22. and Consequences

Author's Note: I have to warn you all - this chapter is a bit long-winded. I will explain myself at the end of the chapter. Thank you all for the lovely reviews! I was so happy to see that a majority of you didn't see the "twist" coming, and as for the ones who had predicted it - well, so had my boyfriend. LOL

Disclaimer: You know the drill.

Draco had been shocked beyond belief. The second the words were out of her mouth and had registered in his brain, his jaw dropped open and his mind became completely blank.

Harry, meanwhile, had looked as though he had been kicked in the stomach. After she spoke, his hand automatically released its grip on her arm, and he staggered back a few feet. He stared in horror at the girl in front of him – the girl who only shared the appearance of his best friend, and nothing more.

"Harry," she said in a small voice, pleading.

He shook his head. "Don't," he hissed. He continued to back away from her, a look of disgust on his face. "You stay the hell away from me."

"Harry, let me explain. Please." There was no strength in her voice, as if she knew her pleas were worthless. He wouldn't listen to her. He'd gotten the answer he'd been looking for – just not the one he had expected, or wanted.

Draco stood silent, watching. Tearing his gaze away from Hermione, he saw Harry moving away – turning around and leaving. "Potter," he called after him. "Potter, where are you going?"

Harry stopped and turned around. "I'm getting Dumbledore. She's not staying in our world any longer." He spoke his words with an eerie calm. Draco guessed it was because he was in shock.

"Wait." Draco stalked over to Harry and grabbed his arm with a tight grasp. "You're not going anywhere, Potter."

"The hell I'm not! She's a murderer, Malfoy!"

Hermione continued sobbing, her face buried in her hands. She may have been a murderer, but in that moment, Draco felt for her.

"Bloody hell, Potter. All this time, you've wanted answers from her – and now you're just going to walk away before she has a chance to explain herself? Well, I'm not going to let you do that. The least you can do is listen to her."

Harry glared over at Hermione, his expression filled with hatred and spite. Luckily, Hermione did not see it, as she appeared to be avoiding looking at him. "Fine," he said, in a voice so cold it could give a Dementor a run for its money.

Draco let go of Harry's arm and walked over to Hermione. "Granger," he said softly.

He didn't need to say anything. She just nodded and said, "I know. I'll tell you everything – anything you want to know."

Glancing back over at Harry, Draco said, "Let's go somewhere a little more private."

He was the first one to speak.

"Why did you kill me?"

Realizing his mistake, he cleared his throat and said, "Why did you kill the Harry Potter in your world?"

At the sound of his voice, Hermione's eyes opened wide as she turned to look at him. Just moments before, she had willingly taken another swig of the homemade Veritaserum, to assure that her answers would be completely honest – though, at this point, Draco figured everything that would come out of her mouth would be the truth. After her previous bombshell, she really had nothing else to hide.

She sighed before answering. "A lot of things were different in my world," she began. "Some of the places; some of the people. Harry and I were friends – best friends, actually. And Ron, too. We were always together – we did practically everything together. We were known by many as The Golden Trio, and we were always envied – not only because of Harry Potter's star status, but because of how devoted we all were to each other. We were inseparable. That is, until the end of our fifth year."

"What happened at the end of your fifth year?" Draco asked.

"That's when Harry began to change," she replied softly. "After the death of his godfather -"

"Sirius," Harry muttered stiffly. A pained expression now adorned his features.

Hermione nodded. "Yes, Sirius. His death hit Harry hard, putting him in a very dark place – darker than anyone could have imagined. And at first, when we began to notice how distant Harry was becoming, we just assumed that he was having a hard time dealing with his loss. But we had no idea…no idea that we were slowly losing him to the other side."

Looking shocked, Harry shook his head and said, "No way. I would have never joined the other side."

"You wouldn't, maybe. But the Harry in my world would, and he did. I think that Sirius's death left him an empty shell – and that it also left him vulnerable to The Dark Lord's manipulation. Harry's transformation began very slowly; it was almost hard to notice. You know, I remember the first time he called me a mudblood." She glanced back down at her hands, which were playing nervously with the hem of her shirt. "I thought he was joking, so I just laughed it off. I thought he was merely mocking all of the Slytherins who had ever called me by that name -" She looked up at Draco. "But by the second time, I knew – he was saying it to be cruel. I saw the look on his face when he saw how much it hurt me, and he looked so pleased with himself."

"Why would he have joined the other side?" Harry asked, looking slightly ill. "It makes absolutely no sense."

"You're right – it didn't make any sense. That's why nobody believed he had switched over – or, at least, why they chose not to believe it. When I tried to talk to Ron about it, he got so angry with me. He said that there was no way that Harry would betray his friends – and that there was no way he would fight for the other side. And Ginny was the same way. They both thought something was wrong with me – that I was making up these stories about Harry because I was jealous of him. But I knew what was really going on – and he was aware that I knew. And he tried to shut me up."

The color had drained completely from Harry's face as he took a seat in one of the armchairs. "What did he do?" he whispered.

Hermione continuously wiped away the tears that were spilling over, but it was no use – she could not seem to stop crying. Absent-mindedly, Draco reached out and placed a reassuring hand on hers. The gesture seemed to shock her; she faltered a bit as her gaze met his with a look of appreciation.

With a deep breath, she continued. "One evening earlier this year, Harry, Ron, Ginny and I all went down to Hogsmeade to hang out at the Three Broomsticks. Soon after we got there, though, Harry just got up and said he had to go do something, and that he would be right back. Nobody questioned him. I don't think they dared to. But I needed to know where he was going. So I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and instead – I followed him.

"I followed him as inconspicuously as I could. He never looked back the entire way, so I figured he had no idea that I was following him. Eventually, he stopped near the Hog's Head, looking around as if waiting for someone, and then finally he went down the alleyway right next to the building. I was afraid to follow him the rest of the way, because I was afraid of what I would find out. I mean, I'd had my suspicions, but I didn't want to have them confirmed, because it would possibly mean losing my best friend forever. But I continued following him. I stood by the side of the building, and I managed to peer over without them seeing me."

"Them?" Harry said.

Hermione nodded. "Harry and…" Glancing down again, she whispered, "Lucius Malfoy."

Draco inhaled sharply. "What the hell was Harry doing meeting my father?"

Hermione laughed – a sound completely devoid of emotion. "Well, apparently, judging from the way they were interacting with one another, Harry had become like a son to Lucius. Perhaps even more so than Draco."

Both Draco and Harry looked equally horrified.

"I couldn't hear all of what they were saying," she continued, "so I initially assumed that perhaps Harry was just playing Lucius, to try and get information from him, but I found out the hard way that I had assumed wrong."

Harry gulped. "What happened?"

A fresh batch of tears emerged from her already red and swollen eyes. Draco squeezed her hand, trying to provide as much comfort as he could.

"Apparently, Harry had seen me by the alleyway. He knew I had seen him with Lucius, and he assumed that I had heard everything that had been said. And he was afraid that I would tell someone – like Dumbledore. So that same night, when I was walking back to the Gryffindor tower, he came from out of nowhere, and he grabbed me. I cried out, but he quickly silenced me with a spell, and he pushed me into the nearest empty room, and he…"

"He what?" Draco asked softly.

Hermione sniffled. "He attacked me. First, he threw me up against the wall, and grabbed me by the throat. And then he pulled out his wand and held it up against the side of my head and warned me that if I didn't keep my mouth shut about what I'd witnessed, he would kill me. I was so scared, but there was nothing I could do to fend him off – it was like I was paralyzed. Not from any spell, but from the shock of my best friend threatening to kill me."

Draco let out a slow breath. "Did he hurt you?"

Hermione shook her head. "No. Luckily for me, the Head Boy was patrolling the halls nearby, and had heard my cry for help. He walked in on us. He saved me."

"The Head Boy…" Draco muttered. He didn't even need to ask the question; she knew exactly what he was thinking.

She nodded. "Yes. Draco Malfoy saved me."

That bit of information provoked a scowl from Harry. Draco figured he must have been having a terrible time dealing with everything he was learning about himself from another world, and it only added insult to injury to hear that Draco had been Hermione's knight in shining armor, while Harry had been everything but. Draco should have been reveling in Harry's distress – but he wasn't.

"After that night," Hermione continued, "I stopped hanging around with Harry – I was just too afraid of him and what he would do to me. And because I had distanced myself from him, I had also managed to distance myself from Ron and Ginny. And I never told them – or anyone, for that matter – about how he had threatened me, or about what I knew about him being associated with Lucius Malfoy. They probably wouldn't have believed me, anyway. So I became a loner. I avoided Harry at all costs, and I became withdrawn from everything – my schoolwork, my extracurricular activities, and all of my other friends. I had hoped to just go the rest of the year avoiding any sort of confrontation with Harry, because after graduation we would all go our separate ways anyway. But in the end, I just couldn't sit back and watch it all happen. Harry was a powerful wizard, and he'd only become more so as he got older. If he was going to fight on the wrong side – then the good side really stood no chance of winning."

"So you told someone, then?" Draco asked.

"No," she replied. "And that was my mistake. I went directly to him. I needed to know why he was betraying everyone who had fought beside him all of those years. I needed to know why he would willingly serve someone who took the lives of his parents – and who was responsible for the death of his godfather. He told me that I wouldn't be able to understand – and that I was just a stupid mudblood who would get what was coming to her." She lowered her eyes. "I could see right then and there that the Harry Potter I knew and loved was gone, and had been replaced by some…soulless entity. I don't know how exactly it had happened, but the Dark Lord had managed to snag him. And I knew there would be no way to get him back.

"But then I foolishly told him that I was going to Dumbledore and tell him everything. He said that he couldn't let me do that, and that's when he pulled out a knife." She paused and chuckled. "A knife! I had no idea why he'd even had one with him. He must have been carrying that thing around with him all the time, just in case he needed to use it on somebody. Well…I had given him the perfect opportunity to put it to use."

Harry was now staring down at the floor, his jaw clamped so tight that Draco could see the muscles contracting.

Hermione, meanwhile, unbuttoned the first few buttons of her shirt and pulled it open, revealing the nasty scar she had shown them when she had first arrived in their world. "I told you that I got this from a Death Eater. Well, I was being half-honest. I got it from a Death Eater-in-training."

"I did that," Harry mumbled. He didn't word it as a question, rather as a statement. By now, it was pretty easy for both of the boys to predict the rest of her story.

"He stabbed me when I'd tried to flee. I was in such a state of shock when I hit the floor that I couldn't move. I think he was in shock as well. And as I was crying out in pain, I could almost swear that I detected some bit of remorse dwelling in his face – as if for one brief moment, he realized that what he was doing was wrong. But that didn't last very long. The next thing I knew, he was down on the ground, straddling me, with one hand clamped tightly around my neck. He told me that the Dark Lord would be so proud of him for killing a mudblood – especially Hermione Granger. He said he could have just used the Death Curse on me, and it would have been a lot quicker, but that it also would have been a lot easier for him to get found out. And then he glared down at me and said, 'besides – I'd much rather watch you suffer'.

"But, despite the strong hold he had on me, my will to live was a bit stronger. I somehow managed to knee him where I knew it would hurt the most. He rolled off of me, writhing in pain, and he dropped the knife. Without even thinking, I picked it up, and I just reacted. I stabbed him. I didn't mean to kill him – I just meant to hurt him the same way he had hurt me – but I'd hit just a little too close to the heart and…"

"Merlin," Harry groaned, hiding his face with his hands.

"It all happened so fast," she said, her sobs returning. "I didn't think about it, I just did it. I was so scared – and I was dying. I could feel it. I was bleeding to death, and I didn't have my wand with me; I couldn't heal myself – or Harry, for that matter. So I panicked, and all I could think to do was get away from there as fast as I could. So using the last of my strength, I managed to go find the one person who would help me. Only later did I realize that I had left without the knife."

"I can't listen to any more of this," Harry muttered. He shot up from the chair. "I'm getting Dumbledore involved with this."

"Potter," Draco protested. But Harry didn't let him continue.

"Malfoy, you just heard her story. She killed Harry Potter. If her world is anything like ours, that's a pretty big offense – one that most likely includes time in Azkaban, seeing as though the Dementors are already after her. If we want to try and help her at all, we're going to need Dumbledore's help."

There was no way Draco could argue with that. Harry, as usual, was absolutely right. They were all in way over their heads, and it was irrational to think that they would be able to help Hermione on their own.

"You're right," Draco said with a somber nod. With a sigh of defeat, he said, "Go get Dumbledore."

Harry glanced at Hermione with an expression of pity mixed with guilt and sympathy, before turning on his heel and exiting the common room.

The second Harry had disappeared through the portrait hole, Draco took a seat next to Hermione on the couch and said, "I was the one who helped you get here, wasn't I?"

She did not look surprised at all that he had figured it out. She just nodded and said, "Yes. You were."

Draco swallowed hard. "You and…and this other Draco. You were friends?"

Hermione shrugged. "I guess you could call us friends. We certainly weren't enemies anymore. After he had saved my life, things had changed between us. He hated Harry with a passion, so naturally when Harry had joined the evil side, Draco wasn't so interested in being a part of it anymore. He didn't exactly join the good side, but he did seem to suddenly want to defy his father, and I think befriending a mudblood like me was a good start. He's the one I went to, you know, right after I killed Harry."

"I figured that," Draco said. He wasn't sure why he had figured that. But something told him that the relationship between Draco and Hermione in her world was not all that different from the one he'd had with the Hermione in his.

"By the time he had opened up the portrait hole, I wasn't doing too well," she continued. "When he saw all the blood, he immediately picked me up and brought me into his common room. He wasted no time in performing a healing spell on me, while I managed to tell him the whole story. By the time I had finished telling me about Harry, he had managed to stop the bleeding, but the scar had remained. But that was okay, I told him. I felt that I had deserved it, anyway."

Draco shook his head. "It doesn't sound to me like you deserved it at all, Granger. What Potter did -"

"I don't blame him," she interjected. "Whoever the person it was that he had become – I don't believe for one second that he had made the transformation willingly…or, at least, using a sound mind. Like I said before, he had been traumatized by Sirius's death, and The Dark Lord had used that trauma as a way in. Harry was so easy to break when he was already falling apart, and…and I knew that. I knew that we hadn't lost him completely. I should have tried harder to get him back, or I should have gone to Dumbledore…but instead, I – I killed him."

"Granger, you just reacted – you reacted to him trying to kill you. It was an accident – you said so yourself. And that's why you need to go back to your world and explain everything -"

"No," she said, shaking her head adamantly. "No, I can't…"

"You have to go back," he said. "You killed Harry in self defense – that right there would give you a lighter sentence to begin with. But I'm convinced that with the help of our Veritaserum, they won't even try you after they find out the truth."

Hermione shook her head. "I don't know…"

"Granger, you can't keep running from this. The Dementors know that you are here. It's only a matter of time before they come back to get you, and when they do, they're not going to bother to listen to your story – they are going to suck the soul right out of your body…and then it will be too late. If you go back and talk to Dumbledore, he will know what to do, and he will help you." Draco paused. "The only problem with this, though, is trying to find your way back to your world. I suppose you could just wait around for another Dementor and go through the same portal -"

"Actually," she said in a sheepish voice, "getting back to my world might just be a little easier than you think."

Draco arched an eyebrow curiously, as Hermione reached down the front of her shirt and pulled out a necklace with a gold medallion hanging from the end of it. He couldn't believe he hadn't noticed her wearing it before.

"What is that?" he asked.

"It's a charm," she replied, glancing down at it with a smile. "Draco managed to find a way to imprint a connection to our world on it – in case I needed to come back for any reason. He made one for himself too, that would connect with wherever I ended up. That's why I was so worried when the Dementor found me – because there is a very good chance that they obtained the charm, meaning they probably found out that Draco had helped me, and who knows what they might have done to him…"

Draco understood. If the Dementors had found out that the boy had helped Hermione, they might have very well given him the Kiss. It made him a bit uneasy - if not completely creeped out - to think that perhaps another version of himself in another world was either dead, or worse – alive, but lacking a soul.

Ignoring the feeling, Draco said, "Well, that's great, then. I mean, it's great that you have a way back. And now, with a way to prove what really happened that night…you no longer have anything to run away from."

She nodded. "I know. You're right. But, it's just that…I…I can't do this alone," she whispered.

"I know," he said softly. "That's why I'm coming with you."

His words surprised him – possibly even more than they had surprised her. He actually had not given any prior thought to accompanying her to her world, but once the words had been spoken, he realized it was something he needed to do.

"R-really?" she stammered. "You would do that?"

Draco nodded. "You shouldn't have to go through this alone, Granger. Besides, it would drive me crazy to send you back there, not knowing what might happen to you."

Hermione smiled and said, "You're so much like him – the Draco in my world."

Draco arched an eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"

"Yes. You act all tough, like you don't care about anyone but yourself, but deep down you do care. And you're stubborn – refusing to admit when you feel something for someone else, as if those feelings are something to be ashamed of. They aren't, you know."

"I know that," he said defensively. "And I haven't refused to admit my feelings to anyone."

"I wasn't talking about just you."

Draco opened his mouth to ask her what she meant by that, but quickly shut it when he realized she was referring to the Draco in her world.

Suddenly, her face crumpled and a new set of tears began to flow. "I'm so scared that something has happened to him. I'm scared to go back and find out he's been hurt, or captured or killed. That scares me even more than what they might do to me…"

As her broken voice trailed off, Draco found himself pulling her into a comforting embrace. She fell into his arms as if she had done so a million times before, and she buried her face into his shoulder and sobbed. And suddenly, Draco could see that the boy in her world meant a great deal to her – greater than she was probably even aware of.

"Granger, I'm sure he's fine," he murmured as he gently caressed her back. Closing his eyes, it was easy to pretend as though this were his Hermione he was holding in his arms. She not only looked and sounded like her, but she felt like her too. And holding this girl in his arms right now, it reminded him of just how much he missed Hermione…and how he would give anything to be able to hold her in his arms, or to fall asleep next to her, or just glance at her from across the room and admire how innocent and beautiful she was…

As if sensing what he was thinking about, Hermione pulled back slightly. Her face was still wet from the tears, but they were no longer overflowing. She stared up at him with those big brown eyes – identical to her predecessor's – and he immediately found himself getting lost in them. For a moment, as she leaned in a little closer, his mind went blank. For a moment, as her lips nearly touched his own, he fooled himself into believing it was the real thing.

But he stopped the kiss before it could happen.

Gently, he pushed her away. She didn't look hurt or disappointed. If anything, she looked relieved.

"I'm not him," he whispered.

Hermione nodded. She understood. "And I'm not her."

Draco closed his eyes and shook his head. No, she wasn't her. And he had never for one moment wanted this girl to be her. He could feel a lump begin to form in his throat. He might have even let it dissolve – he might have broken down as Hermione had a few moments before – but the portrait hole opened up from behind them, and Harry walked in, with Dumbledore trailing closely behind him.

Draco turned around to acknowledge them, but then quickly glanced back at Hermione.

"Are you ready to go home?" he asked her quietly.

With a solemn nod, she said, "Yes, I am," and soon thereafter, the four of them began the preparations.