Reflections in a Broken Mirror

Chapter One - The Things We Leave Behind

What has happened to it all?

Crazy some say

Where is the life that I recognize?

Gone away

Those grey eyes are cold and empty, like holes into nothing, a void so deep that there is no end to the fall if you were to slip at the edge. There is nothing behind them, no love, no hate, and no recognition. Suddenly they are not eyes at all, but one great sheet of ice or glass, reflecting nothing and everything. He steps closer, wanting to touch the pane of ice, to make an impression on it, to be visible in it and not insubstantial. He reaches out to touch its surface, feeling the cold numbing his fingertips. They are inches away, a breath from brushing the glacial surface. Just a breath . . .

Draco bolted upright in bed, breathing heavily. The air in his room was thick, and for a moment, he was gripped by the irrational fear that he was going to be smothered. The back of his neck was damp with sweat and caused his hair to stick to it. He felt slippery and ill at ease. It was late August, and unnaturally hot. Draco rolled over onto his stomach, pushing the pillows away and laying flat on the mattress before flipping onto his back in restless agitation. Draco wasn't a sound sleeper by nature. He had crossed the line to becoming an insomniac quite a while back. The shadows under his eyes had all but taken up residence.

It was disturbing to be at home since father had been put in Azkaban. The house was always missing something when Lucius was gone--which had become quite often during the past few years--but now that the guarantee of his return did not exist, there was strangeness about the whole of the Malfoy manor itself, an emptiness that was only recognizable now that it was impossible to fill. It no longer had the feel of a real place; the Malfoy home was a skeleton and little more.

He's gone. The thought floated unbidden into Draco's mind. He'd been avoiding the it for quite a while. Feeling a number of painful emotions rising in him, he forced them down and to clear his mind, but found it impossible, adding to his constant, building frustration.

Without the distractions of classes, Quidditch, and the ten thousand other petty trials of school, Draco really had nothing to concentrate on, save the surreal events of recent weeks. He managed to stave off dark thoughts during daylight hours; immersing himself in the vast library his family had built up over centuries of larceny, pillaging, and more recent, legitimate purchases. Most days he spent a good deal of time flying, urging his broom to increasingly reckless heights in search of the perfect oblivion that accompanied the sensation of chill air dragging icy fingers over his skin and through his hair. He spent hours on his summer assignments, covering feet of parchment with spidery writing on extended essays that he wrote and rewrote.

Draco's near manic need to do achieved the end he desired during the light of day. In the lonely darkness of his chamber late at night, the tale was a different one.

As a very small boy, Draco had been afflicted by nightmares. Night after night he was plagued by shadowy nameless fears that he was unable to recall upon waking. On one such occasion he had awakened in childish terror, gripped by the conviction that he was entirely alone in the sweeping halls and wide chambers of the Malfoy mansion. For an entire night he had sat bolt upright in bed, knees pulled to his chest and biting his lower lip, not moving even so much as to push the strands of ghostly hair from his wide eyes.

Exhausted though he often was after days of near-compulsive activity, Draco found himself staring up at the silvery black canopy of his bed, incapable of stopping the constant parade of dark thoughts that capered through his mind. Often he fell into periods of fitful slumber only to awaken at ungodly hours of the morning, his mind racing. He felt crazed and desperate; a child running through a snowstorm from rabid wolves woven of his own suppressed anguish, each of them with cold, expressionless grey eyes.

On the worst nights he lay staring into the middle distance, torn between tearing his chamber apart and curling up into a ball. It was like being three people at once.

One of the nastier results was Draco's increasingly short temper. On the rare occasion that he did speak to infrequent visitors, his words were clipped and tense. After one such incident, his mother had confronted him, her normally even voice strained and low. Draco had lashed out, his words derisive. A glimmer of hurt had made a fleeting appearance in her eyes, gone before it had truly formed.

Draco hated himself for it.

He didn't apologize.

Though neither of them spoke of Lucius or the trial, the subject hung heavily in the air between them. There were times when Narcissa, unaware of her son's scrutiny, would be possessed by an air of heartrending despair. Draco would catch the briefest glimpse of the agony his mother held behind a mask that seemed never to falter. Once, after returning from some unspecified errand of which he had been unaware, Draco had caught the sound of soft crying, the sound low and stifled. He had felt wretched over this, for he was sure that this hurt was a different hurt altogether than the now familiar pain of Lucius's absence.

Hell was not a place of fire, brimstone and lost souls. It was a large house full of buried emotions.

He couldn't stay at home much longer. It would leech away the last of his reserve and leave him on the edge of sanity, raw and bleeding.

Draco turned onto his side and pulled his knees up. Down stairs in some remote part of the house, a clock was chiming the hours. One . . .two . . .three . . .

Again, he would be all night awake.

* * * *

Packing was by far the hardest part of the summer for Hermione. She never quite knew what to take with her, so she ended up putting all of the strangest things into her trunk and then taking them out, and so on in this vein for at least a day or so until none of the things she had originally planned to take were in her trunk and her room was a disaster. Moreover, each year it seemed that she took more with her. The entire procedure left her harassed and intolerably scattered. Letting out a harried snarl, she threw herself onto the floor next to her bed and began an ardent search for her copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, feeling steadily more put upon as she came across an increasing number of dust bunnies and socks in various states of cleanliness. Yet still she had no book.

The cause for Hermione's feelings of harassment was not based in her lack of packing prowess--though it did play a part--but in her increasing awareness of the reality that her parents' house felt less like home with each year. Indeed, the very detail that even in her mind she referred to it as "her parent's house" caused her to feel as if she was betraying them--or more accurately, herself--in some inexplicable way. She had strived repeatedly to convince herself that this was all a part of growing up, of developing into a responsible adult.

This approach had done nothing to assuage the sensation that she was merely a well-liked visitor as she had stepped over the threshold of the grey brick house with red shutters the evening after she'd gotten home from King's Cross. Her parents had embraced her, fussed over how well she had done in her studies, how pretty she was growing to be, how mature she had become.

"Your hair's so long now dear!"

"Can't call you my 'little' girl anymore, can I? Quite the scholar you're getting to be."

Smiles, embraces, and all of the other trappings of parental affection had been showered upon her in such profusion she feared she would asphyxiate. Yet even with all of the commotion, it became clear that her parents had to make a conscious effort to work their daughter back into life at the Granger Home. They tried very hard to fit her back into their normal routine, taking time to try and engage her in activities they had once enjoyed as a family; even so that it was a bit awkward, almost as if they had forgotten how. Still, they tried. She loved them for it.

There were times when she wished she had not been so willfully independent and had instead bothered to enjoy that she had been given such loving parents. But somewhere along the way she had learned to need them less and less, and she couldn't go back to suddenly needing them desperately. They no longer had the supernatural power that all parents possessed to Make Everything Right.

No one did anymore.

For her part, Hermione found herself spending quite a lot of time at the cinema, at the library or really anywhere that was not the Granger home. On one such occasion she had even stumbled--quite literally, for she had not been paying attention--into a couple of girls she had attended school with before Hogwarts. She had gone a few places with them. Still, there hadn't been a real connection between herself and her old schoolmates save dusty memories that had been set aside along with jump ropes, swing sets and excited whispers of "Who do you like?" behind cupped hands. There were so many aspects of her life she could not share with them, and she could not relate to their experiences. She had gradually let them assume that she was just quiet by nature, and no longer the talkative girl she had once been. It had been very easy to let herself fade quietly into the background and fall into a sort of routine, which--while not being exactly satisfying--kept her occupied.

It was becoming progressively more evident that Hermione had all but withdrawn fully from the Muggle world. Within the next two years she would take her N.E.W.T.S, graduate and be on her own in the magical world. By that time there would be nothing to tie her to the muggle world save a childhood and her parents. And somehow, in the face of everything that had taken place last year in the Department of Mysteries, they had taken second place to the immediacy of the Dark Lord's threat. She no longer had an anchor to the Muggle world.

No, that wasn't entirely true. She possessed the knowledge of how to use various appliances that presented problems to most non-Muggleborn members of the wizarding community. Wonderful, Hermione thought. One of my great distinguishing characteristics is that I know how to use a toaster properly. Look out world--I can make Poptarts!

Hermione wasn't the type to let her future come on her by surprise. She had begun to seriously consider what she would do after graduating from Hogwarts in her third year. Despite her confidence that she could carry out the occupation quite competently, she had never shared her friends' interest in becoming an Auror. She'd always thought she would end up as a teacher or a historian perhaps, some sort of quiet, logical position that would pay her nicely and send her home every night to a small but comfortable flat inhabited by a cat or two. Neat, intellectual, and utterly predictable--it reflected Hermione perfectly.

At least it had. But the reflection Hermione was seeing lately wasn't one she was altogether familiar with. She found herself staring at her mirror more closely these days, surprised to no longer see the plain bushy-haired girl that had stared back so often in the past.

She was somewhat troubled by the girl that looked back at her when she truly evaluated her likeness. The image that gazed at her from behind the glass was familiar yet foreign. There was the same bushy hair, still the color of fallen leaves, the same large brown eyes, same elfish nose and pleasant, if plain, mouth. But in it's longer state, the bushiness of her hair could be mistaken for thickness, perhaps seeming only a little wild as opposed to dreadfully unmanageable. Large though her eyes were, they were not quite so very wide and young as they had once been. And now that her front teeth weren't so appallingly outsized . . . there was no way to deny that it was a vast improvement from her once chipmunk-like state.

Taken separately, these details were not very obvious but merely slight inconsequential marks of time passing. Together they held more magnitude.

The most unsettling detail though, was the look that came over her face when she wasn't thinking of it--an expression that was an elegant blend weariness and antipathy, as if the world was wearing away at her.

Hermione remembered the Yule Ball. She'd caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror as she hurried to meet Viktor. A stranger had stared back then, and a very pretty stranger at that, but that had been all that mattered right then. Afterward she had become Hermione again; dependable, bookish, and predictable.

This mirror girl wasn't a stranger exactly, and for her part, Hermione had to admit that she didn't really feel like the same person. The quiet yet productive existence she had once anticipated was no longer an option. Any possibility of such a life had been obliterated with Voldemort's return to power. Muggles and Muggleborns were the first on his agenda, and Hermione fit the bill flawlessly.

Without the demands of school and her studies consuming her time, Hermione found herself locked inside her head for rather longer than she liked. It couldn't be healthy to spend so much of her time brooding, she knew. She also didn't happen to be very good at brooding, since she inevitably became frustrated that it did not change the situation, only left her more restless. But with the troubles her friends had been having, the Ministry of Magic's recent acknowledgement of Voldemort's return, and her recent revelations regarding herself, Hermione's mind was reeling. Since the handbook on the basics of preparedness and defense had arrived from the ministry, she had been worried out of her mind about Harry and Ron. The handbook had been all but useless--the vague generalized information wasn't worth the paper it was printed on--and served as a reminder of the ineffectiveness of the Ministry of Magic's efforts to protect those it governed. This wasn't a real change in the grand scheme of things. She still felt less secure because of it.

And yet, when the Weasley's had invited her to come and stay with them for the rest of the summer, she'd said no, writing the Weasley's and telling them she wanted to spend time with her parents. As terribly as she missed her friends, she didn't want to leave her parents. Part of her feared that she would leave and never see them again, that they'd be involved in a horrible accident or some other unspeakable disaster and she would miss what little time she had been given with them. Another part of her knew very firmly that this would be the last summer she spent in her parents' home. After this, she wouldn't be coming back to stay for nearly so long. She simply didn't belong there anymore. It wasn't a frightening thought, and though she was a little sad about it, it was more an abstract regret than an actual emotion. She just knew. So she stayed, making more of an effort to be her parents' daughter for the little time remaining of the holidays, instead of the polite guest she had been functioning as for weeks.

Harry hadn't gone to stay with the Weasley's either. This didn't surprise her as much as it would have a few months before, when she had believed Harry's relatives to be one of the ugliest things in his life. Now she knew better.

He had been a haunted soul since Sirius's death. Hermione wished that she had bothered to pay attention to Harry's withdrawal into himself when it had first begun back at the end of their fourth year following Cedric's death.

Harry had been the only one able to attend the memorial service for Sirius--it had been a family only affair, save for a few notable exceptions such as his godson and of course Professor Dumbledore. Ron and Ginny had written her the day following, telling her Lupin that had attended as well, though he had left before the service had ended. Tonks had been by the Burrow afterward, looking drained, with her short hair black and her eyes the same grey that Sirius's had been, pale and fathomless and worn. She hadn't stayed long, and had seemed anxious to leave, according to the letter, remaining only long enough to leave a message for Mr. Weasley and nod a brief hello to each them.

Hermione wondered who of the Black family had attended the memorial. For all of the faults he possessed, Sirius had deserved a send off that had consisted of more than a half dozen people, and wondered why attendance had been so limited. She had heard nothing from Harry about the service, and knew better than to ask him about it, as much as she wished she could, if only to offer a willing listener.

Wishes were worthless in the face of reality.

It was another sign of how much Hermione had changed in a short while; not so long ago she had thought of herself as an optimist.

Shaking her head as though it would redirect her train of thought, Hermione sat back on her knees, swept aside the large pile of newly unearthed socks--some she hadn't seen since nearly three years--and wracked her brain. Her eyes raked the room again before alighting on the object of her search. There on the topmost shelf if her books case, sitting innocently next to a worn runic dictionary and something that may have been a cat toy at one time, was a battered copy One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, held together in places by copious amounts of Spellotape. She tossed both books into her trunk, and after a moment, tossed the cat toy into trunk as well, wondering for a moment if Crookshanks was still rooting through the flowerbed, but not having the heart to rescue her mother's tulips from the perils of feline recreation, she didn't dwell on it.

With a final inventory of the trunk's contents and a sweeping glance around her room, Hermione snapped the lid of her trunk into place and locked it before grabbing her wand, her Hogwarts letter and her purse from their places on her bed. Pushing her unruly hair back from her face, she took a deep breath then let it out slowly, waiting for the pang of unhappiness that always accompanied her leaving for Hogwarts. Not surprisingly, it did not manifest itself. Feeling decidedly off-center, Hermione pulled her trunk into the hallway and closed the door to her room shut with a decisive click.