Their love is not star-crossed. It's not pure and holy like a white flower unfolding delicate, crinkling petals in the early morning light, it's not the love that long-ago minstrels sang of to long-ago kings. It's not what Romeo felt for Juliet, what Tristan felt for Isolde.
Their love is heated looks arching across crowded rooms, insults that make each other's blood rise, passion hidden behind tapestries and in locked classrooms, his hands twisting in her lion's mane of hair and her nails leaving long, red scratches on the porcelain skin of his shoulders. It is a dangerous game they play, a swaying tightrope that they walk because they know if anyone finds them out, it will be a death sentence.
After Dumbledore's funeral, she excuses herself, walks to the edge of the Forest, a lonely figure with the sun picking out the gold in her hair and a flock of ravens croaking overhead, black against blue like an old painting. In the fringes of the trees, he is waiting, pale, handsome, face set into grim lines, the night-time to her day, the winter to her summer.
They stare at each other across an invisible abyss that widens with every silent second.
She is the one who jumps first.
"Why?" she asks.
"I had no choice."
It's not an apology – he never gives apologies – but it's enough. She's in his arms before she knows it, kissing him fiercely like she's trying to devour every molecule of him before the inevitable going-away. He stumbles backwards under her weight and then they're on the floor in a tangle of ripped robes and uneven breathing with twigs digging sharply into his back.
The question bubbles over her lips before she can stop it.
"When will you be back?"
He looks at her with angry regrets burning in his grey eyes. "Don't you get it? Even if I come back, we'll never be able to be together. You and I are on opposite sides of this war, Granger. Nothing will ever change that."
"You could desert them." She is serious. He rolls his eyes.
"After I've killed Albus Dumbledore? Use your brain. I know you've got one. How the hell would that work?"
She is anything but weak, but she can't help the tremble in her voice. "I don't want you to go."
In answer, his lips are on hers again, hot and furious and demanding, and he takes her there on the forest floor amid the liquid shadows that teem all around them in harsh gasps and clawing hands, and Hermione doesn't want to leave this moment, not in a lifetime, not in a thousand years, not in the infinity that lingers at the edges of the universe.
When they finally break apart, there is something bittersweet in his expression that is usually turned down in a sneer as he helps to adjust her robes.
"Be safe," he says, suddenly. "Don't let the two dolts get you killed."
"I won't," she tells him, for once choking down the irritation at his way of referring to her two best friends. She knows it shouldn't annoy her – Harry and Ron have been his enemies since the very start – but she's learnt from bitter experience that everything Draco Malfoy does is designed to get under her skin.
He leans forward and brushes his lips against hers in a tenderness that has never belonged to them, and then he's gone, and she's alone in the hallowed quiet of the Forbidden Forest, wondering if she'll ever know that kind of alive again.
The grand finale comes a year later. Hogwarts is in ruins, piles of crumbling stone and rusty blood pooling on the cracked flagstones, yet still the battle rages. He is towards the outskirts of the hall, surrounded, firing off jinxes and hexes and curses in a maelstrom of coloured light, and she is fighting her way through the crowd, Death Eaters crumpling in her wake.
He sees the wand raised, the spell shouted, feels the light flash towards him, twists around with a shield charm rising to his lips but suddenly a head of curly hair is in front of his, and Hermione Granger collapses to the floor before him. He's on his knees before he knows it, but the light is fading from her eyes and there's nothing he can do, nothing he can say but hold her close as her last breath whispers past his face.
A scream tears its way cruelly up his throat, and he buries his head in her shoulder, spears of pain shattering the heart he thought had turned to stone years ago. This is worse the Cruciatus curse, worse than guilt, worse than remorse…Hermione…no, NO….
He doesn't register the spell that hits him in the back. One moment he's bent over her prone body, and the next he's spiralling down towards a peaceful blackness, and she's waiting, hand extended and a smile on her face.
In life, he was a murderer and she was a saint, and there's no way in hell that he should've fallen in love with her. But he did.
So he takes her hand, and doesn't look back.
A/N I'd love to hear what you think. N xxx