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Draco is as tall as his father’s cane when Mother explains to him why there are scorch marks on their family tapestry. He sounds out the letters visible beneath a ruined portrait of a woman with hair as wild as his Aunt Bella—Andromeda.
“She’s…lost,” Mother says.
“Can’t we help find her?”
“No, darling. She’s not missing. She’s just…lost her way.”
Father then explains that Aunt Andromeda was a Muggle-loving traitor who betrayed her family to run away with her filthy Mudblood lover. That she’s a stain on
their family,
their name,
their lineage.
That she is a waste of magic, and she deserves what’s coming for her.
Behind him, Mother weeps.
Draco keeps a stiff upper lip and swears he’ll never lose his way.
It’s a scorching day in London when Hermione loses her mother at the zoo. One moment, she’s standing right beside her, looking at the gorillas, and the next—gone.
Despite her trembling hands, Hermione finds a friendly-looking woman and calmly relays that
she’s five years old,
she can’t find her mum,
and she lives at 1204 Hempstead Drive in Oxfordshire, England.
Luckily, her mother soon comes running, tears streaking her stricken face.
“I thought you were right behind me,” she whispers into their embrace. “You were supposed to be right behind me.”
In the safety of her mother’s arms, Hermione lets the tears flow. “I thought I lost you.”
“Never, darling,” her mother vows. “Never.”
An expertly repaired vanishing cabinet towers over Draco where he stands, stone still and silent, in a room full of lost and forgotten things.
He should be proud. He’s the one who repaired it, after all.
The first half of his task, complete, and soon—too soon—the other half will be laid out on the path in front of him, an opportunity to solidify his place in the Dark Lord’s ranks. To truly earn the screaming brand on his arm.
When they come, they come
shrieking,
howling,
screaming,
all wild hair and ripped robes bursting from the cabinet. Draco follows on faltering feet, wondering what he’s just done.
In the astronomy tower, he lowers his wand. He, as well as his headmaster, knows the curse would not likely work from his lips. Green light explodes from behind him anyway, and the old man falls to his death.
Hermione’s hand does not tremble when she takes her parents’ memories. She stands stone still and silent as any evidence of her existence is erased from her home.
She disappears from photos. Her name vanishes from the handwritten letters on the fridge. Her parents blink once, then twice, forgetting her.
It isn’t until much, much later, in the quiet of the Forest of Dean, when she casts a privacy charm on her cot where she lies
cold,
afraid,
alone—
And sobs.
Draco once swore he’d follow the path laid for him by his father. But if his failure in the astronomy tower had been a chip in the veneer—a hairline fracture—then the night in the drawing room is a shattering explosion, leaving all the leftover pieces scattered on the floor.
Potter is forced to his knees in front of him, swollen from a simple stinging curse. Weasley struggles to escape the grip of one of the snatchers. Granger is frozen in fear. It’s the first time he’s ever seen her afraid.
“Well?” Aunt Bella pulls him to his knees for a better look. “Is it him?”
It’s him.
Draco knows it,
his father knows it,
they all know it.
And yet—
“I can’t be sure.”
In the moments after the battle—bodies still warm, fires still burning—there is celebration. Mourning. Families are cleaved in half and reunited all at once.
Hermione returns to Oxfordshire to a flattened lot. A gas leak, the city says. Freak accident. Luckily, no one was home.
She knows it was no accident, but magic, that stole the last of her childhood. And while she finds relief in the knowledge that her parents are
far away,
safe,
and blissfully unaware,
she knows, then, that they may be better off lost to her forever.
It’s three days after the fall of Lord Voldemort that the Aurors come.
Father barricades himself inside. He’d rather fight and die for a dead demagogue than turn over his wand. Mother weeps.
Draco goes willingly.
“Coward,” Father spits. “You’re no son of mine.”
When they sit him across the table in a holding cell at the Ministry, Draco
talks,
and talks,
and talks,
and when he’s released, he returns to an empty home and the remnants of a family tapestry burnt to a crisp.
Unmoored and undone, Hermione turns to what she knows. She searches for remnants of herself, searches for broken pieces to pick up, searches for somewhere to be —finds it all in a book, scattered about, hidden between the pages. Outside is the ceaseless drone of war hero and golden girl and savior while inside, all she knows is
lost,
lost,
lost.
Draco, too, is
adrift,
drowning,
tossed about
in waves of that which is unknown, that which he does not understand—loud crowds and big cars and bright, flashing walk lights. A big metal tube hurtling through the ground. Paper notes. Telephones. He finds solace in the quiet of a bookshop, in the gentle swish of turning pages, in the desperate relief in learning that everything he ever believed in was a lie.
And so two lost souls meet, deep in the stacks, converging in the section marked H, connecting in an accidental brush of fingers, colliding in a gasping rush of air as they both reach for the same title, all perhaps
by chance,
by circumstance,
by the unspoken rule that like calls to like.
Forgiveness is found between the lines, understanding bleeds into the margins, potential blooms in shared coffees—all to make room for the longing, for lingering sunsets and cobblestone strolls and brushes of fingers no longer accidental.
For the hope—that they might someday find their way. And that if they don’t—at least they’ll be lost together.
Draco’s own home often feels like a foreign place, full of dark hallways and empty rooms. Even his own mother feels like a stranger, holed up in her own wing of the manor, waiting out the remainder of her house arrest.
But occasionally she surprises him, joining him at breakfast, flipping through The Prophet like everything is normal.
“Elven labor reform,” she reads—practically spits it—and Draco knows what she will see before she even turns the page. “You danced with the Granger girl?”
In front of her loops an image of him spinning Granger around at a fundraising gala,
laughing,
smiling,
in love,
not necessarily unrequited, but perhaps unrealized.
“Yes, Mother.”
“The Granger girl?” she asks again.
Draco hears her question for what it is. “Yes, Mother.”
“Oh, no, darling.” Mother laughs. “Not the Granger girl.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“No, darling. These are trying times,” she says. She strokes his cheek, and the motherly gesture feels more like a blade against his skin. “You’re just…lost.”
Hermione spends Christmas with Draco Malfoy, huddled close on the couch in front of the fireplace in her tiny flat. She’s supposed to be sitting on the floor in her parents’ living room. Opening gifts, singing songs. She’s supposed to be at the Burrow, squished between a few Weasleys. Instead—
The tea he hands her is perfectly made, even though he hadn’t asked how she wanted it.
“My mother always made mulled tea on Christmas,” she says.
“I know.” He brings his own mug to his lips. “You told me.”
Even as she smiles, the tears
slip
and pool
and stream.
“It’s disgusting,” he adds.
Her sob turns into a laugh. Silver eyes sparkle over the rim of his mug, and she can’t help but scoot closer until she’s curled into the side of her once-enemy, now- more, her head on his shoulder.
Is this where she’s supposed to be?
“It really is.”
Somewhere in a vanishing cabinet, a killing curse, a drawing room—Draco lost his way. Everything after—every testimony, every book, every moment with her—has been a desperate effort to once again be found.
But now he must consider the reverse, because if this is lost—
Granger gesticulates wildly with her hands as they weave through the New Year’s Eve crowd in the square. He loves her like this—deep in conversation, pink-cheeked and passionate. She’s so absorbed she nearly walks into traffic, but Draco’s become quite familiar with the walk lights, so he reels her back in with an arm around her waist.
He lingers longer than is necessary. She doesn’t protest. Instead, she just looks at him, waiting for him to do something.
And why hasn’t he? She’s given him plenty of signs.
The foundation of their relationship is built on almosts and near-misses, but this time—beneath the bright bursts of light that explode like blinking arrows pointing to
the quirk of her brow,
the crinkle of her eye,
the curve of her lips,
bathed in the neon light of a cosmic sign that screams THIS WAY IF YOU WANT TO GET LOST—he does not miss it.
He guides her mouth to his. Lets his hands follow the path of her spine to sink into her hair. Surrenders to the puzzle piece fit of his heart in her hands, because—
If this is lost—
He never wants to be found.
After a summer of searching, Hermione manages to track her parents down in a small town in Australia. They have entire lives—jobs and friends and newfound family, and when Hermione passes them on a footbridge on the trail by their new home, they don’t even turn their heads.
She is no prodigal son. A lost daughter remains lost.
Richard and Jean Granger don’t even exist. Legally, they are dead. And Hermione—to Wendell and Monica Wilkins—she’s no one.
Just a girl in a park where she shouldn’t be, weeping quietly on a bridge over an ambling creek. Aching for a mother’s embrace, yearning for her father’s crooked smile.
And yet, she finds resolve:
in losing everything but finding something still,
in the cracks of a spine and the words on a page
in growth and dependence and becoming.
Draco stands beside her on the bridge. Even as the evening colors fade, they watch the stream flow home together—as they always are, whether laughing in polaroid pictures or side-by-side on a torched family tapestry—and it’s then, she knows:
She’s not supposed to be anywhere but here.