Chapter Text
Draco settled down beside her, careful to abide by the appropriate centimeters of distance between them, and folded his hands in his lap. Call it some sort of sixth sense, but somehow, he had known that she would be at the quidditch pitch where she had sought him out all those weeks ago.
Even as Draco shifted his weight on the bench and it creaked with age, Hermione didn’t look up from her book. He managed to sneak a peek at the cover as she lifted it higher and caught the title—Hogwarts, a History. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Typical, even when she was upset, Hermione couldn’t bear to simply sit still and needed to be productive.
Funny, how things have changed since they were last here. In a blip of a few weeks, they had torn down years and years of walls and bridged together some sort of unexpected friendship.
It hadn’t really been that long since he had been alone in the dark trying to get the hell away from Granger.
Now, the day was bright and the sun shone high in the apex of the afternoon, and all he had wanted to do was find Hermione.
“I’ll find a way to pull that article from the Prophet,” Draco began casually, speaking as if this was an article with a simple typo and not one that had propagated her utter humiliation and ultimately school-wide destruction of property. “The Malfoy family isn’t completely desecrated. I still have some strings I can pull.”
Hermione stiffened, but didn’t avert her attention from her book and even turned a page.
“Draco…you don’t have to do that for me. A few years ago, I did something unpleasant to Skeeter, and since then her ire towards me has only grown. I’m not going to let myself be swept up in her revenge,” she asserted.
“Who says I’m doing it for you?” he shot back, although not unkindly. “I’m also implicated in that same pathetic excuse for an article. It’s not like I appreciate gossip like that circulating around.”
Hermione pressed her lips together, likely forcing herself to refrain from pointing out that she could probably put together an encyclopedic collection of all the Malfoy gossip circulating around that Draco hadn’t bothered to previously contain.
Instead, she opted for changing the subject and remarked, “You arrived much faster than I expected, although a part of me thought that you would never show up.”
Draco raised his shoulders in a half-shrug. “On the contrary, I would have arrived much earlier if it wasn’t for the…events that occurred after you left the Great Hall.”
That finally lured Hermione away from her book. She stuck a feather bookmark to mark her page and then regarded him suspiciously.
“Draco…what did you do?”
“I swear, it wasn’t me who escalated everything. My intentions were not of the violent nature.”
“Draco,” Hermione demanded.
“Nothing of particular interest occurred,” he evaded.
She rested her chin in her hands and shot him a look drenched with skepticism. “You might as well tell me now. You know I’ll find out anyways one way or another.”
Stubborn woman. Sighing, he conceded, “Remember when you told me not to do anything unfortunate to McLaggen?”
Her jaw dropped open. “What did you do?”
“I barely did anything. My fellow Slytherin roommates on the other hand…”
“No,” she groaned, “I agree as much as the next person that Cormac can be…rather unpleasant. But I don’t want all these fights starting in the name of defending me.”
“To be fair, Zabini’s fight with McLaggen started in defense of me. It was only indirectly on behalf of you.”
“Blaise did?!”
“Don’t worry, Nott was monitoring the situation.”
“How is that supposed to make it better?”
“And as I was leaving the Great Hall, I may have dodged a shepherd’s pie being thrown at the back of my head, and it may have landed on some other unfortunate bloke. This may have a triggered a school-wide food fight, which was again, not my intention.”
“What?!”
“Aren’t you always preaching about inter-house unity and muggle cultural integration? What’s more unifying than muggle-style fist fights and muggle-style food fights being brought to Hogwarts?”
“Draco! As eighth years we’re supposed to serve as role models!”
“Well, that is certainly news to me. I may have missed that memo.”
She rolled her eyes, but Draco noticed her biting on her thumb to refrain from breaking out into a grin. Giving up on Hogwarts, a History and laying the book down on her other side, she turned towards Draco and watched him in silence. In a way that wasn’t entirely uncomfortable, he felt her gaze roam down his platinum blond hair, high cheekbones, and pointy chin, then move back up to his eyes. Hermione scooted towards him, closing the distance between them a little more.
“Thank you, by the way, for defending me,” Hermione spoke softly.
“I never said that happened,” Draco replied.
“You didn’t need to. I have enough context clues to piece together the story. What else could have started this whole chain of events?”
“They’re all bloody idiots,” Draco suddenly snapped, dropping all pretenses as his temper flared at the memory. “The whole lot of them. You literally save the world and do all this other important shite the other 99% of your life, but all anyone cares about is fake gossip surrounding your supposed love affairs?”
“I know,” Hermione said quietly. She smiled sadly, placing her chin in both her hands.
“The rumors may have just gotten worse, by the way,” Draco decided to warn her. Why not? She was going to find out anyways, and she might even find it humorous enough to cheer her spirits.
“What could possibly be worse than me hypothetically cheating on you, Ron, and Harry all at once? Also, that photo of Harry and myself is from 2 years ago! How did no one notice that?”
“Some people are under the impression that I’m the real one,” Draco explained.
“Real what?”
“The real boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
Despite waiting a few seconds for the news to sink in, Hermione’s expression remained stoic.
At best, her reaction could be described as indifferent, and it was all…strangely anticlimactic.
Draco had expected her to burst out into guffaws, smack him on the arm, and then go into a long-winded lecture on the illogical and irrational notion that the two of them could ever be together. But instead, she remained uncharacteristically taciturn and picked at her trimmed cuticles like he hadn’t revealed that the entire school thought they were in love with each other. Maybe the thought was so stupid that Hermione hadn’t deigned it worth thinking about.
The train of self-deprecation that Draco was derailing on hit him harder than he imagined, and he struggled to find the brakes.
“So…what do you think?” he probed.
“Hm? Well…I…what did you say to them?” Hermione faltered; her voice squeaking at an oddly high-pitch.
Draco shrugged. “Nothing really, I figured that when they came to ask you about it later you would correct them.”
“Oh,” was all she replied with again. Her attention returned back to her nails and she refused to even glance at him from her periphery.
The two of them had shared their fair share of silences, but none of them compared to the suffocating awkwardness of this current moment. Bollocks, he shouldn’t have brought it up. Of course it would only make her feel uncomfortable. However, he still had one trick left up his sleeve, and if this didn’t make her happy, then he truly didn’t understand women at all.
“Hermione, I want to show you something,” Draco began, as he slipped his hand into his robe and pulled out a folded piece of parchment.
“Hm?” she hummed distantly, moving from fidgeting with her fingernails to a loose thread on her robe.
“Take a look,” he said, proffering the paper to her.
Hermione accepted it with only a slight lift of her eyebrow to indicate her interest. Gingerly unfolding the paper, Hermione began reading. Never one to turn down an opportunity for learning, Draco watched as the brilliant gears in her mind went to work in digesting his research.
Each stage of understanding reflected clearly in her expressions— she raised both brows and her eyes sparked with interest, then her jaw unhinged until her mouth parted open, and finally, she whipped towards Draco with huge, disbelieving brown eyes.
“Draco! This is amazing!” she chirped.
Draco smirked, puffing out his chest a bit.
“Dittany…ground up moonstone dust…I mean, it’s just a recipe but the theory is sound. If we could run some experiments you could very well have a cure-all salve on your hands that can counteract any dark curse. The only issue is…well, one of the ingredients is incredibly rare. It’s not every day that someone can get a hold of—”
“Phoenix tears?” Draco finished for her, and waved a tiny bottle under her nose.
Hermione gasped and leaned forward excitedly. “Wow! How did you manage to get a hold of that?”
She held her hand out in a silent bid to examine it further, and Draco obliged her. Their skin brushed for only the briefest of moments, but her warmth lingered on his fingers and tingled throughout his entire nervous system.
He cleared his throat and replied, “I’ve had this since the day I was born. Every Malfoy does, it’s a precaution to ensure that the Malfoy lineage can carry on.”
“Wow…I’ve never seen Phoenix tears up close like this. Look at the quality of these tears, they’re so viscous! And the way the light shines so iridescently is unlike any other type of magic—”
Draco waited patiently as Hermione continued describing all the properties and characteristics of Phoenix tears with textbook-verbatim accuracy. He already knew all the facts she recounted, but it was charming to see how excitable Hermione became from any sort of new magical discovery. He could only imagine how she would react to the grandiose that was the Malfoy library collection. It was likely that she would huddle in one of the leather arm chairs and bury herself in a stack of books, only crawling out of her book fort to seek sustenance.
Suddenly, Hermione was shaking him by the shoulder and the reverie popped from his mind.
“But Draco, why are you attempting to make a cure-all salve? Oh no, did something happen to your mother?”
Draco shook his head and placed a reassuring hand on her arm. “No, my mother is fine.”
“Then it’s for Blaise or Theo?” Hermione pressed; the worry even more evident in her voice.
“No, it’s not for them.”
Confusion painted her expression and she turned to stare thoughtfully out into the quidditch pitch.
“Perhaps…a business venture then? I’m sure you could churn out quite a profit selling this. But considering this is a Malfoy birthright, it seems almost trivial to use your Phoenix tears for some extra galleons. Unless…maybe this is for yourself?” She glanced down at his concealed Dark Mark, then just as quickly looked away bashfully, her cheeks pinkening.
“No, I’m not going to use it to remove my Dark Mark,” Draco answered her unspoken question for her.
“Then…what did you want to use the salve for?”
“For you,” he revealed bluntly.
Hermione blinked once. “For…me?”
“Yes,” he affirmed, and pointedly looked down at her sleeve, where the Mudblood scar lay underneath.
She gasped and reeled back in her seat, her eyes bulging like round marbles. “Absolutely not— Draco, I don’t want you using your Phoenix tears for me! They’re an extraordinarily rare and powerful substance!”
Expecting this reaction, Draco calmly rationalized, “Why not? My family gave you that scar, so it’s only logical and appropriate for my family to get rid of the scar, isn’t it?”
“No!” Hermione refuted, hopping to her feet and pacing back and forth. “You’re supposed to use those Phoenix tears to save your life when you’re in a dire situation. I’m not taking that safety net away from you!”
“It’s alright Hermione, I rather give them to you.”
“Draco, I really appreciate the gesture. Honestly, I do. But my scar is just some cursed dead tissue embedded in my skin. Please, I much rather that you use an ingredient as coveted as Phoenix tears on something more…important.”
Draco took a deep breath, his stomach tightening and chest rising and falling with the movement. “Right here in this very spot, you told me that you hate the word, don’t you? Waking up and having to see your scar everyday bothers you, doesn’t it? This is the only way we can get that hateful word off of your wrist and now that you have the opportunity, I don’t understand why you’re not taking it.”
Hermione paused in her pacing. She leaned back until her body thumped against the railing dividing the stands from the pitch, then turned in Draco’s direction but kept her face angled towards the ground. She played with the ends of her hair, twirling a curly brown strand around her index finger.
“I know…I did say that. But I think…I think I’m alright now. Thanks to you, to be honest,” she admitted.
Draco looked down at his hands, idly playing with his Malfoy signet ring.
“How could you be? I haven’t done anything,” he said quietly.
“I beg to differ,” Hermione disputed firmly, “do you remember the day we went into the pensieve and watched your dreams together?”
He abstained from snorting. How could he forget?
“It was more overwhelming than I anticipated to witness myself in the most helpless moment of my life…but…” she trailed off, tucking an errant strand of hair that had fallen into her eyes behind her ears.
“Hermione…if you don’t want to talk about it—”
“No, I do. I want you to know,” she interrupted him, then came back to the bench and settled next to him, leaving almost no space in between. She clutched the bench with both her hands, her nails digging into the wood. “After the war, I wasn’t able to sleep properly anymore. Maybe it started even earlier than that, from when I was on the run with Harry and Ron. I thought that facing Bellatrix again would make me feel like I won, like I didn’t let her control my future. I thought that my fear of her and the night of my torture was the crux of my sleepless nights.”
“But then I saw…I saw the way you looked at me like you were the one being tortured on that drawing room floor. I felt your emotions even as you hid them behind walls and doors and blank spaces of occlusion. I feared what was going to happen as both myself and as you. That day in the drawing room floor of your Manor wasn’t just the worst day of my life, it was the worst day of yours too.”
She stared at him so intensely and with such a myriad of emotions that he couldn’t bear to look away. Somewhere along the way, Hermione had reached for him and now rubbed soothing circles on the back of his hand.
“Neither of us were alone in this experience. And the fact that you were struggling through it so vividly made me realize that it was okay for me to struggle as well. It’s okay if I don’t ‘fix’ myself with one night in a pensieve. It’s okay if I can’t wrap that night up into a box with a neat little bow and shove it far away. It’s okay if I’m not okay for a very long time. Yes, I got this scar on my arm that says Mudblood, but it is just a word. A word that when split into 2 separate words, are just common, ordinary words. And if it’s this word that finally managed to bring us together, then I’m almost grateful for it.”
His heart thumped wildly against his ribcage as his brain blanked, his mouth running dry. It was all he could do to match her gaze and allow himself to drown in her beautiful brown eyes. She looked at him with nothing but trust, baring her soul to him without a second thought.
A few stray tears escaped from the corner of his eyes and slipped down his cheek, the salty residue sticking to his skin and leaving a trail of warmth.
Who was he kidding? He would give the world to her if she so much as asked for it.
Forcing himself to say something verbally out of his mouth, Draco persisted and said, “I…still want to make the cure-all salve for you—”
Hermione abruptly cut him off as she pressed her lips against his own. Her lips were warm and velvety soft, and they nibbled tentatively against his lower lip as he remained frozen, unable to move a muscle. A mix of flowers and vanilla wafted from her and flooded his senses, and he had the sudden urge to pull her close and bury his nose into her hair.
But by the time he processed that Hermione Granger was kissing him, she had already pulled away and he had done nothing to reciprocate. She blushed so prettily that Draco could barely comprehend that this was real, much less that this girl had kissed him. His lips tickled euphorically, and if he died right now, he might have been alright with that. But it seemed that she wasn’t done propelling his heart into to the edge of the earth.
“I like you,” Hermione confessed.
Draco opened his mouth, but his brain had lost all ability to formulate thoughts, much less a coherent response.
“Yes, I like you romantically. If that’s what you were going to ask,” she quipped before he had even thought of asking the question.
His face reddened so darkly that he must have resembled a ripe tomato; his pale skin had never been helpful in hiding his flushed cheeks. There was no way that Hermione could have liked him— he was well, Draco Malfoy. She could choose literally anyone else in the entire world.
“I—um…are you sure?” he managed to stumble out.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she confirmed, and even had the audacity to giggle. She caressed the side of his face with gentle fingers, sending shivers up and down his spine from the innocent touch alone.
“It means the world to me that you were willing to give up your Phoenix tears, and I truly appreciate the intention. But I’d honestly be a lot happier if you saved them for a dire situation. Thank you, Draco, for turning this scar on my wrist from a horrific nightmare into a happy memory of knowing what you were willing to give me.”
He leaned into her touch, and brought up his own hand to lay over hers. He sighed and gazed at her with fond exasperation.
“When you ask me like that…how can I say no to you?”
Hermione shifted forward and grinned victoriously. “There’s just one more thing I want to show you, will you follow me?”
x-x-x-x-x-x
x-x-x
As the large door to the Room of Requirement quietly clicked behind them, Draco spun around on his heel and stared wide-eyed at Hermione.
She smiled shyly, then swiveled him back around and guided him further into the room.
“Do you remember the day you first brought me here? I figured out almost immediately that you specifically tailored the room for me. I do know how the Room of Requirement works, you know,” she remarked playfully.
The room smelled strangely of burning firewood, tart green apples, and garlic, and he wrinkled his nose at the combination of mismatched smells.
“…Why does it smell like garlic in here?”
“It’s the scent of your Amortentia, is it not?” Hermione explained coyly, her eyes dancing with mischief.
“I didn’t say it was bad,” he tried to salvage.
As he walked further into the room, he noted that half the explosion of Gryffindor red and gold décor had been ripped out, and in its place, a Slytherin tornado had dumped out green and silver. The walls alternated between red and green like a gaudy Christmas palette, and although the plush rug remained a roaring lion, the squashy red arm chairs had changed to velvet green. There was still a pot of steaming tea on the table in front of the hearth, but it was Earl grey this time, the standard tea throughout Draco’s childhood. He walked towards the side table which had previously only held Hogwarts, A History and an unknown muggle book, but now also included a book on quidditch plays and new texts on potions and ancient runes.
A closet had been added in this iteration of the room, and he opened the door to see quidditch equipment neatly tucked in one half, and black dress robes and muggle athletic wear on the other side.
Draco spun towards Hermione again, bewildered by her meticulous re-imagination.
“Alright, the green and red color scheme is sort of tacky, isn’t it?” Hermione conceded.
“The intention is understood,” Draco answered. In a few long strides, he closed the distance between them and hovered awkwardly in front of her. “But why did you do this?”
“Because you had only catered the room to me, and that’s not really fair is it? This should be a place that is a shared memory for both of us,” Hermione replied.
Pushing up on her tiptoes, Hermione moved to kiss him again, but Draco pulled away. She frowned, withdrawing herself from him.
“O-Oh I’m sorry…I guess I just assumed…but I shouldn’t have, because now that I think about it, you never did kiss me back or tell me how you felt,” she mumbled, looking down at her shoes.
“It’s not that, it’s just…” he trailed off hesitantly.
“What?” she prodded.
Draco sighed and massaged his neck with one hand. “Hermione, are you sure this is what you want? Being with me is going to make your life overwhelmingly difficult. I’m a former Death Eater, and the stigma attached to me is going to bleed onto you. Every day will be an uphill battle, and we’re going to be judged and ripped apart by the entire world and face hardship after hardship. Frankly speaking…you can do better than me.”
“I’m exerting an insane amount of control to refrain from smacking you.”
“What?” Dumbfounded by her response, Draco could only blink in confusion.
“Draco…don’t you realize this decision is as much yours as it is mine? It’s not like dating each other is only going to make my life hard. It’s going to make your life difficult too. You’ll be constantly hounded by paparazzi and the press as the Golden Girl’s partner, even more so than you were before. Plus, there’s the whole matter of your parents— will they really accept your decision to date a muggle-born and ruin the carefully sown pureblood Malfoy line?”
“I don’t care what your blood is,” he declared immediately.
“But your parents may not feel the same way. It’s going to take time for them to see other perspectives, and that’s a reality we can’t be blind to.”
Taking him by the hand again, Hermione lead them over to a chaise lounge and motioned for him to sit. “This is going to be difficult. It’s going to be an uphill battle most of our days. But I don’t want to settle for an ending just because it’s convenient. I want to pursue a happy ending. With you. Because I like your sarcastic sense of humor. I like that you actually read Hogwarts, A History. I like how attractively fit you look in muggle athletic apparel. I like that your all of 2 friends care about you enough to start a muggle-style fistfight. I like you, Draco Malfoy, and I’m willing to dump the easy, convenient endings to pursue this difficult one with you.”
Draco leaned forward, pressing their foreheads together and nuzzled her nose.
“Take it. Take my heart, and take the remainder of my soul as well. You can even filet my heart and crush my soul if you wish. It doesn’t matter, since in actuality, they’ve probably been already yours to break for a very long time.”
“That was really very sweet, but must you always put such a terrible twist on things with the fileting and the crushing?” Hermione teased, then nuzzled his nose back and admitted quietly, “I don’t intend to do either of those things.”
Hermione smiled so beautifully that he could hardly believe he once thought of her as plain, and before she could say more, he dipped his head down and kissed her. For two people who often clashed and argued just as frequently as they spoke civilly, the kiss was surprisingly tender. Hermione’s soft lips moved against his slightly-chapped lips with fervor, and he couldn’t help but be taken aback by how much love she pressed into each kiss. Her breath was warm, and a jolt of excitement ran up his spine as the tip of her tongue swiped against his lips. His fingers danced lightly up and down her back until they settled on her shoulders and he pulled her closer and inhaled her sweet vanilla scent.
“By the way, you smell divine right now,” Hermione noted, breaking away from his mouth to wrap her arms around his torso and bury her nose into his chest.
Chuckling, Draco pressed a kiss to her forehead. “It’s the sweat isn’t it? I think I haven’t stopped sweating since you started your speech on the quidditch pitch.”
“Well, it is one of my Amortentia scents.”
x-x-x-x-x-x
x-x-x
As he stepped onto the castle grounds, the cool air ran briskly over his calves. He had permanently traded his trousers for muggle running shorts, because admittedly, they were far more comfortable than the business-casual wear he had previously been sporting.
Draco paused, breathing in the balmy autumn day and filling his lungs with the fresh air of another 5 am morning. The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, which meant that he still needed to wait a few more minutes for her to show up.
“Hi,” a familiar voice murmured sleepily. Oh, she was a little early today.
He pivoted around just as Hermione raised her hand to cover a yawn.
“Good morning,” Draco greeted. He noted that her hair was neatly pulled back into a springy ponytail and he watched it sway as she trudged towards him.
“Did you wake up from a nightmare?” she asked, her voice still hoarse from morning grogginess.
He lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug. “Yes, but it’s alright. I got a few hours of sleep in.”
“Do you need to occlude?”
Draco hesitated, then slowly nodded. “Yes…”
Hermione’s face fell, but she accepted his answer and offered, “If you want to…why don't you tell me about it later? It might make you feel better.”
“Alright.”
Hermione blinked, taken aback by his response. “Alright?”
Draco rolled his eyes and nearly pouted. “What’s with all of you Gryffindors acting so surprised whenever I agree to do something?”
Giggling, Hermione explained, “Well you are Draco Malfoy and you have a certain penchant for being not very agreeable.”
Draco scowled, but even his frown was half-hearted. Deciding to change the subject instead, he asked, “Did you get any sleep last night?”
She mirrored his previous actions of lifting her shoulders in a slow shrug.
“Yes, I managed to get a few hours in,” she paused, and then rotated on her heel to gesture at the rising sun, just beginning to streak the pale blue morning with golden rays of light. “But I do have a request. I really am not as much of an early bird as you are, must we do this at 5 am in the morning? How about a more reasonable time slot of 7 am?”
A small smirk played at his lips and he acquiesced, “Very well. If that request would make the lady here happy, then so be it.”
“This agreeable Draco is going to take some getting used to…are you going to start sitting at the Gryffindor table and hanging out voluntarily with Harry and Ron next?”
“Let’s not push our luck here,” Draco stated flatly.
Hermione laughed, and pressed a quick kiss on his cheek before giving herself a head start on their morning run. Soon afterwards, Draco followed in her footsteps, no destination or time limit in mind.
The nightmares didn’t exactly go away and the content was still just as unpleasant, and Hermione still had her fair share of sleepless nights. It was with a peaceful sort of resignation that he accepted that the nightmares wouldn’t altogether disappear, nor would the war ever lose a place in their minds.
But it wasn’t as bad as it may seem.
Draco Malfoy was no longer sitting alone in the dark, and he would never be again as long as Hermione Granger was by his side. Only time could tell, but he hoped that one day, he would progress far enough that he wouldn’t need all these walls and doors and mazes to hide behind anymore.
After all, there was something beyond the walls now— hope, and a future.
There was happiness to pursue.