December, not in total surprise because she'd done her reading, but still rather queasily and it was with great relief that she'd learned that witches had Charms to deal with the inconveniences and what was Harry even doing asking a poor innocent girl a question like that -
"Look, I'm sorry," Harry said frantically. "I really didn't mean most of that the way it sounded! I'm sure that anyone taking the outside view of the whole situation and offering betting odds on who I finally married would assign a higher probability to you than anyone else I can think of -"
Her intelligence, which had barely been starting to pull itself together, promptly exploded into sparks and flame.
"- though not necessarily a probability higher than fifty percent, I mean, from the outside view there's a lot of other possibilities, and who I like before I hit puberty probably isn't all that strongly diagnostic of who I'll be with seven years later - I don't want to sound like I'm promising anything -"
Her throat was making some sort of high-pitched sounds and she wasn't really listening to exactly what. All her universe had narrowed to Harry's terrible, terrible voice.
"- and besides I've been reading about evolutionary psychology, and, well, there are all these suggestions that one man and one woman living together happily ever afterward may be more the exception rather than the rule, and in hunter-gatherer tribes it was more often just staying together for two or three years to raise a child during its most vulnerable stages - and, I mean, considering how many people end up horribly unhappy in traditional marriages, it seems like it might be the sort of thing that needs some clever reworking - especially if we actually do solve immortality -"
Tano Wolfe, of fifth-year Ravenclaw, slowly stood up from his library desk, from which vantage point he'd just watched Granger flee the library, sobbing. He hadn't been able to hear the argument, but it had clearly been one of those.
Slowly and with his knees trembling, Tano approached the Boy-Who-Lived, who was staring in the direction of the library doors, still vibrating from the force of how they'd been slammed.
Tano didn't particularly want to do this, but Harry Potter had been Sorted into Ravenclaw. The Boy-Who-Lived was, technically, his fellow Ravenclaw. And that meant there was a Code.
The Boy-Who-Lived didn't say anything as Tano approached him, but his gaze wasn't friendly.
Tano swallowed, laid a hand on Harry Potter's shoulder, and recited, his voice cracking only slightly, "Witches! Go figure, huh?"
"Remove your hand before I cast it into the outer darkness."
The library doors slammed open again in the wake of another departure.
Chapter 88: Time Pressure, Pt 1
If you have forgotten current events within the story, I would suggest rereading Ch. 85-87 before proceeding to Ch. 88-89. Those of you who recall previous reading-environment difficulties are advised to find an appropriate refuge before reading Ch. 88-89.
April 16th, 1992.
12:07pm.
Lunchtime.
Harry stomped over to the mostly-deserted Gryffindor table, determining at a glance that lunch today was breen and Roopo balls. The ambient conversation, Harry could likewise hear, was Quidditch-related; an auditory environment which rated somewhat worse than the sound of rusty chainsaws, but better than what the Ravenclaw table was still blithering about Hermione. Gryffindor House, at least, had started out less sympathetic to Draco Malfoy and had more political incentive to wish that everyone would just forget certain unfortunate facts; and if that wasn't the right reason for silence, it was at least silence. Dean and Seamus and Lavender were all gone for the holidays, but at least that left...
"What was all that ruckus at the Head Table?" Harry said to the Weasley-twin group-mind, as he began to serve himself his own plate. "It looked like it was just ending as I walked in."
"Our beloved, but clumsy Professor Trelawney -"
"Seems to have gone and dropped an entire soup tureen on herself -"
"Not to mention Mr. Hagrid."
A quick glance at the Head Table confirmed that the Divination Professor was waving her wand frantically as the half-Giant dabbed at his clothes. Nobody else seemed to be paying much attention, even Professor McGonagall. Professor Flitwick was standing on his chair as usual, the Headmaster seemed to be absent again (he'd been gone most days of the holiday), Professors Sprout and Sinistra and Vector were eating in their usual grouping, and -
"You know," Harry said, as he turned his head away to stare at the ceiling illusion of a clear blue sky, "that still creeps me out sometimes."
"What does?" said Fred or George.
The powerful and enigmatic Defense Professor was 'resting' or whatever-the-heck-was-wrong-with-him, his hands making fumbling, hesitant grabs at a chicken-leg that seemed to be eluding him on the plate.
"Eh, nothing," said Harry. "I'm not quite used to Hogwarts, yet."
Harry continued to eat in moderate silence, as various Weasleys discussed some bizarre mind-affecting substance called Chudley Cannons.
"What sort of deep mysterious thoughts are you thinking?" said a young-looking witch with short hair, sitting nearby. "I mean, just curious. I'm Brienne, by the way." She was gazing at him with one of those looks which Harry had firmly decided to just ignore until he was older.
"So," Harry said, "you know those really simple Artificial Intelligence programs like ELIZA that are programmed to use words in syntactic English sentences only they don't contain any understanding of what the words mean?"
"Of course," the witch said. "I have a dozen of them in my trunk."
"Well, I'm pretty sure my understanding of girls is somewhere around that level."
A sudden hush fell.
It took a few seconds for Harry to realize that, no, the entire Great Hall wasn't staring at him, and then Harry twisted his head around to look.
The figure who'd just staggered into the Great Hall appeared to be Mr. Filch, Hogwarts's token hallway monitor; who, along with his predatory cat Mrs. Norris, constituted a low-level random encounter whom Harry often breezed past wearing his epic-level Deathly Hallow. (Harry had once consulted the Weasley twins about pulling some sort of prank on this deserving target, whereupon Fred or George had quietly pointed out that Mr. Filch was never seen to use a wand, which was odd, really, considering how many spells would be useful in that position, and it made you wonder why Dumbledore had given the man a position at Hogwarts, and Harry had shut up.)
Right now Mr. Filch's brown clothing was disarrayed and soaked with sweat, his shoulders were visibly heaving as he breathed, and his everpresent cat was missing.
"Troll -" gasped Mr. Filch. "In the dungeons -"
Minerva McGonagall stood up from the Head Table so quickly that her chair fell to the ground behind her.
"Argus!" she cried. "What happened to you?"
Argus Filch staggered forward from the huge doors, his upper body streaked and dotted with small crimson dots as though someone had spattered steak sauce over his face. "Troll - grey - twice as tall as me - it - it -" Argus Filch covered his face with his hands. "It ate Mrs. Norris -
ate her all up, in just one bite -"
Minerva felt a stab of dismay in her other self, she hadn't liked the other cat very much but the two of them had still been felines.
An uproar started from the Great Hall. Severus stood up from the Head Table, somehow doing so without drawing any visible attention to himself, and strode out the huge doors without another word.
Of course, Minerva thought, the third-floor corridor - this could be a distraction -
She mentally consigned all such matters to Severus's care, drew her wand, raised it high, and let out five sharp cracks of purple fire.
There was stunned silence but for Argus's broken sobs.
"It seems we have a dangerous creature loose in Hogwarts," she said to the faculty at the Head Table. "I will ask you all to aid in searching the halls." Then she turned to the stunned and watching students, and raised her voice. "Prefects - lead your houses back to the dormitories immediately!"
Percy Weasley leaped up from the Gryffindor table. "Follow me!" he said in a high voice. "Stick together, first-years! No, not you -" but by that time the other prefects were raising their own voices as a renewed babble sprang up.
Then a clear, cool voice spoke under the sudden rush of sound.
"Deputy Headmistress."
She turned.
The Defense Professor was calmly wiping off his hands on a napkin as he stood up from the Head Table. "With respect," said the man of unknown identity, "you are not expert in battle tactics, madam. In this situation, it would be wiser to -"
"I do apologize, Professor," said Professor McGonagall, as she turned toward the great doors. Filius and Pomona had already risen to follow her, with Rubeus Hagrid towering over all of them as the half-giant stood up. She'd been through similar experiences too many times, at this point. "Sad experience has taught me that on occasions such as these, it is not a good time to take any advice the current Defense Professor may offer. Indeed, I think it wise that the two of us search for the troll together, so that no suspicions may be cast upon you for any untoward events which occur during that time."
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Page 153