Night One
It started when she locked the door of the house, pushed her way through the caresses of the trailing honeysuckle and began to walk. Someone had once said that finding something to distract yourself from the blind grief and blinder rage was a step towards recovery, but Hermione thinks that nothing can lessen the emotions that howl and batter at her heart, demanding to be let out. It just shoves them into the back of her mind for a rainy day, but even on rainy days she walks, her wild hair cowed into meek submission because if she doesn't walk, she'll go mad.
It was a third of the way around her usual circuit when she realises someone is beside her, matching her step for step with loping, graceful strides. She turns her head and almost trips over her worn, torn walking boots, but forces herself to keep going. One-foot-in-front-of-the-other. He looks at her with eyes the colour of storm-clouds, and she averts her gaze. Just keep walking.
When they get to her house, she half expects him to stop, but Draco Malfoy walks on by, chin at a proud tilt with weakly stewed moonlight glinting off his hair.
It isn't until she gets inside, sinking into the comfort of the red armchair by the fireplace that she thinks what the hell just happened?
Night Two
It isn't the fevered wanderings of her imagination. The next night, he joins her at the same place, a silent silhouette against the soft, starry sky, and again, when they reach her house, he goes on as if he doesn't even notice that she's gone.
Night Forty
It takes forty days to make a new habit, and by November, Hermione thinks they're well and truly stuck. Even if she wanted to stop, she couldn't. The walks with the biting air snapping its teeth at her cheeks pushes the monotony of long, slow days at the Ministry away, his silent, ghost-like presence keeps the insanity at bay.
Once, Hermione Granger was notorious for the curiosity that squirmed on the tip of her tongue like a disobedient child, but now the silence is something holy.
She asks no questions and he gives no answers. It is better that way.
Nights Ninety-Eight and Ninety-Nine
The shortest day has passed and snow frosts the streets like glittering icing, crunching beneath their feet. She bundles up in a red woolly hat and matching scarf, but he doesn't seem to possess anything like that, his ears and nose chapped the colour of strawberries by the cruel wind. He never makes a complaint, but she knows just what it is to be cold so that night she curls up on the rug and by the flickering light of the fire sets a pair of enchanted knitting needles clacking away.
She isn't sure what colour he'd like, and ends up with a shower of tears dribbling down her cheeks because she remembers asking colour advice from a clueless Harry and Ron when she was making all those hats for the house-elves. How grand she thought she was at age fourteen, Hermione Jean Granger, liberator of the oppressed!
It's a sad truth that not many of the oppressed want to be liberated. Dobby was the exception, not the rule.
She eventually settles for neutral black. She'd considered green for Slytherin, but old enmities are sewn into the past and she has no right to drag them into the here and now.
When she gives them to him, he looks as though someone has run him down with a flying carpet. He fingers the neat, even stitches as though they are made of pure gold, and winds the scarf around his throat reverently. Gratitude that she knows he'll never put into words burns in the back of his eyes.
She gives him a thin-lipped smile, and they continue on their way, fresh snow settling idly around them in a thick, frozen blanket.
Night One-Hundred-and-Thirty-One
It's February before even a word is spoken. Their feet are slipping and sliding on the iced-over puddles that throw off their camouflage a second too late, and five minutes into their usual round, Draco offers her a hand to hold her steady as she battles to remain upright. There is a smirk playing around his lips, and irritation is simmering in her veins until she finally snaps, "You're finding this hilarious, aren't you?"
His smirk widens. "You've as much grace on the ice as a duck with no feet, Granger."
"Like you're much better," she shoots back, but she is smiling too against her better instincts, and his gloved hand is sending little jolts of static charge racing up her arm and warming her like a fire's been lit in her pit of her stomach.
"Ah, but I am inherently good at everything I deign to do," he says, his voice dripping with false arrogance, but then there isn't frost-encrusted tarmac under his feet but slick black ice and he's falling, dragging Hermione down with him in a heap of arms and legs and knitted accessories. Hermione begins to laugh, to cackle in a way that forces him to join in, and he thinks that nothing in the fucking farce that is his life has ever felt this good.
Night One-Hundred-and-Seventy-Four
As spring washes over their heads in a crash of sweet-smelling petals and birdsong, they break the silence that has hung over them like a death sentence all through the winter. At first it is ordinary, mundane things – the weather, the people they pass, local gossip which bizarrely he seems very well informed about.
The heat crowds closer, the evenings are awash with watercolours rather than the dense, heavy darkness and they start to talk of consequences. Results.
The war itself is taboo. It's never mentioned, not even in passing, but the facts are branded into the back of people's thoughts, a reminder of what happens when Darkness tries to drag Light from her throne of freedom and glory. Voldemort lost. Dumbledore's Army, led by the world-famous Golden Trio won. There, finished, done. The book is closed and left to gather dust on a lonely shelf. But what happens to the characters after the ending?
Night Two-Hundred-and-Three
It takes time, as all things do, but eventually their own endings spill out like blood, staining into the fragile weave of their friendship. She is the one who cracks first.
They sit on the bridge with the stream babbling nonsense rhyme to itself and she's teaching him to play Poohsticks when she suddenly finds herself telling him about her break-up with Ron. Her fall-out with Harry. Not being able to find her parents. Her boss shunting her sideways into another department whose work is interesting but in the vague way that someone might consider a lost age or a good student might endeavour to succeed in Professor Binns' lessons. She confesses how weak she feels for letting it happen, how worthless she must be for it to have happened.
He nods and listens, and when she cries, he doesn't look away in embarrassment. He meets her gaze with one that says, You are strong and don't you dare let anyone tell you otherwise.
Night Two-Hundred-and-Forty-Nine
She never presses him to tell her things, but as summer draws on in a haze of golden evenings and glorious sunsets, his shields begin to crack. He shows her where he lives – a little house tucked away from the rest of a village with a long drive, and a tall, smoking chimney. He tells her that his father is in prison, and his mother is dead.
It doesn't take long for her to guess that he's been in prison too. She's always been smart, but it's unnerving how bloody perceptive she can be, looking at him with those eyes the colour of cognac, amber-brown and so deep he could drown in them.
She never spouts platitudes. She never says she's sorry. Neither of them are, for the things they did during the war, the consequences that they brought down on their heads.
That's all this is, he tells himself, lying in bed at night after he's seen her into her own house. This is consequence. Nothing more.
Night Two-Hundred-and-Eighty-Five
It is one evening in late August where they are approaching the place where they part ways like a river forking into two, and he doesn't want to go back to his house where his ghosts reside, unquiet and deadly and terrifying, so he slips his hand into hers and she looks at him, slow and unsure, but then her fingers curl softly around his.
Suddenly, the prospect of the ghosts really isn't so frightening after all.
Night Three-Hundred
One night, she's not there. He stands and waits for her in the orange glow of the street-lamp, clenching and unclenching his fingers. A part of him is screaming at him to go home, to go to bed, because Pansy Parkinson will be here in the morning to help him look at getting his fortune back, but he's in too deep and he can't go without seeing her, without feeling her warmth at his side, her small hand held tightly in his.
It's midnight before she comes, hurrying towards him with a coat thrown on inside-out.
"Where've you been?" he asks, his voice harsher than he'd like it.
She sighs. "Deadlines. Bloody deadlines. We're going to have to take the shortcut tonight, I've got to be at work at seven tomorrow."
He's selfish. He slows his pace so they have more time, but she is distracted, muttering about paperwork and her stupid bloody boss. He knows it won't be long until she bursts out with it. Hermione Granger is never very good at keeping her feelings in check.
"Tell me," he says as they pass under the shadow of the church steeple that rears its head towards the sky.
"My boss," she says without looking at him, "Has decided that the papers he gave me for next month are actually needed tomorrow. He knows I haven't started on them because I've been busy with this other case, he knows that I work myself to the bloody bone, and no, he still says, Miss Granger, I need those papers otherwise I'm afraid you'll be demoted. Well, he didn't actually say that, but I got his meaning! He's an absolute bastard and such a creep and I don't know why I put up with him…urgh!"
He forces himself not to smile. "I could help, if you like?"
"What do you know about sport?" she asks glumly, and he stops her.
"Granger, I didn't play as Seeker on my house team for six years for nothing."
When she smiles, it's like the sun appearing from behind clouds, and she nods. "Thank you."
He presses his lips together and shrugs, and she leads him back to her house, to the kitchen with a battered table and uneven flagstones with mounds of paper scattered like a whirlwind around the place, and she sits closer than she has any right to, explaining how the laws for this and that work, and he can tell in her voice that she'd rather be doing anything than working for the Department of Magical Games and Sports.
"Why don't you do work you enjoy?" he asks as they near the end of the interminable forms and reports.
"The departments don't want me since I fell out with Harry," she says.
"Why the hell is that? You're a hundred times more intelligent than that git."
She gives him a look, and he knows he's overstepped the line. "I think it's time for you to go," she says, and he doesn't pretend that it doesn't hurt when she shuts the door with a snap that feels far too final.
Night Three-Hundred-and-Sixty-Four
He hasn't seen her for sixty-four nights and it's driving him mad. He waits every night by the lamp post as the air gets colder and autumn leaves fall in cascades of orange and red fervour, but at dawn he's alone as he trudges back to the house just in time for Pansy to Apparate in and tell him that he's not sleeping enough, he's not eating enough, how is he going to gain respect for the ancient name of Malfoy if he goes on like this, but he doesn't care.
Hermione. Hermione.
September is dying to give October life when he finally sees her again, hurrying down the street by the church and he runs to fall into step beside her, not saying a word, barely daring to breathe, and wondering how the hell the Mudblood Granger has gotten under his skin in such a way that those sixty-four nights without her were the kind of torture that makes you scream until you can scream no more.
She doesn't look at him until they're standing in front of her house, the falling-down cottage with the overgrown front garden, and then her eyes meet his and there isn't anger, or anything he was expecting, but longing staring out of them. He puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn't push him away. He leans down, and she rises up on her tiptoes like a bird about to take flight, and then they're kissing like shattered glass, all broken edges and sharp corners, and she's warm in his arms as she kicks the gate aside and turns to unlock the door, and heat is pooling in his stomach as though it's lava. Hermione. Her-mi-o-ne.
Before he even knows it, they're up the stairs, scattering a trail of clothes like breadcrumbs and she's tugging him onto the creaking bed, and he knows this is the way the story was always meant to end, this is absolution, her freckled skin and the smell of soap and honey, her legs wrapped around him, holding him close.
The sins that always weighed on his mind like lead are gone, and all he can think of is her, her closed eyelids, her flushed cheeks, the way she gasps his name.
He knows that as she opens her eyes, as brown as wonder, he is saved.
Dawn
When she wakes in the morning, they are tangled together, limbs twisted like vines and faces almost touching on the pillow. She blinks, and then he is watching her, eyes as grey as a dove's feathers and a lazy smile pulls insistently at his face.
They are not meant to be together. This is only a result of circumstances beyond either of their control, but Hermione doesn't care as she traces patterns on the skin on his shoulder, as the soft yellow and pink light floats into the room like a dream. Everything is a result, and everything has a consequence. It's a result, that she fell in love with him, and the consequences will be beyond what she's ever thought about before, but she-is-in-love-with-him, and she finds she doesn't care.
The nocturne has ended. It's time to step out into the light.
A/N The other little Harry Potter oneshot. Please review if you can - I'd love to hear from you. N xxx