Disclaimer: I don't own these characters. I just like to mess around with them.

Fifteen Octobers

Chapter One: Memory

To someone who didn't know her, she might have disappeared within that clamoring and heavy thing that most people call insignificance. She might have been swallowed up into a vast, indifferent world.

It was because of many things: she had lost her beauty; she was either too afraid or too uninterested to flaunt her overwhelming intelligence anymore; she was not even the sort of audacious being that shocked you with its impudence. She was only herself, mangled and stripped to pieces after a war. And society couldn't handle her like that; they could not fathom that the girl might only be a girl, and nothing more.

She was not that tall, and the curves she'd had before the war had hollowed into a slim strength that generally unnerved people. She had high cheekbones that were too pronounced to be considered pretty anymore. She had enough wit to fit easily into crowds. She had a soft enough laugh to make you feel welcome until her dark eyes frightened you away.

But the problem was that she wasn't captivating. She could walk into any room, smile, and the people in it might smile back, but she was forgotten when she left. The room did not ache with the sudden absence of her; the people in it did not regret that she had decided to leave. They simply forgot her.

Draco Malfoy hadn't been working with the Aurors for very long when they decided that he would be partners with her.

He'd have liked people to think that he joined with the Light because he was "reformed" or some such bullshit, but he'd really only done it because he had been too much of a coward to kill someone instead of being killed himself, and so he'd had to face the repercussions. Or maybe, as she had said to him a long time ago, maybe he hadn't been a coward when he'd dropped his wand and maybe he'd actually been doing something decent. But the truth of the matter was that Draco didn't really care about whether or not his weakness equaled moral decency; he'd had to run either way.

The Order had found him and his mother on a chilly night in the summer, when the grass was heavy with unexpected rain and it'd soaked straight through their cloaks. His father had still been in Azkaban at the time; the Order tried their best to get him out of there, but there wasn't much they could have done. In the beginning, he'd hated them for that, but after working with Aurors, he realized just how difficult that task would have been.

It was humid the day they told him that they needed information. His sweat had been trickling underneath his collar and sliding between his shoulder blades and all he'd wanted to do was stand up and run. He didn't, and they'd placed him in a small office at the back of the department, shoved him in with the filing cabinets and broken desks and coffee-stained maps and ordered him to start writing down any information he had on the Death Eaters.

They placed her in there with him and it was the first time he'd seen her since school had ended. They never said anything to each other; she watched over his progress in a maddeningly silent sort of way, occasionally pointing out the fact that he'd need another piece of paper soon. And then they'd yell at each other over the most trivial of issues and Draco would feel a little more at home. She waited for his list to be complete and then she would take it to Potter, who would run it by the other Aurors in a meeting and then people would be assigned to positions in the field.

Sometimes, she went. Most of the time, she stayed behind because Potter ordered her to. Draco pretended not to notice, but he saw the flash of bewildered pain in her eyes every time Potter did it, and he would wonder, every time, why or how Potter didn't see it, too.

He figured that Potter ordered Granger to stay behind to keep an eye on him but that didn't really make any sense, because there were plenty of other Aurors in the office whenever he was there. Weasley had a habit of popping into his room once a day, peeking through the door and giving a grunt of approval at seeing him hunched over his desk. Draco wanted to spit in his face whenever he did that because Weasley damn well knew that he had nowhere to go.

No, he had a feeling that Granger was left behind because they didn't trust her out in the field. But that didn't make any sense either, because Hermione Granger had already proved herself to be capable. Hadn't she fought at the Ministry? Wasn't she good at keeping a cool head when people needed her to? He'd heard the occasional gossip that circulated in the office: that she'd cracked a little after seeing those Muggle girls tortured a few blocks down her street or that sending her parents into hiding had somehow messed up her head. He always wanted to snap at them when they said things like that, he wanted to haul himself into this crazed tirade in defense of Granger but he never said anything, because he was Draco Malfoy, and he wasn't going to be caught sticking up for Hermione Granger. He didn't know the real reason why she was stuck behind so often. All he knew was that she was thrust into his office in much the same manner as he had been, unceremoniously dumped there because they had no idea what to do with her.

In the beginning, all they did was research together. She was always bent low over the papers on her desk that she'd somehow managed to cram into the corner, the cabinets near her head overflowing with charts and lists and maps and old wrappers from the croissants she'd eat while she worked. He would doodle several images of Potter falling off of his broomstick on his notebook, one hand cradling his head in boredom, occasionally lifting his eyes to glance over at her, making sure she couldn't see his artwork and scold him for it. She never noticed, and if she ever had, she'd made no mention of it. They rarely spoke; the only times they talked was to ask the other what they thought about this strategy, or this motive.

It was during a meeting when he first heard someone say that they were partners. He saw her face snap up from her notes, eyes looking sick, her lips pursed into a solid line of disapproval. It had shocked him too, to say the least. But he figured that was what happened when you had to spend that much time with someone in a cramped room; people assumed that you were working together and that you were supposed to stay that way. So he and Granger were partners for the rest of the war, just because some stupid Auror had made it his business to label them as such.

He still hadn't liked her at that point. They still bickered in that way that had people rolling their eyes and telling them to grow up, but they continued to go at it. He figured it was for normalcy's sake, a sort of monotony that made sense and would always make sense, because he and Granger were always supposed to hate each other.

They hardly spoke outside of the office. Once, a year into being partners with her, he saw her down in the café where many of the Aurors dined when they found the time, and for some reason, she asked him to join her. He didn't go off on her about Mudbloods and purity and how he wouldn't eat with her even if he was forced to, because he was too old for that sort of thing and because he knew that blood didn't really matter anymore, had probably never even mattered. He'd seen his blood against his pale skin and he'd seen other people's blood against it, and it always looked the same. That blood pumped through veins and made people wake up in the morning and breathe when they saw the sunlight and Draco knew that everybody, including Muggles and Halfbloods and Mudbloods, lived the same way.

No, Draco Malfoy did not tell Hermione Granger this, but he figured that she knew just by the fact that he said yes, he'd join her for lunch. And so they talked for that hour, awkwardly, because they still didn't like each other that much and because they probably would never get over the fact that he was still the boy who had called her a Mudblood to make her cry and she was still the girl who had smacked him across his face in Third Year to spite him.

If they did speak outside of that cramped room, it was only when Potter finally realized that he needed more men out in the field and had assigned the two of them to operations. After that, there were a lot of nights spent curled up in tents, making foggy circles in the air with their breath and trying to warm up without using magic, because everything could be traced. There were also many nights spent talking, similar to that day in the café, but without all of the discomfort that comes with an unspoken apology. He found out what books she liked and what music she still listened to. He told her a few stories about growing up knowing he was a wizard and she told him what it was like to live half of her life believing she was a Muggle.

Whenever they talked like that, he went to sleep feeling somewhat lighter, although he didn't really understand what that meant or if it meant anything at all. He just wanted to know if she had forgiven him for what he'd done at Hogwarts – he was already quite positive that Potter and Weasley hadn't – because he really wanted her, out of all of the people they worked with, to think that he'd become a better person. He never asked; he knew that she would just shake her head in the way that meant he'd won the argument before it had even started and that she didn't want to broach the subject. She did that a lot near the end, but that was probably because she'd been trying to forget so many things.

After the war, they didn't speak to each other. He wanted solitude and he was pretty sure that she was traveling somewhere so she could allow her mind to let go of all of the memories from the war. Draco knew that she traveled to Wales and bought the most remote piece of land she could find. He sold the manor when his parents passed away: they had died during the war, died one night when he'd been waiting in the tent with Granger, holding his breath and hoping that no one heard the twigs they'd snapped when they'd rushed back to huddle in the center of their beds. Potter told him after they'd come back, in that somber tone, running his hands along the back of his neck. Draco had thrown all of their papers into the fire, upturned the waste bins, chucked the paperweight at the window and he still hadn't felt like anything was enough. She'd waited for him to stop and when she'd turned those eyes on him, he'd cried into her hair for an hour before she finally let him go.

So he'd sold the Manor to the Order, told them they could use it as Headquarters; he'd laughed at the irony of it over a few drinks. From across the table, Granger's face was red with liquor and her voice was slurred. Draco had stood outside of the manor the last night that it had been officially his and he'd stared up at the windows, picturing the Christmas when he'd gotten his first toy broomstick, his five year old self whirring around on it while his mother apprehensively told him to slow down, his father telling her that Draco would be fine as he grabbed her hand and pulled her onto his lap.

He told Granger that story one night while she was bustling around her flat, picking up tea bags and tossing them in the sink. He'd been drunk and he'd been coming over to Granger's house a little too frequently, because he no longer had a place to stay. She told him that night that he could live there, in her guest room, and he wouldn't even have to talk to her if he didn't want to. And he'd asked why he would want to do that, that silly business of not talking to her if he actually wanted to, and she'd blushed, because they had gotten to the point of being something like friends.

He woke up the next morning to see her slumped over the side of her sofa, her hair frizzing at the top of her head and he'd smiled a little bit. He could still remember that morning and he didn't really think that there was a reason for it, except that it was the morning when he realized that he liked Hermione Granger as a person, and not just as his partner. It didn't scare him; it didn't freak him out or make him want to vomit. He just knew it, the way he knew that Weasley would always hate his guts or that Potter would always try to save someone if he had the chance.

She woke up just as he was about to leave and asked if he wanted to move some of his things into the guest room, probably because she knew that drunk people normally say things they don't want to say and she was testing him. But when he said yes, she'd smiled so widely that he could practically hear the skin around her mouth stretching beyond its limits.

The war ended around the time he moved into her flat; he remembered waking up one morning to see his things out in the hallway and a small note written in her handwriting announcing that she was moving out. He didn't ask her why because he knew that she wouldn't tell him and because he was pretty sure he already knew why; the funeral was meant to take place in a few weeks. He still felt something painful settle into his chest that morning, a heavy knowledge that he wouldn't see her again.

Draco bought a small cottage on the coast of Scotland, a place with dark floorboards and bright windows. He liked it well enough, but he was often bored and idle, and when he was like this, he tried to recreate memories of the two of them. He was lonely, he figured, but it was also because Hermione Granger had probably been his only friend.

He could still see the smirk that would fall onto her mouth whenever he couldn't figure out something that she'd already solved a few minutes before. He'd always chuck part of his eaten apple at her, because he was always eating apples and because he knew it grossed her out to know that his spit was on the fruit. And whenever he sat down at his kitchen table to split an apple into halves, he half expected her to be sitting across from him, a book folded onto her lap and her hair tied up in some horribly messy bun, lazily reaching out a hand so he could hand her the other half.

It'd been five years since the war had ended, and Draco Malfoy still went down to the local pub to celebrate. He didn't like to go to those big parties that had everyone drunk because they didn't want to remember the people they'd lost. He liked the system he'd created; go down to the pub when the date of the war's end rolled around, get shitfaced, stumble home, and fall asleep in his own bed with his limbs draped all droopy and heavy on the covers.

It was the same tonight as it might have been any other night: the same obnoxious Muggle music that he couldn't bring himself to like (maybe he just wasn't a hip-hop sort of guy), the dim lights, the proverbial smells of beer and stale bread and cheap perfume. He took his seat at his usual spot, ordered his usual drink, and stared off into the crowd, watching the other people that frequented the place. They seemed different tonight, new and refreshed, as if they had suddenly shed their past lives and left them to wilt in the earth.

He was lifting his arm up in a solitary toast when he noticed her standing by the bar, eyeing him with curiosity. She was holding onto a drink that looked like it might knock her unconscious if she drank half of it. She was simply watching him, her lips pulled up into this confused little smile, laughing at him for toasting no one in the room except himself.

For a brief moment, he considered that it wasn't her, that the woman standing by the counter was just some stranger that happened to look like Hermione Granger. But that was one of the stupidest things he'd ever tried to convince himself of, for who else had that hair, or those eyes, or that defiant tilt of the chin?

She turned away from him then and sat down at the bar to enjoy her drink, her fingers snaking around the glass, and when she brought it up to her lips, she sighed a little as the alcohol burned down her throat. He remembered that she had always liked the warmth she derived from drinking and how shocked he'd been that Hermione Granger, of all people, liked to be drunk. She'd hit him on the shoulder when he announced that and she'd told him she wasn't that much of a prude, that alcohol reminded her of laughter, of a noisiness only found amongst friends.

She glanced over at him again, and her lips pulled back into a smile, eyes still distant, her expression one of confusion and possibly flirtation. But he couldn't see anything like clarity on her face, nothing like recognition. If he saw anything at all, it was because he was hoping he would see it. Anything at all would have been preferable, even if she looked like she'd seen him at a train station and forgotten him the next day.

And that knowledge hit him in the fucking stomach, hit him so hard that when he tried to suck in air, he found that his lungs would not respond. And she was still just watching him, her eyes moving across his face, as if she were memorizing the lines of his jaw, the shape of his eyes.

He stared morosely into his drink while she sat there at the counter, waiting for him to respond to her, to lift his eyes and wink or do something that he figured she wanted him to do. But he couldn't, not even for just some sick twisted pleasure, not even to fuck with Hermione Granger's head and confuse the shit out of her and make her run back to wherever she'd hidden herself after the war. He didn't have the stomach, because there was not even the slightest trace of memory in her eyes, and he was hit in the chest again by the sheer weight of it, the realization she didn't remember him.

Knowing that felt worse than many other things he had experienced. It hurt to the point where he could see the bar go all blurry and out of focus and he heard himself mutter the beginning of a curse before he managed to stop himself and he felt that ache more acutely than he felt his own heartbeat. To know that he hadn't meant enough to make her want to keep it, that all his memories of her fingers so fucking close to his weren't really anything at all; they were just meaningless snapshots ripped out of his life. Something like pain, or maybe it was just blatant awareness, painful, awful awareness, was biting into his limbs and his lungs were shrieking with a throbbing sort of anguish.

He'd thought about doing it, too, thousands of times; he'd gone over the possibilities so thoroughly that he had lost sleep because of it. And it bothered the shit out of him, knowing that Granger had been the one to give up and not him, because he was fucking Draco Malfoy, and Malfoys always took the easy way out.

Draco pulled his eyes off of the table, ignoring the scorch marks he'd made, and he looked over to see if she would still be studying him in that maddening silent way. She smiled and he didn't want to look at her anymore, hoping that she could be merely an illusion, wanting the edges around her to ripple like a mirage, so he could look away and glance back and she would have never been there at all.

He stared into the bottom of his glass and slammed it on top of the table, satisfied when he saw a crack develop in the glass. She looked up when he walked out. She said nothing, just questioned with that tilt of her head, to which he responded by slamming the door. The shop bell clinked against the glass.

Outside, the night air was damp and cold and he could smell the sea. He breathed in deeply, grass and sand and wet wood assailing his senses, and he set off for home.

He remembered walking into the room after the raid. He remembered the blood on the walls and the carpet; the half eaten dinner on the table, the ripped magazines. He remembered the four of them lying in a scattered heap of broken and ripped flesh, their faces turned toward the door, their arms reaching out for the window, as if expecting help. He remembered the way she had stared at the floor for a moment, her hands dangling uselessly by her sides. Hermione never stopped moving her hands and that was probably why Draco remembered it all so vividly, because her hands were always moving, pushing back her crazy mane of hair, tapping impatiently on the desk, waiting for his report. But at that moment, when she'd been staring at the blood spattered walls, when she'd been watching the room as if it would tell her its secrets, her hands had just hung there, slender fingers curving grotesquely to the floor. And he had wanted so badly to run, to sprint away from the house and from her and from that image of her friends' hands curling tightly in rigor mortis.

Without saying a word to him, she noiselessly began cleaning the room. She siphoned the blood off of the walls, repaired the furniture, chucked the food into the waste basket. He watched her, unable to help, unable to say anything because he had always been the sort of person to muck up condolences and come off as an arse. She stepped around their bodies with a delicate sort of apathy, ignoring their presence as if they were unwanted house guests. She finished mending the cushions in the couch and putting the pictures back on the wall and then she sighed quietly, a soft, defeated sound that scared the shit out of him because Hermione wasn't supposed to do things like give up.

She didn't look at him when she made her way to the stairs. He didn't know if she wanted him to follow, if she expected him to crawl up behind her and murmur soft words in her ear and tell her it was fine. But Draco knew she didn't want that; he knew that she wanted him to scream in her fucking face and tell her she was a pitiful Mudblood and that she deserved this. He knew that she wanted to be able to hit him across the face the way she had in Third Year. So he followed her up the stairs and found her in a room that he presumed had once been Ginny's: a picture of her and Potter was taped to the dresser's mirror, both of them waving at the camera, smiling a little shyly. Hermione was on the bed, lightly gliding her fingertips over the sheets, eyes glassy and fixed on the dark wood of the floor.

He was glad that there wasn't a sign of a struggle in here, that the place looked like Ginny had been happy the last time she had slept in it; maybe she'd even been smiling at a remembered joke when she first heard the Death Eaters downstairs.

He walked over to the bed and sat on the opposite side, waiting for something, for an order to go back to Headquarters and ask for backup, maybe, or for one of her useless facts that annoyed the shit out of him because she always mentioned them in situations like this. He waited and waited and her hands finally stopped caressing the sheets and Draco thought that this was it; she would tell him to get his arse back to the office, she would let him have it and scream in his face until her mouth was cracking around the edges.

But there was only screaming, a horrible, pained crying that had her shoulder blades rippling underneath the layers of clothes and skin and the sound of her sobs echoing in the emptiness of the house. Draco almost told her to be quiet, as if the bodies downstairs could hear her and yell up the stairs for her to calm down. Awkwardly, he placed a hand on the space between her shoulder blades and he could feel her whole body shuddering with the shock of finding out about it like this.

Draco knew that she blamed herself. When he had his hand on the fabric of her coat, he almost said that it wasn't her fault, that there was nothing that could have been done and that no one could have known. But he knew that shit like that didn't help, because his parents had already died by then and he still blamed himself for it.

She cried for only a few minutes, those huge, shaking sobs that haunted him for weeks after, because it seemed as though she was remembering herself, remembering who was with her. For the rest of the night she only sat and stared at the blankness of the walls. He rubbed the sockets of his eyes with the heels of his palms.

"Hermione?"

She didn't move her eyes but he saw the way her shoulders tensed at the sound of him saying her first name. He continued to grind his palms into his eyes, ignoring the way her name sat in his mouth and scorched his lips. He couldn't stand sitting in this house anymore; the feel of it was enough to make his skin writhe in discomfort. It reeked of death and sorrow and he wanted to bury those bodies out in the backyard without any pomp and circumstance and just walk away and pretend that they hadn't seen it at all.

He looked down a patch of fraying fabric and started pulling at the threads.

"Who were they?"

Draco didn't know why he'd asked her that because he knew the answer. He'd placed them there in that rotting house when he'd been working with Granger in their tiny office, trying to find places to hide members of the Order. He knew that it was Longbottom and one of the Patil sisters and Weasley's little sister and that strange girl with radishes in her ears. He knew that, but he asked anyway and she turned her eyes on him, her face twisted into fury and hatred.

"Fuck you, Malfoy."

And then she had leapt up from her spot on the bed and she was hitting him, clawing at his clothes and smacking him across the face and yelling at him, screaming those three words over and over again. He grabbed onto her hands and pinned them to her sides. She tried to spit into his face but missed when he turned his head. She was crying again, wailing, her body going limp in his hands. She pried her hands away from his grasp and grabbed fistfuls of his robes, trying to shake him, but fell forward without doing anything.

"I should have saved them." Her voice was barely above a whisper when she managed to get her shaking lips to form the words but it shattered the stillness of the room.

He shook his head with impatience and he could feel her falling apart against his chest, his chin brushing across the top of her head.

"No one could have. It was too late. We got here too late."

At his words, she drew away from him, her face momentarily captured by anguish, the lines around her eyes like cracks on glass. "I should have been here," she told him with conviction, her hands still grasping the front of his robes tightly. But she seemed to realize how stupid it was to wish for something when the damage had already been done, when it was so blindingly clear that nothing would bring them back and she turned back to the stare at the floor, pulling her body away from his.

He resumed picking the threads.

If there was anything that Draco understood, it was that he was never meant to be a hero. He wasn't supposed to run alongside Potter and save children from buildings and have the press shout questions up into his face about how he'd managed to become so fucking brilliant. He wasn't supposed to be the poster child of morality, wasn't supposed to be an upstanding young man with a heart of gold and a purity of mind. He had never fit into any of those categories; he wasn't ever going to. And yet he was stuck in a house that was bellowing at him to become the hero, to stand Hermione up on her feet, wipe off the tears tracking down her face and tell her what needed to be done.

Draco stole a quick look at her, wondering what she would do if he started acting like Potter. She'd turn and laugh, probably, laugh the way she had when Weasley had eaten some piece of candy that had convinced him he was a cat, and he'd meowed and purred and slinked over the desks all day. She'd laugh in his face and tell him that acting the hero was Harry's job. Maybe she'd snap out of it if he tried that, maybe she'd pull her shoulders together behind her back and tilt her chin up and tell him to go downstairs and do something useful.

She'd already settled into her familiar mask when he looked at her, posture small and straight. He knew that she was waiting, thinking, trying to come up with answers, her mind overworking itself, desperate to make sense of this. That was the problem with death, though, that it never made any fucking sense, that the people who died were normally the ones who didn't deserve to.

How could it be that someone like Longbottom, bumbling Longbottom who knew fairness like it was printed on his hands, was slashed to strips of skin because he was defending people? Why was Ginny dead when all she'd wanted was to marry Potter and have his babies and live her life the way she'd wanted it to be since she was ten? Why the fuck had these people died, when people like his aunt were torturing Muggles for sport and kicking them in the ribs when they begged?

Maybe Hermione was thinking about the fact that she could have been sitting where they might have been moments before they heard the stomping of boots downstairs. Maybe this was where one of them first saw that pivotal flash of green light. Maybe when she'd been staring at the floor downstairs, she'd been staring at the same spot as they had, watching one another's blood pool onto the wood.

Her voice startled him when she spoke; he had almost expected that she'd forgotten how to talk.

"We should send them back to Headquarters."

And she pushed herself off the bed and walked over to the door, pausing for a moment at the mirror to look at the photo, Ginny's smile suddenly like a vicious taunt.

"I took this photo, you know."

Draco cleared his throat and nodded.

"They had just gotten together."

He nodded again but she wasn't looking at him and she didn't seem to be waiting for a response. Her voice was flat and constrained, tightly hinged and shut tight, a Pandora's Box of grief.

"Will you tell Harry?"

She was looking at him then, the shocking hollowness of her face brought out by the thin moonlight streaming through the window.

"It'd be better if you told him."

She looked away and her face fell back into the shadows, body turned toward the picture. There was no acknowledgement after that; she just walked to the door and crept down the stairs, found the bodies where they had been and tried to clean them up as best as she could.

Draco followed her again and stopped when he saw her levitate them out one by one. The moonlight fell onto the surfaces of the furniture, settling into the cracks on the tables, the corners of the room. The wind outside whispered; branches scratched against the windows. The room itself looked eerie, even more so now that it was clean. It was startling, after becoming accustomed to dirt, blood, and the raw stench of death, to see a house that looked so achingly normal, as if the two of them had returned home from a vacation, anxious to rest.

They both walked out into the backyard and she unwrapped a Portkey from inside her pocket, a battered keychain that had a small picture of Rome printed on the surface of it. She shakily penned a note explaining what had happened and pinned it to the pocket of Longbottom's shirt. Carefully, she held the Portkey in between a piece of cloth and made sure that all of them were touching it. Her hands trembled as she touched their cold skin and when she dropped the Portkey and the cloth, they disappeared from the grass.

She was vomiting in the dirt when the words first slipped out of his mouth. "People erase tragedies, Granger."

He had never seen her look so exhausted when she lifted her head to meet his eyes, her hand wiping away the film on her lips.

"Well, I don't."

They'd Apparated back to the office to find Potter blasting things off the walls and yelling at the Aurors who were trying to calm him down. Hermione had walked up to him and placed those hands on his shoulders and Potter fell apart, and the two of them had cried until dawn broke across the sky in the city.

End Notes: Definitely does not end there! Does anyone have any ideas as to why Hermione doesn't remember Draco? If you do, message me or leave your guess in a review (that's a sly hint if I ever saw one). I hope I'll be able to keep you guessing enough so you keep coming back! Next chapter should be up sooner rather than later, but this is the time when college doesn't really slow down for us fanfic writers. Thanks for reading!