Chapter Text
Chapter Seventeen
This whole wretched saga had started with her crying in the loo, so it seemed appropriate that it should end here, too. Was she always going to be a compulsive fixer? Ron was right. She had wanted to fix him and Malfoy and everybody, and who was she to anoint herself as their saviour, anyway? What did she know, really know, about parental wounds? Where did she get—
A loud knocking interrupted her self-reproach. She fell silent, as if to trick the intruder into leaving. But this was absurd. “There’s someone in here,” she warbled as the knocking resumed.
“Hermione?”
The voice… Hadn’t she heard it on the other side of a bathroom door once before?
“Hermione, are you okay in there?”
Her face had been wary that night, too, when she’d cracked the Ministry bathroom door ajar to stare out at him. Had his voice sounded quite this desperate then as well?
In the past month, he's apparently earned a few additional centimetres of trust, as he can see much more of her face through the open door this time.
Water gleaming on her lashes. The remnants of her lipstick, which had valiantly resisted the onslaught of a three-course meal, only to collapse in crimson patches around the edges of her mouth.
If Draco were the literary type, he might appreciate the poignant promise of this moment as a bookend of sorts. Might have quipped, “We must stop meeting like this, Miss Granger,” breaking the tension with a delicate appeal to humor.
But Malfoy’s best material was typically mean-spirited. He had little practice with affectionate witticisms, so instead he asked, “Why did you run away like that?”
Hermione’s eyes narrowed, dimming their vulnerable luster. “Like what?”
“Like it's indecent to feel things in public, I suppose. Like you deserve to be alone because you got upset. Err, because I upset you. Again. Sorry.”
He really was trying his best, poor lamb, and there was something much more likable about this version of Draco than the one who'd leaned against the Ministry bathroom wall with studied insouciance.
Still, his well-intended question made no sense on the face of it. “We're British,” she said, as if this was the first time someone had ever explained the concept to him. “Public displays of emotion are practically a misdemeanor.”
Now that sly bravado was back. “We're wizards, Hermione. We make our own rules.”
Almost immediately, he seemed to regret the elitist undertones of this remark, but just as he opened his mouth to clarify, Hermione pulled the door the rest of the way open. “Indeed we do,” she said calmly, before advancing on him with a wicked glimmer in her eyes.
Whatever Draco had expected for the evening, it had not involved slamming backward in a restaurant hallway with Hermione Granger’s hands gripping his face. The shock of it was seismic, and while her kiss had felt more resolute than violent, he felt as winded as if she'd thrown him into the wall on purpose.
“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she gasped, releasing him with a terrified expression. “I didn't mean… so clumsy of me, and I didn't even think to ask if you were all right with this to begin with—”
Draco caught her by the wrists, grinning. “I appreciate your concern for my delicate constitution, but you can put your mind at ease. I think you'll find I am unlikely to complain.”
Back in the restaurant, Hannah Abbott watched the curtained hallway disconsolately. “They’ve been gone an awfully long time, haven’t they?”
Neville looked up from the dessert menu. “Oh, only a couple of minutes, dear,” he said, though he himself had been performing similar arithmetic.
“You don’t think they’re…” Hannah’s voice dropped to a fretful hush. “Snogging, do you?”
“I certainly hope they are,” Ginny said, summoning a serving trolley. “I can’t do another dinner like this, can you?”
Hannah’s lips quivered but Neville leaned in to clarify. “She means she can’t bear another second of the unspoken tension between them, love. Not the restaurant. Right, Ginny?”
But Ginny’s attention was on ordering her next drink. Harry nodded emphatically for both of them, though, before placing his cocktail request with the trolley. Neville hoped from the wobble of Potter’s head that he and Weasley were walking home, not flying.
“I can’t say as I’ve noticed much tension,” Hannah said, her mood hurtling towards sulky as the trolley trundled away and Harry and Ginny returned to making semi-drunken eyes at each other. “Not that kind, at least. But then I’ve always been a bit stupid about such things.”
“Never stupid, my pet,” Neville soothed, stroking her back. “Draco’s a difficult man to read, and Hermione—”
But Neville’s thoughtful take on the complex emotional of state of his oldest friend never left his throat. Auror that he was, he noticed the automated serving trolley disappear through the velvet curtain into the hallway before his conscious mind had fully registered the possible danger.
“And Hermione what?” Hannah pursed her lips, expectant.
A colossal crash answered her, so loud that Neville could practically feel each shard of crystal glasses and porcelain place settings ricocheting through the restaurant’s posh, muted ambiance.
Potter lept to his feet, emptying a fistful of Galleons from his wallet onto the table. “Lovely to see you, Neville. Wonderful evening, Hannah.” Ginny was right behind him, snatching up her handbag with a Seeker’s accuracy—her instincts were impeccable, even when soaked in spirits. The pair of them dashed for the exit, leaving Neville and Hannah to face the music.
“They’ve left their coats,” he observed, mild as ever.
Hannah put her head down on the white linen tablecloth, shoulders shaking with dry, silent sobs. Patrons throughout the restaurant shot them scathing looks at this unseemly display, while others craned their necks towards the velvet curtain. For his part, Neville sat calmly, massaging the nape of Hannah’s neck as he waited for Draco and Hermione to fix whatever mess they’d made.
As a young teenager, Hermione’s romantic imaginings had followed the traditional folly of unkissed adolescents, elevating the magical possibility of a “first kiss” as the hope of untold rapture.
Scaling that mythical peak with Viktor Krum in her fourth year had been, if not a letdown, a sobering lesson in practicality. On page and screen, kisses delivered passion with expert choreography, and only after the requisite amount of pining and/or perfectly cued lines.
Real-life involved more anthropological oddities, like the silent and experimental negotiations of noses, height differences, and, surprisingly enough, clacking teeth. Hermione had emerged from her early excursions into snogging with the quietly self-satisfied sobriety brought only by experience.
Ron… Well, Ron had been a different story entirely. Years of pent-up longing, irritation, fondness, jealousy, and battlefield adrenaline had rendered their first brush with intimacy bruising, desperate, and electric.
But ecstatic beginnings cannot guarantee joyous ends. Ron’s moods and insecurities had kept their relational seas stormy, and so Hermione clung to every evidence of his desire and affection with the fierceness of the drowning. Euphoric highs, crushing lows. Kisses pure and sweet as summer strawberries. Fights as wrenching and traumatic as breaking bones.
The moment that Hermione realized Draco Malfoy was about to repay her kiss with interest, these memories crowded her mind, like commentators awaiting the start of a race. What promises did Malfoy’s shapely, smirking lips hold for her—and were they promises that he could keep?
For his part, Malfoy felt a flutter of nerves as he studied Granger’s face. His palms… were they clammy and sweaty? Was it too bold, grabbing her wrists like that? What did he intend to do, now that he had her in his grasp? It was all too silly, and a little sordid, snogging outside the bathroom… was it strange that the prospect excited him? Would his tastes, formed in the dark and twisted places of his past, prove too seedy for this flushed and starry-eyed Gryffindor?
Hermione stared him down, tracking the movement of each thought. “I’m waiting,” she teased, and Draco bent to kiss her, releasing her wrists to cup her face in his hands.
Peaceful.
What other way could he describe it? Even as his heart rate rose and his hormones spiked, his mind drew a pleasant blank, swimming in the rush of sensation—
Until this bliss was interrupted by a giggle. Draco froze, horrified to discover his tongue exploring the inside of Hermione’s lower lip. He pulled back, aghast. “Sorry,” he said, “probably better policy to ask if you even like that sort of thing before just… going for it.”
Hermione shook her head, smiling. “No, that wasn’t it at all. It’s that you—” She struggled to find the words. “Your kissing is so… sincere. I don’t know that it’s what I would have expected.”
“Sincere?” Draco hadn’t expected rave reviews after so brief a performance, but sincere sounded like code for dreadful . Polite. Dull. “Don’t damn me with faint praise, Granger. What else can a person be when snogging if not sincere?”
Sadness blossomed behind her eyes, spreading across her face like a stain. “Selfish,” she whispered, lowering her gaze.
Draco pulled her into a hug, surprised all over again by how soft and delicate she felt. He was not an imposing man, but holding Hermione, letting her press her face into his shoulder and neck, gave him the strange sense of being strong enough and big enough, if only just barely.
It was this tender scene that the bungling serving trolley interrupted with a crash, splattering Malfoy’s brand-new sweater with a shower of assorted spirits and food fragments, and losing the young gentleman’s good opinion forever.