Chapter Text
Present Day
“Let’s get those pins out of your hair-”
“Don’t touch me!” Hermione pushed him back until he raised his hands in surrender. He hadn’t stopped staring.
Hermione breathed like she had been running a marathon.
The minute he made himself known, Hermione ran into Draco’s arms, crying and laughing.
Take me away, She had said in his ear, and he had, his arms like home as they wrapped around her and he whisked them away to Craigh Na Dun.
But once her feet landed in the soft grass, after she made sure he was real, and that this wasn’t some dream, she realized that he had been gone for years, and now he was here, and she was angry.
“You’re so beautiful.” He murmured as he stepped back. Almost in a daze. “How did you get more beautiful?”
“Draco!” Hermione snarled. She wasn’t letting him distract her, by his comment or by how different he looked.
Gone was the lean, sometimes even near-starved wizard she knew. He had put on weight and kept it, and had kept his combed hair short. Only a wisp of it fell over his forehead. His skin had gotten color from the sun. He was clean shaven, and though there was nothing too off about him, he felt so much…older. Different.
Draco swallowed. “Hermione, I can explain where I’ve been-”
“You left me!” She screamed. Draco quickly put a silencing spell around them so no one would hear the fight they were about to have, despite it being the middle of the night. “I thought you were dead, or that your mother had hidden you somewhere. I thought you left me.”
“Hermione,” Draco took her face in his hands. His silver eyes burned into her as the moon gave them a spotlight. “Beloved, I would never have left you. Never.”
He leaned forward until his forehead was against hers, and she breathed it in.
The smell of home.
Yes, she was angry. Livid, really.
But she had been dreaming and praying for this moment since she woke up in St. Mungo’s, and she wasn’t about to waste it by fighting with him. They could fight later, when they had settled into the reality that they were finally reunited.
Her nose brushed against his as she titled her head up. She was shaking.
“You can give me answers afterward. Right now I need you.”
He didn’t hesitate to kiss her with everything he had.
It was better than she remembered. She had been feeding herself only scraps of these memories, fearful that if she thought of the intimate moments she’d fall into a hole she couldn’t get out of. A kiss, a finger trailing down her back, a pair of bright eyes staring at her from between her legs. But now he was here, in her arms and not in her memories.
They had tumbled into the grass. Draco wasted no time tugging off his shirt as Hermione ripped off her gloves and let her hair down.
She had been about to work on taking off her dress when Draco bunched and pushed the fabric up, yanked her knickers down, and aligned himself with her entrance. Hermione didn’t hesitate to lift her hips and wrap her legs around him as he sank into her in one stroke.
Hermione hadn’t forgotten that since they had only been together in the rooms, she was still a virgin. It would be the second time he took it, but there was no one else she wanted to give it to.
The pain was sharp and sudden, but Hermione refused to relent to it.
She missed this, and him, too much.
They kissed each other savagely as he took her. Her hair was in his tight grip, and she clawed scratches down his back. Draco bit her neck, and she moaned for more.
He pulled out of her only long enough to flip her onto her stomach, raising her hips into the air. With his wand he cut her dress off at the calves and pushed the rest of it up over her back. Cool air brushed against the heat that had been collecting in her core.
Draco bent over her, and she felt him rub himself against her. She bit her lip as her eyes rolled back.
He kissed her ear before he whispered in it, “Let me show you how much I missed you.”
This angle was so much deeper, more thorough. Hermione couldn’t help but dig her fingers into the grass and cry out every time he slammed into her. She nearly flew over the edge when he brushed his fingers against her.
“That’s it.” He said softly, his pace quickening. “Come with me. It’s all I’ve dreamt about.”
He tugged on her hair until she was arched and flush against his chest. She was so close. She whimpered the words to him, and he groaned.
The guttural sound of it, mixed with his fingers working their magic and his cock driving into her, made her shatter into a thousand pieces. She didn’t hold back as she came, gripping Draco for support. It was only a second later that he grew stiff and finished with her.
They collapsed into the grass. Draco swiftly pulled out and away, cleaning himself with a wave of his wand. She heard the click of his belt buckle as she righted her knickers and flattened her dress. She’d worry about the gloves later.
Now that she had gotten it out of her system, she remembered the anger and hurt that he was alive and well, and yet hadn’t found her until now.
Hermione turned and found Draco watching her, his clothes righted and tucked.
They said nothing, merely absorbing that the other was there. The wind blew gently around them, and the moon gave them just enough light to be more than shadows.
Draco spoke first. “I would be mad at me, too.”
Hermione scoffed. “I’ll say sorry for being so angry if you have a good reason for being missing for the last several years.”
“I do.” He said, absently twirling his wand. “Me and Theo both.”
Theo. Had he found Luna yet?
“I guess I should start at the beginning.” He cleared his throat. “In the rooms, Theo and I had just gotten to the field when my mother appeared before us.”
Hermione knew this. That Narcissa saved them while Ginny saved everyone else. It was everything after this part that she was in the dark.
“She didn’t wait for us to process what she was doing or why she was even there. She grabbed us both and sent us back. But it was an overload on our brains, to be so rough with us. Theo and I lost our memories of the rooms completely.”
Hermione felt encased in ice; she couldn’t move, she could barely breathe.
“We awoke in our Italian summer home, with a house doctor by our beds and my mother fretting over both of us. But I didn’t remember how I had gotten there, the last thing I remembered was walking through the castle during the Battle. Everything else was…black. Fuzzy.” Draco looked into the distance. “Theo seemed to be the same. It was weeks of frustration as my mother told us where we’d been, what we experienced, but that she didn’t know any other details because it had happened in our minds. I asked her if we could go back home, and she said home wasn’t safe. That because of father we would be under house arrest if we returned. That I could go to Azkaban for what I did in the rooms.”
“But she had immunity from the Order.” Hermione interjected. “Ginny told me they promised that wouldn’t happen.”
“She didn’t trust any of them.” He shook his head. “And at first it worked in her favor that we couldn’t remember. Because I didn’t mind Italy, and I didn’t think there was anything to return to except an empty house.”
Draco swallowed. “But then I started to dream of you.”
Hermione felt her heart push against her skin as it swelled from his words, as if it too wanted so desperately to feel Draco in the flesh.
“I didn’t know this until I asked him, but Theo was seeing Luna in his sleep. And I saw you. It was you, with those muggle headphones on your head in the Gryffindor room. I saw you in the igloo, asleep as the nymph asked me what my wish was. I saw a Phoenix patronus wrapped around you. And I remember waking up and feeling so empty without the answer to the question that plagued me: where were you?”
Hermione was crying now.
“After I talked to Theo, and he said he was dreaming of Luna, we asked my mother if she’d hire a doctor trained in Legilimens to peer into our minds and free our memories. I could tell she didn’t want us to remember, but we were done sitting around growing tan. If she didn’t agree we were going to leave. So she did. She hired an American woman who could heal the mind and its memories. And she started on Theo.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “She quickly found that Theo had…trauma. And she asked him, bluntly, if he wanted to keep it forgotten. She told him it was brutal, and that there was much of it. All he asked her was if there was a girl in any of those memories. He said that if Luna was in any of them, they could be freed. Everything else he didn’t care if he forgot. She worked on us for months, only pulling one memory free a day. My mother was mortified to learn how I had spent my time in the rooms.”
Hermione blushed.
“Soon, and not soon enough, we remembered everything, and our minds were fully healed.”
“When was this?”
He looked at her then, and she let emotion cut her to the core.
“Three days ago.”
He had fought to find her. Even when he didn’t remember her, even when he didn’t understand why he dreamed of her, he fought for her and he came for her. Just as he always had.
“Theo is with Luna now, I told them they could have the manor tonight.” He moved closer to her until he took her hand. “Do you believe me now, that I would never willingly be apart from you?”
“Yes,” Hermione said through the tears. “Yes, I believe you, Draco.”
And she did. Her heart felt lighter than it had in years. That warmth that had left her the day Ginny saved her was finally coming back.
Draco cleared his throat. “You didn’t go back to Weasely, did you?”
Hermione reared back as if he’d slapped her.
“You think my love was that fragile?” Hermione said, her voice quivering. “Did you think that I would find you’ve gone and just go running back into Ron’s arms? I loved you, for months. I still do. I didn’t throw that away for him.”
“None of it was real.” He said plainly. “I didn’t know what to think on my way back here.”
“It was real to me!” Hermione yelled as tears stream down her face. “All of it. All of it was real to me, Draco.” She repeated what Pansy had told her that day. “It has to be real, or else we’ll go mad. We cannot pretend it was nothing, not when I’ve had to live with the grief of losing you for years.”
His face nearly crumpled at her words. Hermione stood.
“You came back to me.” She said fiercely. “That means you know it was real.”
She knew, logically, he likely still needed space to sort out the truth of it all. But she needed to hear him say it.
He moved to stand in front of her, and she titled her head back to gaze at him.
“Everything was real.” He whispered. “Everything I felt was real then, and it’s real now.”
She let the relief wash over her like fresh rain.“Are you coming home for good?” Hermione asked him.
He smiled. “You’re my home, Beloved. I go where you go.”
“What do we do now?”
“Whatever we want. The world is ours.”
Draco kissed her, and Hermione felt like she was finally alive again.
She was a ghost that was given a vessel, a spirit attached to a warm body.
Color crept back into everything.
Stars exploded in her veins.
The sound of harmony filled her heart. Everything was as it needed to be. Finally.
As her hands wound through his hair, everything felt like pure, cosmic magic.
Draco laughed into her mouth as he picked her up and spun her around. And as Hermione laughed right along with him, she looked up at the stars and found the constellations looked very much like a certain rune.
Their rune.