What Colour Is Your Humanity?

What Colour Is Your Humanity?

By Emwah

Oh, it was glorious to insult her. Draco loved to see her crumble, to watch her self-esteem take a punishing blow, to make her eyes overflow with the salty tears, each one a testament of her hatred for him. Every word that left his lips, he could see stab her over and over like a dagger to her soul. Each time he spat cutting comments at her about her parentage, he could just tell that he was breaking her, breaking her so efficiently she may never be repaired again.

Yes, he was good at it.

He was a Malfoy, a wizard most superior. She really shouldn't have expected any less.

But she'd gotten this foolish notion that now they were both Heads of the school, they could be civil towards each other. Maybe she thought that they could be friends. Maybe she thought they could be lovers. Maybe she didn't think at all, something that was seemingly quite obvious, and yet very unusual for her.

For months now, he'd been making her life as rough as possible. It was almost too easy nowadays, especially as she spent more and more time alone in their shared common room than with her friends. An insult here, a mocking there, it really wasn't that difficult.

But it made him feel magnificent to see her so. Sometimes he'd replay the scenarios in his head, as he lay himself down to sleep, just because he rested easier knowing she didn't rest well at all.

Draco traipsed into the common room after a delightful dinner with his Slytherin friends, and an even better end to a perfect evening presented itself to him when he spotted her, Little Miss Bookworm, curled up in front of the fire with a large looking book. Typical of her, to have missed dinner in favour of getting better acquainted with a dull, heavy object. Potty and Weasel for example.

"Alone again, Granger? It doesn't seem too outlandish, considering you're an annoying Mudblood and all."

Rather cautiously, she looked up from the text, only to sneer at him. "At least I don't look like I fell into a vat of bleach, Malfoy," she replied scathingly, spitting out each syllable with as much venom as she could muster. Gone were the propositions of friendship that night. These were the moments he lived for. He saw her self-consciously twist the material of her jeans, drawing her legs closer to herself. The feeling of power that washed over him made him feel almost giddy.

"Don't you feel terrible, Granger, knowing that should some poor, delusional chap ever want to procreate with you, you'll taint your filthy offspring's blood as well?" he asked in a cool whisper, barely enough that she could hear. He grinned evilly as he said it, just because it felt so good to get to her.

She glared at him for a solid ten seconds, which he returned with amusement as he watched the tears form in her eyes, before she put all her focus back to reading.

It was so simple to win.

Draco was just reading over his Potions essay, which he knew would warrant him a very good mark from Professor Snape. He seriously wondered, not for the first time, if there was a more perfect being in existence. He belonged to a good, rich family that cared for him, and inspired fear in wizards of a vicinity. His appearance was enough to make any girl over the age of thirteen faint in a fit of undiluted pleasure. His mind, so full of knowledge, was as sharp as his tongue, which cut his enemies down with well-selected words.

Draco was just trying to find something, anything, wrong with his life when the single answer, the insufferable, walking textbook wandered through the portrait to their common room. From his vantage point, he saw her enter, and was just itching to get her riled up, for the pure and simple fact that she was the one thing wrong with his life. His body hummed with the exciting prospect of Mudblood tears.

"Granger!" he exclaimed with false cheeriness, "You look dreadful!"

Hermione viciously glared at him. For the briefest moment, he could have sworn he saw tears in her eyes, and he definitely noticed that her damnable hair was in an even more catastrophic state of disorder than usual. "Not tonight, Malfoy, I mean it," she warned, heading past the couch. Needless to say, Draco expected a bit more of a reaction.

"Is that all you've got, Mudblood?" he provoked as he rose from his seat. He could already sense that she was in a foul mood, and he just couldn't wait to make it worse for her, to attack her mind and soul. The punishment was just beginning.

She spun around from the stairs that led to her bedroom, with an air of danger. Draco noticed, with some pride, that she was already crying. He hadn't even done that much to her. Yet.

"Just shut up, Malfoy, I've had a very bad day!" she threatened loudly with an uneven voice, though stood where she was without moving, save for her clenched fists trembling with rage.

"What makes you think I'd take orders from a Mudblood?" Draco said with a scowl.

Hermione took five quick strides toward him, so that she now stood but two feet away from him. The proximity was enough to make him sneer at her. He detested having to be so close to something so unworthy of his presence. The mere fact that he had to eat in the same, granted vast but not vast enough, room as her was enough to ruin his appetite. He challenged her with a glare of his own, his intent, grey eyes promising threats of untold hurt and pain.

"Give me your hand," she said quietly. She bowed her head to divert their eye contact, which was just as well as Draco saw it. She wasn't worthy of his direct gaze, let alone any part of his body, however non-sexual her wants would be.

"I'll do no such thing Mud-!"

"Do it!" she yelled at him fiercely. Never had he seen her so full of rage, not pained but angered, excluding their third year when she had the cheek to strike him. Still he refused to obey her commands. He wouldn't sink to a point so low that he would resemble anything akin to a house-elf. And certainly, if at any unlikely stage, with whichever unlikely circumstances, he'd not bow down to a filthy Mudblood.

"Fine," she said softly, before echoing herself. "Fine."

She sniffed and, most disgustingly, wiped her nose on her sleeve, before she awkwardly turned to walk away, something for which Draco was most grateful. His mind was just sorting through the most perfect way to make her suffer, when something quite unexpected happened.

Before he could possibly have reacted, even with his heightened, Seeker skills, she quickly turned around. For a faint moment, he saw the flash of silver before it came slicing down and slashed the inner part of his arm. Instantly, thick, red blood began to ooze from the wound of his pale flesh, which peaked from the slash in his own robes.

"Ow! You bitch! You cut me!" Draco shouted, clutching his arm just above the blood, trying desperately to keep the liquid from escaping.

"What colour is your blood, Malfoy?" she asked in a psychotically calm voice. Her eyes, those bland, boring, common brown eyes had taken on a quality that Draco found a weakness. He saw desperation.

Quite forgetting her question, as Draco was preoccupied with worrying about the damage done to his writing arm, he looked once again at the line of colour on his otherwise black and white self. "You cut me!" he rambled, "You cut me!"

"What colour is it?" she screamed, her calmness breaking. Her eyes blinked, not in unison, but one after the other, trying to calm herself and recheck the reality of the scenario.

Draco stared at her, really looked at her, and wondered if she was insane. Who didn't know what colour blood was? More importantly, if they didn't know, who couldn't tell what colour it was when it was spilling right before their eyes?

"It's red, for Merlin's sake, Granger!" he spat incredulously. "And it hurts like hell!"

Hermione began to sob as she bowed her head, nodding to herself as she did so. Draco would have taken pleasure in her act of weakness, had he not been in a state of extreme pain. But he watched her, unable to do much else, stunned as he was by the shocking attack.

Finally, she looked up at him. Her eyes met his own, wide, grey ones. Draco swore it was then he knew she wasn't all there, that she wasn't all right, that her sanity wasn't quite in tact. And the thing she did next quite proved it.

She held up her left arm, almost like a stationary wave, and Draco saw the patch of crimson liquid that had stained her robes, originating from her wrist. "Is my blood red, Malfoy?" she asked, like she honestly didn't know, breathing heavily, almost panting, loud enough that Draco heard its erratic pattern.

The thought that first popped into Draco's mind was the sheer amount of blood that he'd been presented with. At that present moment, he was trying very hard to stem the flow from his own wound to care all that much about her own blood loss, or the fact that she might die, but he could tell that there was something very seriously wrong.

"Is it?" she asked again as she bit her lip. She must have felt the pain just as much as he did.

"Yes, yes, it's red!" Draco snapped, very, very not handling the current situation. Whatever mind game this was, whatever trick this little stunt was, he wanted no part of it. And Merlin, it hurt!

Hermione half sighed, half grunted in exasperation and torment. "Then what's the difference?"

Draco rolled his eyes at her, despite the serious state of blood loss. If this was the smartest witch of their age, he hated to see the competition. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he replied waspishly, "It's blood, Granger, there's no-"

His eyes widened in realisation. His blood was red. Her blood was red. What was the difference? All these years, he'd been flinging insults based on something that didn't matter, that possibly didn't exist. There was nothing dirty about her blood, nor was there anything pure about his. The blood was, for all that he could see, the same.

In that moment, that tiny, infinitesimal moment, his whole life crumbled around him. All that he was, all that he knew, all that he believed, all that he was raised to be was changed and altered forever. On the floor, where droplets of their blood mixed and infused, he could not tell where his began or where hers ended.

He didn't know what that meant. His world was inverted. Suddenly, it didn't matter that he was rich, that he had a good family, that he was good-looking, that he was capable of ripping a person to shreds with mere speech. Nothing but this plain-as-day message mattered.

Finally, he saw what he failed to understand for the past seventeen years. He grasped the triviality of all that his name meant, and how little her name meant. He was open to believe that every witch and wizard was worthy of being what they were, and that they should be valued no more or no less than everybody else.

"Granger," he croaked before he amended, "Hermione, there's no difference."

She tapped her wand to his wound, then to her wound, effectively healing the both of them. A wave of her wand and the pool of two bloods was gone, too. "Of course not, Malfoy," she said simply, her mind starting to return to her, and her grasp on sanity seeming to have returned.

"We're all human."