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She had only given in because she was lonely. He realised that. But Draco couldn’t help taking advantage of the affection she willingly gave. It wasn’t a secret that he had consistently been a selfish man, and with her—his greed knew no bounds.
The time spent together—under the darkness of night—always felt fleeting, stolen, just seconds away from being out of grasp. So he continued feigning sleep every night; unsure fingers would burn paths into his skin as if she needed to memorise him, too.
Slowly, as the weeks passed, he began collecting and filing the simplest moments away, fearing that one day it would be all that he had left in her absence.
Turning the book’s page, he observed the way her brows furrowed in deep thought, gazing at him, almost as if trying to solve an equation, but didn’t have all the data. Usually it made Draco uneasy when someone stared for too long. He would deflect by using sarcasm or a sneer to drive their minds elsewhere–before they could discover the cracks in his carefully curated facade.
But with Hermione, he always pretended that it escaped his notice. He’d plead silently that she would never look away—that she would eventually find him worthy of her love after it was all said and done, and wouldn’t leave as everyone else had.
“Malfoy.”
Silently, he turned the page again, pretending his surname didn’t sting, humming a response of indifference.
“Do you ever think about who we’d have become if things had played out differently?”
As he lifted his gaze from the pages, their eyes connected. The room was silent; the question echoed in his mind, hope deflating at a rapid pace. Forcing his breathing to stay steady, he raised an eyebrow in response, not trusting that his voice wouldn’t crack.
Hermione dropped her eyes to the floor, and he silently cursed the way he always failed her, opening his mouth too late to respond. She stood from her chair with a pained smile, looking away to hide the disappointment he would find there.
Before leaving the room, she turned, face steady, connecting their eyes once more.
“It’s okay. I just-” Pausing for a moment, Hermione took a deep breath in.
“Granger, I-“
“No, really, it’s okay.” His mouth snapped closed at the interruption, not sure if it was annoyance or relief he felt since he wasn’t sure how to respond. Desperation clung to him, begging him not to let her walk out. Everyone always left, and he let them. But the thought of having to watch Hermione stride away was something he knew he wouldn’t survive.
“It’s okay,” she repeated it in a tone that sounded almost like a question, as if she was trying to convince herself.
He held his breath, eyes guarded, waiting for her to turn and leave. Instead, he watched as she sat once more, flipping open the book with a sad smile.
Shame crept up his spine, thinking of the manner she flawlessly considered him before acting. It was jarring at first, how she never took advantage of the weaknesses she found. It was one reason it had pulled Draco into her orbit, why he was silently screaming to stay.
Sometimes he still struggled to articulate his feelings, so he stayed silent. Lucius had ruled their home with a firm hand, showing love the only way he knew, preparing him for a future that was already predetermined. Even as a small child, Lucius used his emotions against him, picking apart every flaw he could use to break him; layer by layer, his father moulded him into the perfect heir.
But he had quickly realised that the only alternative to protect himself was to place those weaknesses behind walls.
Building mental wards around the moments.
Wandering through his life with a mask on.
Never asking questions.
Holding himself above those his father thought less worthy and used his name and well-placed insults to push people into submission.
But he soon realised being a Malfoy had only one upside, beginning and ending with the unlimited amount of gallons at his disposal.
Everything else just brought about their downfall.
That was why after the war, Draco still hid behind the only good thing his father taught him: his walls. But it was lonely keeping everyone at arm’s length. So, when he saw Hermione, truly saw her, he wanted more out of life.
Closing his eyes, he fought to reel in the emotions; the shame rolled off him in waves, and he swallowed all the feelings his father instilled in him, slamming his barricades in place.
Galleons wouldn’t make her stay, and he couldn’t buy the sense of home he felt with her after she ultimately left—so he hid.
Hermione stared down at the page, replaying the words that slipped out back to herself, ‘ Do you ever think about who we’d have become if things had played out differently? ’
Daft. So fucking daft.
It was a habit that started after the war, asking questions out of context. When she let her mind spiral in thoughts, flashing through memories like a scrapbook, wondering how she ended up right here, at this moment, with him.
Everyone was coping in their own way after the war; some finished 7th year and others were self-isolated. It did not surprise Hermione when Draco decided not to return, as many students couldn’t cope with staying in a place that no longer felt like home, but was now ruined. Hermione was different, though. She had no home to go back to, and no family left that knew she existed. The Weasleys were always an option, but she for once, wanted to stand on her own two feet in the wizarding world. So she packed her trunk and headed back to the only place she had: Hogwarts.
There weren’t many students that Hermione remembered from before the war. She wasn’t the only one who came back as an escape from the realities of home. Theodore Nott would sit quietly to himself in the library, trying, and failing, not to listen to the whispers about his family.
Theo hadn't been active in the war, but his last name wasn’t uncommon in dark circles. Hermione watched from afar for a long time, unwilling to put herself back into the limelight, even though that wasn’t what she fought a war for–to stand by why others suffered because of their blood status and association. So one afternoon, after an overly confident 5th year shoved a book off of Theo’s study table, Hermione walked over, slamming her books down beside Theo, making eye contact with the pest of a student.
“Sorry, Theodore. I know I was supposed to be here right after dinner, but McGonagall needed help, and I happened to lose track of time.”
The look in Theo’s eyes at that moment told her everything she desired to know about him. He just wanted to find peace in the aftermath that war created for them. With a smirk, he gestured to the chair to his left as an invitation, and returned to his lines
It became a new habit for Hermione to set her stuff down beside him in the library quietly. It kept the others away. There were no more loud, unnecessary comments thrown in Theo’s direction, and no one wanted to ask the Golden Girl insensitive questions about her time with Harry and Ron on the Horcrux hunt when she was sitting so close to a Death Eater's son.
The routine shifted with time. Quiet studying turned into whispered confessions, and library visits turned into secret alcove meet-ups that didn’t need words to be spoken. It was easy not to pretend with someone who was just as broken by the war as she was. Neither of them had a family. Neither could relate to their friends anymore. They all seemed to have something to live for, so they became passing ships with everyone they once knew, and they clung to each other in the uncertainty of those moments.
Time passed quickly in the bubble they created for themselves. The school year ended before they realised, and they walked into a world they couldn’t easily hide from. Even from Azkaban, Theo’s father was pulling puppet strings to bend him to his will. Yet they still clung to each other like a lifeline.
Marriage contract after marriage contract started arriving by owl. Hermione saw the anxiety written in his features clearly as he burned one, terrified that someday his father would bind him away from her.
“Hermione, what do you say? Let’s just tell the tosser to piss off and run to the Ministry and get married.”
Her gaze snapped up quickly to look at his face. Usually, it was the first thing to give him away. It surprised her to see no mirth, just bright eyes full of hope she wouldn’t dare crush.
“Yea, you act as if we could up and drop into the Ministry and make this all go away.” Her heart was beating so fast it was hard to keep a level head. Was it crazy? She’d ridden a dragon and fought in a bloody war. Why was the thought of marriage so out of the realm of possibilities?
“Why couldn’t we? Who is going to stop us before it’s too late? Who could tell the great Hermione Granger, the Golden Girl, the Brightest Witch of Our Age, no ?” Theo stood quickly with a manic smile.
“Don’t think about it, please. Don’t think about all the ways it could go wrong, and who would be mad? It would be us, just us like it was always supposed to be.” He took a deep breath in. “What do you say, Hermione Granger? Will you make me the happiest tosser in the world right now?”
“Nott,” she added with a smirk, tasting the name rolling off her lips to see how it felt.
“Not? As in, no?” He responded with furrowed brows, slightly leaning back from her to stare into eyes that she knew anchored him.
“Nott as in I’m going to be Hermione Nott.” Finally, the smile she was holding back bloomed onto her face. “Theodore, of bloody course it is a yes. Why wouldn’t it be a yes?” She responded shakingly through her joyous laughter.
At that moment, she realised how radiant he looked–this happy–it was something she vowed to regularly bring forth in him.
But that was easier said than done.
They rushed to the Ministry in secret. Well, for as long as a secret could stay for a war hero and a son of a Death Eater. The fallout came and went, as did time. The cracks in the facade showed they always would have. They were two broken people trying to build a foundation on unstable stone.
It started with mixing circles; it wasn’t easy. They stayed with her friends, mainly after most of the pureblood society shunned Theo for the ‘sins he committed against his bloodline’. At least, that’s what she told herself when she felt guilty for the animosity she still held for the Slytherins. Malfoy was a constant to stand beside him, to Hermione’s surprise, but their friendship never wavered, even after they married. When Theo would Floo to the manor drunk after each one of their big fights, Malfoy would send him back with a clearer mind; yet, they never spoke of her and Draco.
The Malfoy Manor was still a place that held the hardest of her memories, but she returned for the first time, sitting in the last row, watching as Draco did his duty by marrying Astoria Greengrass with Theo by his side. Malfoy looked at every part of a pureblood prince as he stood uneasily at the altar. It was hard for her to determine if it was last-minute cold feet, or the fact they both were reliving one of the worst of their shared memories of the war together. Hermione felt the tightness in her chest at the thought of that night; closing her eyes, she took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. When she reopened them, they automatically connected with Malfoy’s, wide-open and full of terror. She did the only thing she could think of, nodding in his direction; he mimicked it swiftly and averted his gaze; mutual respect was born out of their love for Theo, even though sometimes it was painful to bear.
After the wedding, things took a turn for the worse with Theo. She wasn’t sure if it was attending the wedding they never got to have or that the firewhiskey did little to hide his demons had not healed. The cries into the dark that he thought no one witnessed became more frequent. She could feel the resentment rolling off of him in waves until it was so large that it was all that was there. The disinheritance was hard, but they had made it work; he didn’t want to be tied down to a man who damaged him even if it was sometimes challenging to manage. She shut down; she knew she did, often spending more weekends with the Potters, and less time at home straining the marriage already hanging on by a thread. That was, until the owl came that flipped their world upside down. Nott Sr. was dead in prison, and all Theo could think about was all that was left unsaid because of her.
Hermione was the reason his father wouldn’t return his letters for years. It was a weird thing, being a child from a broken home. He still longed for the validation of the person who hurt him the most. Even if he couldn’t acknowledge it, he felt it in the deepest core of his being. It hurt, being rejected by the ones who are expected to love you most. The thought was not logical, but it was the last straw for him.
“It’s always you, Hermione. Always bloody you. You are why my life turned out nothing like it was supposed to.” He slurred insult after insult as she sat there and took them. He regularly did so when he drank heavily, but she loved him too much ever to leave. The way he used his words as a weapon to cut her down until she felt as small as he did at that moment.
“We’ve talked about this, Theo. I can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep going back and forth about how I’ve made your life bloody impossible.” Wiping the angry tears from her eyes, she stood tall.
“I’m not a punching bag; you do this to me every time you feel you don’t have a grip. It’s not fair. It’s not fair, and YOU KNOW IT.” All she saw at that moment was his rage–the anger that wasn’t for her but had nowhere to go. There was no place for it here or in love. Even if that love was torn, like theirs was now. The holes they tried to fill with each other were crumbling like sand with the weight of it all.
With one final swipe at her eyes, she spoke in a calmer tone. “Maybe we should owl Malfoy, have him come to take you to the Manor. I know Astoria shut the floo off to you, but he always knows what to say when you’re like this.”
“FUCK, Hermione, just going to continue to push me onto someone else every time it gets a little hard for you? What you miss is how Harry always cleaned up your bloody mess with Ron. If you miss the Golden Trio so much, then why don’t you stop slumming it with the bottom feeders? How does it feel to be so Golden on your high horse? You don’t know what it feels like to lose everything for someone, do you? DO YOU, HERMIONE?!”
It was her turn to turn towards him, filled with rage, the way he deflected his insecurities onto her without a thought about how it would make her feel.
“I hate what you’ve turned us into, Theodore Nott.” She spit it out like poison, aimed to kill on contact. “You’ve turned our love into something broken and disgusting, just like your father. You’ve turned into the person you hate the most; it’s not me you hate. It’s yourself! You’ll always be just like him, a broken man who broke everyone else around him to feel something.”
All the air seemed to deflate from the room at that; they stared at each other, heaving for oxygen and a way to push the hurtful words back in. But the thing with words is that they can’t be unspoken–forgiven, yes, but never unspoken.
And with a pop of apparition, he was gone.
Hermione jumped at the next sound of the apparition, jarring her back from the memory she had replayed in her mind. How she had watched Harry walk up the front steps to her flat, muffled remarks that made little sense at all.
Found Theo.
Hermione, can you hear me?
Splinched.
Unfit to apparate.
Nothing we could do.
At that moment, it was as if the clouds had opened up to swallow her whole, as the rain poured; it hadn’t stopped since.
She knew it wasn’t him. It would never be him; she saw to that. But she stood by the window and watched the rainfall wash over the dark figure, only lit by the streetlight. The stream of water rolled off the sidewalk and down the alleyway, and as she watched, she wished it was that easy to wash away the festering guilt and regret inside her. It was too painful to watch how the stream moved through the winding paths in the ways that she couldn’t, so she turned from the image and back to her unread book.
A knock saved her from trying to read the line on the page for the hundredth time. Looking at the clock on the wall, she knew it was well past when normal visitors stopped by just to overstay their welcome.
But she wasn’t expecting to open the door and find him standing there. The harsh reminder of a life she no longer had even though she secretly was screaming to be free of the burdens it placed on her. The constant fighting for something that was never meant to be forever, but she stubbornly wanted to prove it wrong.
“Fuck, I don’t know why I came, Granger, but I knew I couldn’t send an owl.” Malfoy refused to meet her eyes.
“Nott,” she said with a watery smile.
“What?”
“I mean, not for long, I suppose.” She added in a whisper that only she could hear a joke he was no longer there to get.
“Oh, and Astoria already sent her regards with a bouquet—those right there.” She pointed past him to the steps where she had left them.
Malfoy’s eyes widened slightly as she forced eye contact.
“I’m also not such an invalid that I wouldn’t know that an arrangement of aconite, yellow carnations, and orange lilies was a cunt move on your wife’s part.” There were many things that grief was going to take from her, but that didn’t mean she had to do it lying down.
“Ex-wife.” He smirked at her. They announced it a few days after. After, well… Theo.
Of course, the fucking tosser was even working to come second best to her own trauma. Such a Malfoy thing to do, get divorced, not to be upstaged.
“Tea? You’re soaking wet, and I already have one dead pureblood line on my hands. Can’t go offing you all in one week.”
They sat in silence, sipping tea until Draco stood to leave.
“Thank you, Malfoy.” It might irritate her under the circumstances, but she was thankful he didn’t occupy the silence.
“Thank you? For what? I came to give you my condolences, and I failed.” Huffing out a breath of frustration, he stepped towards the door again.
“For not trying to fill the silence with well-meant sentiments and just… having tea and letting me be. It’s redundant hearing the same phrases over and over. ‘It will get better,’ and ‘What happened, happened.’ ‘The hollow pain won’t last forever.’” She wasn’t used to being this vulnerable around him, but she didn’t care.
“I’m a lot of things, Granger, but never a liar.” He looked over his shoulder towards her and met her eyes once more. “And from my experience, it doesn’t get better.” And with that, he turned to leave.
From then on, a new routine started. She would answer a late-night knock at the door and offer him tea. The nights began with them sitting in silence until Hermione couldn’t take it anymore. She would pass him a book, and they would talk about any and everything, and they would read.
It was easy being there, alone, with him in her flat. She didn’t have to censor her words to sound more like a widow, and he didn’t have to pretend to mourn an adulterous wife openly. Grief is so commonly known by many, but also as harshly judged.
The nights turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and with every whispered confession of guilt, and every laugh of joy that slipped through, the pain didn’t lessen, but it felt less hollow there with him. There was nothing salacious about the meetings, but they were private, just theirs. They could finally tear down the barriers that always kept them so blocked off from the rest of the world.
It was there, in the rubble of what they used to be that they found each other, tattered and torn, imperfect pieces, but not quite broken. For the first time since the war, she didn’t hate what she saw when she looked in the mirror.
One late afternoon as the sun peeked through the drapes, she turned to him, taking a deep breath in steadying herself. She could do this; she could be vulnerable. He showed her she could be in all the ways he listened with intent and argued with reason.
“Do you believe the universe knew we needed each other?”
Malfoy’s head snapped sideways. “Where did that question come from? Hogwarts: A History, Granger? Give it here.” He reached over to grab the volume from her hand. “If you want an answer, I need to know the full parameters of this deep philosophical question.”
Instead of passing over the book to continue his ruse, she hit him on the arm soundly. “Prat.”
“Not the first addition, Hermione! What would the wizarding world think of someone at your station treating the material so magical as this so carelessly?” Of course, he wasn’t talking about the text as he gestured to his person.
“Wait! Draco Malfoy, did you just call me HERMIONE?”
“I certainly did not. Now stop deflecting. The universe, Allah, the heavenly father Jesus Christ, or Merlin himself, ask the bloody question again. The fluffy furry animals you call footwear distracted me.”
“One, we are never reading up on religion again. Two, you’ve made it completely irrelevant because I’ve suddenly realised I can not stand you.”
SMACK
“You can’t start a pillow fight every time you don’t get your way, Malfoy.” Dodging the flying cushion, she picked one off the floor and threw it back.
“Next, you’ll make some dumb rule about how you won’t let me watch any not horror films , because I know how to have a pillow war better than you do now.” He caught the one aimed at his face flawlessly.
“For the last time, it’s a HORROR FILM.” She didn’t understand how he could be so bloody brilliant and dense simultaneously.
“Right, really scary.” Wiggling his fingers in her direction was even more childish than throwing pillows. “They don’t have wands! Not even one dark lord stinking up their manor’s marble. Again, not horror. Have you had to watch a snake eat someone at your dining room table?”
“No, just explode out of someone’s corpse. Try again, Malfoy. We already tallied up our trauma, and I won, fair and square.”
SMACK
“But did you really win? Or did I win because I am less traumatised than you?” Pausing, they both stared at each other and burst into laughter.
As they caught their breath, Draco retrieved the discarded pillows from around the room. That was one thing that never bothered him, but he always did it for her; after living in a museum-like home with unrealistic expectations, he liked the lived-in look, where she wanted everything in its place, and that is when she got the nerve to try again.
“Draco,” he stilled–his back to her. She wasn’t sure if she ever used his first name without following it with the last so casually before, but his reaction showed that it was unusual enough he took notice.
“Draco, forget the pillows. Look at me,” she said, her words slightly shaking at the end. As he turned around, his appearance shocked her. All the jokes had left his face as he faced her.
“You don’t have to repeat the question, Granger. I heard it perfectly the first time, but I’m not sure if you want the answer to it.” He closed his eyes as he took a breath in, centring himself.
“Of course, I want the answer.” She pointed to herself. “Know it all.” She watched his lip twerk up at the corner as he tried to suppress the eye roll, which would ultimately start another petty war of fluffy house objects.
He stood silently for a minute, shifting on his feet. It wasn’t the type of silence that made you uneasy, but the kind that felt like a promise. The feeling of the room changed as he looked back at her.
“Fine, then yes, I think the universe knew we needed each other. I believe if we asked the Centaurs, they would tell us the stars told them, and even though you think Divination is a crock of shite.“ He paused, knowing exactly where she would make her come back.
So instead of giving him the satisfaction, she whispered, “It is shite.” With that, he took a step toward her, hope shining in his eyes, and for the first time in the last few months, Hermione did not fear the unknown.
As he tossed the pillow behind him, he reached her almost nose to nose. He leaned down.
“It might be shite, darling, but this is not,” and brought his mouth to hers.