Ended up a lot longer, and possibly quite a bit better than I thought it'd be.
My contribution to the Dramione fandom :3
It's later than he thought, Draco realises with dismay when he steps out of Gringotts. And not simply dark-late, but late-late – a quick Tempuscharm tells him that it's nearly eight thirty.
Calm, he tells himself even as his footsteps speed up, and not for the first time he curses the impracticality of the wizarding robes which swish awkwardly and cumbersomely around his feet; even as he's painfully aware that not long ago, he would have scoffed at the idea of anything in the Muggle world being in anyway superior to his.
Things change.
Right now, Malfoy or not (and it's odd, that as soon as he learns that Malfoy means nothing, the world starts believing it does) he wishes that he'd thought to wear the Muggle trousers that fill his wardrobe at the Manor now.
In fact, he wishes he didn't have to come at all. But after the…the War…the goblins have been only borderline polite to him, and they refuse straight-out to even mention the existence of his parents.
"Mr Malfoy."
Draco flinches, he actually does; but then the voice registers and he turns, painting a fake smile on his face. "Mr Nott," he says with a smile and a sinking heart. "It's good to see you again," lie, "you're out late."
Theo's father, a slender, tall man who somehow (Merlin knows how) managed to escape the fervour of the anti-dark-pureblood movement in the year and a half after the war
(Till his mother was found by Potter, and Draco doesn't know what she looked like because Granger and Weasley stopped him from going anywhere near her and he never hated them so much but after that it was over because when Potter says something has to stop of course it has to stop)
After the war ended.
Nott shrugs. "Visiting some friends," he replies and the careful lack of emphasis on the word friends tells Draco way too much. "We're meeting in a bar in Knockturn – would you like to come?"
"Ah – thank you, sir, but I'll have to pass," dear Merlin, Draco is actually going into hysterics at the idea that Nott could seriously believe he'd just walk down Knockturn after everything that happened. "My first appointment for tomorrow is early." That is true, for a given value of early. 8:30 am would be early but since Draco forces himself to sleep by 12 and even the best Dreamless Sleep potions seem to wear off him in five hours at most…it's not.
Nott shrugs, seemingly unconcerned, but then he frowns. "Ah yes," he says slowly. "Your…business." There's a hint of distaste in that, and for a moment Draco holds his breath. "Rather…unconventional, isn't it?"
Draco exhales. Distaste, yes, but nothing beyond the ordinary reaction when a pure-blood of his standing actually works. "Something to do," he shrugs, as though it's a hobby and not his life now.
"Well," Nott says finally after a few more torturous minutes of pleasantries, "I'd best be off. Mr Malfoy," he nods, before brushing past Draco.
"Mr Nott," Draco murmurs, and he waits till the man is long gone before letting out a shuddering breath of relief.
Muggle London used to disgust Draco. Now, he soaks in the laughter and noise of the streets as he trudges through crowds of late-night shoppers. It's Thursday, he realises, and he can't help but smile.
He could Apparate with ease; could find a dark alleyway and discreetly vanish, because he's moved beyond strutting through the streets, hood back and impervious to the cold.
Somehow, life has become about before and after, and he used to think that the line was drawn when the war ended but it wasn't. The war meant nothing, because it took till three years after the war to realise that thewar wasn't a war.
It was life.
Life for humanity, and after he realised that and started slowly forcing himself to learn about the community he was really in, the one with streets and infrastructure and millions of people rather than thousands, Draco learned something he wishes he always could have known.
Muggles, purebloods, Mud- Muggleborns, half-bloods; it doesn't matter.
Life is life and it never stops taking.
Draco only realises that he's reached the outskirts of the central city when he hears the scream; the scream and the laughter and the hums of magic, and oh please, no, he thinks but he's not going to stop, no.
That's what he's going to do, going to keep walking as fast as he can away from the noise and then Apparate because he can't listen to this and then he has to recognise the goddamned voice.
The last time Draco heard Granger speak, it was four years ago and he was too busy calling her a Mudblood whore let me see my fucking mother you cunt to give a fuck what her voice sounded like; but there are some things that stick, and it galls him that how she sounds is one but-
Aunt Bella, carving into Granger's arm, and tears rolling down her face but Draco isn't watching, he can't, because this isn't what was supposed to happen-
"Bloody hell," he mutters, pulling out his wand and breaking into a run. Almost as an aside, he casts a quick Transiguration spell on his robes, barely faltering as the material shifts and breaks and remoulds itself, stiffening into denim around his legs.
Three seconds, that's all he allows himself when he finally finds the right street, broad but mysteriously empty (Draco knows with a sickening jolt that the police are going to be here tomorrow, and it'll be another inquiry into unexplained deaths that the Ministry is going to have to explain away to a wizarding public that is sick of everything).
One: he counts them. Eight, assailants, dressed in robes (advantage) with masks that look enough like Death Eater masks (bastards)that he's not going to feel bad about putting them down.
Two: Granger, and it takes him a while to identify her because it's one of the first times Draco has seen her with her hair, smooth curls rather than a bundle of frizz, actually tied up (practical finally). Pressed against a wall (clever as always), eyes wild but determined, and two wands in her hand – double-casting, Draco realises and tries not to be too impressed. One exudes a shimmering light (Protego) and the other moves in complicated patterns, as her lips move. She's either not listening to or ignoring the jeers of "Mudblood bitch" and "where's Potter when you need him, huh?"
Three: Fuck this.
Draco raises his wand, casting a silent "Concelo" before biting his lip. There's still time to Disapparate out of here; who knows? Maybe the sound of him leaving could afford Granger enough to escape herself.
Aunt Bella Mudblood screaming not what was meant to-
"Crucio Amplio Subverso," he whispers, staring at the masks.
It doesn't work as well as Draco might have hoped because while all eight stop and shudder, only four of them fall to their knees and scream.
But it's enough, and as Granger's Protego falls away in time with his Concelo, their eyes meet long enough for him to raise an eyebrow and for her to grin, viciously, expression eerie and inhuman in the light of the street-lamps.
"Reliquum Magicus Amplio Subfio!"
And she's been holding out on me, he thinks, because now all eight of them are screaming, loud and agonising (and don't think of Aunt Bella, this lot deserve it).
She meets his eyes across the street and Draco tilts his head questioningly when she steps towards him around her attackers. "We'd better go before it wears off," Granger says quietly.
"Alright," he agrees. He's polite now, so he waits for her to Disapparate.
Granger doesn't; merely places a hand on his arm. Draco very carefully doesn't look at it like it's some sort of insect, doesn't brush it off with distaste. "What?" he asks shortly, choosing brusqueness over confusion because he might not want to walk by and let her die, but he doesn't like being touched by her.
In the dim glow, he sees her flush and look down, the other hand going to her neck (slender, pale, is it as soft as her hand feels?) and pulling her collar aside.
Something like pity arises within in him briefly (Draco clamps down on it hard because no, he won't feel that) at the sight of the tattoo, symbols glimmering with a dark light that pierces through the haze of the night.
There are a million things he could asksay; how, why, who did you piss off, good riddance, this isn't meant to happen anymore, fuck this-
But he doesn't.
"Address."
"Thanks," Granger mutters – no, murmurs, because there's sincerity in a murmur and there's sincerity in that one word.
"No problem," he replies, turning away.
He's stopped by a hand on his arm, where she'd touched him earlier in the night and this time he can take advantage of the turn to throw her off, to step away and leave and never have to see her face and what it reminds him of again-
Her lips brush against his, and his wide, startled eyes see the soft length of her lashes as she steps forward.
Run, his mind is telling him but his mind isn't controlling his body right now; it seems to be thinking by itself, moving by itself because his arms are tight around her waist, her hands are raking through his hair and shooting sparks of fire and pleasure through his brain and straight to his groin-
"Mr Malfoy is to be waking up now, sir!" and Draco rolls and jerks up at the same time, sending himself crashing to the floor.
It's not till he's wolfing down a hastily-made sandwich in the kitchens (which used to be filled with house elves but now there's no one to cook for and he doesn't want to see them, doesn't want to remember how he used to laugh as they tortured themselves) that Draco realises it's the first time he hasn't woken up by himself, four hours after the potions wear off and the nightmares start.
Today he sees seven people, performs two procedures and only has one walk-out, but he's exhausted.
Not that he shouldn't be; it might have been a light day, time-wise, but he's learned that even half an hour's consultation will inevitably leave him drained.
When Draco started doing what he's doing, he thought the procedures would be the hard part; and they were, because for a long time he didn't know if they were possible (but he dug through piles of books and it was, it is, and he has to do something to fight the nightmares, even if they're never going to let him go).. But it's what comes before, the three pre-consultations that the Ministry insisted upon – that Draco himself insists upon – as a condition of him opening up business.
Nott was right; he doesn't need the money. If he did need it, there were most probably a myriad of different, easier (less painful)ways of getting it.
Maybe this is penance, he remembers thinking to himself after the seventh enraged attempt to kill him left Draco with strangulation marks around his neck (and he could have healed them but he didn't).
But-
Suddenly, the wards sing out, humming through his veins; not in warning, and so after the initial shock Draco lets himself relax into the couch, feeling the fire soak into his skin.
"Winky!" he shouts out, request (no more commands, to no one, ever) implicit as he tries to figure out just who would be here at this time.
No more patients, not as far as I know – Blaise came by last month so he won't be around for three more – and…
He clamps down on that last because Draco hasn't seen his father in two years and nothing's changed
(and isn't that always the problem?)
Hush, he tells himself, pushing himself to his feet as Winky opens the door to his private living room.
"Mr Malfoy, sir, it is Miss Hermione Granger who wishes to see you, sir,"
He falls back onto the couch.
In retrospect, he shouldn't be so surprised.
But he is, because he can't understand how they've gotten from a slap in third year to this, five years after the old world ended and the new began, as gut-wrenchingly tedious and brutal as before.
(Where this means sitting across the small dining table that Draco has in one of the many rooms in his wing of the Manor, tentatively and awkwardly mouthing at food that Hermione Granger has cooked for him.)
(He doesn't know whether to be more surprised at the fact that he's eating Granger's cooking, or the fact that it's good, some sort of rolled-up lasagne that he's too afraid to ask the name of.)
She makes a small sound, a cough or something that seems more an attempt to dispel the thick, repressive silence than a genuine need to clear her throat, and Draco barely restrains himself from flinching.
"This is good," he tries feebly.
Granger smiles, slight but sincere.
"You don't have to lie," she says softly. He didn't realise it back in the street the night before, but now he does; her voice has changed, lost its arrogance (confidence) and fervour, become quiet in a sense that doesn't change with volume. "I'm not a particularly good cook," she continues, and her lips quirk before the smile falls away altogether. "Ron used to…"
Shifting in his seat uncomfortably, Draco racks his mind for something to say to that – but before he manages to come up with anything, she shakes her head.
"Thank you for last night."
He shrugs, taking advantage of the mouthful of food in his mouth to give him time to think up a response. "No problem," he settles for. "I was in the area."
Draco winces almost as soon as he says that – over-casual at best, crass at worse – but she laughs slightly. "You're not going to ask why?"
Why what is painfully obvious; not just why she was being attacked, but why she couldn't Disapparate, why someone had tattooed binding symbols onto her collarbone with raw magic.
For lack of anything better to do, he shrugs again. "It doesn't matter, Granger. Eight on one isn't fair, and they didn't look like Aurors."
(Not that that means anything anymore.)
"Thank you, Malfoy." It's the first time she's used his name since the last time they met, a year ago. "And it's Hermione," she adds, almost as an after-thought.
Draco looks up to meet Grange- Hermione's eyes across the table, warm and hazel. He doesn't realise he's staring till he finds himself comparing her eyelashes to those of her dreamself – with a start, he looks away.
"No problem," he mutters again, taking another bite of the food. It doesn't feel like it's enough, so "and Draco, please."
The silence stretches, but it's not quite as uncomfortable as before.
"How is your work?" he hears her ask politely and his eyes flicker up.
"It's…" Alright feels too passive, good feels not-true, interesting feels trite. "I don't know," Draco says honestly, because he doesn't. "It's something I do, and I'm glad I'm doing it. I don't know if I enjoy it, but-"
"But it's what you know you need to do," she finishes for him, corner of her mouth twitching slightly. "I understand."
He believes her. "Sorry," Draco says, "I don't actually know what you do." The admission makes him feel almost ashamed, even though he's sure Gran- Hermione doesn't expect him to have kept tabs on her, not the way the newspapers have kept tabs on him.
"That's fine," she replies with a shrug of her shoulders, raising one hand to flick hair out of her face (and that's something that's changed almost too much; too much, but enough that he can think of her as Hermione without wrong calling out to him.) "I'm a historian," Hermione tells Draco. "I'm working on the war."
No need to ask which one, and she does understand.
She comes by the next week, on the Friday night.
Draco manages to catch himself before his mouth opens and makes some caustic comment about her lack of friends. He's sure she had others, that weren't Potter and Weasley-
Harry, he can't be Potter anymore because Draco hated Potter and he can't hate the crazy-eyed boy who did finally crack, just like Draco used to say he would and he wishes he hadn't, wishes that it hadn't happened after Weasley died trying to save his best friend, the Golden Boy-Who-Lived to spend days in catatonia, and this is how the world keeps going, because heroes never last-
But those friends aren't the ones that mattered.
"You should eat lunch here on Sunday," Draco tells her when they stand from the chairs in the study where they've been playing a game of chess, talking about the latest Ministry raids on Muggle families with magic-born children (the Dark Lord's gone, but they can't risk a five year old child exposing their world and so sometimes a family loses its memory, sometimes a house burns down and there are no survivors and a missing set of bones.)
Hermione smiles. "What do you want me to bring?"
"How does it work?" she asks Draco, when they're both two and a half glasses each through two bottles of Chardonnay he had Winky drag up from the cellars. "You know, the…" she gestures somewhat vaguely with her hand but he's around as tipsy as she is and so he understands perfectly.
He sets down his glass, turning and leaning towards her on the couch (nottooclosedon'tworryaboutit). "It's like-" and he is tipsy, Draco notes with a sort of numb, hilariously horrified amusement. "When you, you know, lose someone," Mother, "it just leaves a hole."
Something about that sounds odd, and he frowns; but Hermione nods, too quickly, and even in his alcoholic haze of contentment Draco feels a pang of remorse for having reminded her of Weasley (and Draco doesn't look anything like Weasley does Gra-Hermione only find freckled redheads attractive or was that Granger because Hermione looks at him sometimes and-)
He very carefully takes himself away from that line of thought. "I have to touch their souls, right. Have to st- sti- sew them back up again. Can't take the memories, that's illegal," and that's what all the Ministry fuss was about till Draco performed the procedure on a volunteer from the Auror Department. "But I, I, I fix the hole," he says gravely, "the hole in the soul."
That rhymed, Draco thinks, and that's hilarious., till Hermione asks him softly, "can you fix mine?"
A glass crashes to the ground, smashes into pieces.
It takes Draco one painfully clear, rage-filled moment to realise it's his own.
"Is that why you've been coming here?" he asks as he meets her eyes, suddenly not feeling tipsy at all – please don't be true, please-
She looks away.
"Oh," he says hollowly. "Oh."
He makes to push himself to his feet, though he's not sure where he should go – why he should go, when this is his house – but she grasps him by the arm, tugging him down again.
"Only at first," Hermione tells him quietly. "And not really. I'd have made an appointment, but…" She bites her lip. "I like talking to you," she whispers, and it feels like a confession.
She's serious. She's telling the truth, because Granger could never lie and neither can Hermione.
"I think you're the only friend I have," he says finally as he sits back down. Her eyes widen briefly, and she smiles hesitantly at him.
Draco smiles back.
"I miss him so much," she whispers into Draco's ear later, another two glasses down and halfway through the descent into sleep. He stiffens, but she doesn't seem to notice because she continues, "but you help."
They're not tipsy, but heading there (this time on vodka), mid-afternoon in the sun room overlooking the Manor's gardens. "It matters," Hermione insists, soft hazel gone a fiery honey (and is that possible?) as she raises both hands in exasperation.
Draco snorts. "Why does it matter?" he asks. "Why does it matter when we just do the same bloody thing over and over again?"
"That's why it matters, Draco," and he never gets sick of her saying his name like that, devoid of anger and hate and everything but frustration and an underlying fondness and affection. "Because maybe one day we can do it right."
Maybe one day we can do it right.
"Utopia," Draco whispers, and the girl sitting opposite him frowns.
"Pardon?"
He shrugs. "I've been reading about Muggle history," he says in lieu of explaining himself directly. "Did you know that at the start of the twentieth century, it was meant to be some new era of peace? No more medieval barbarism, no more division."
"And fourteen years later, the largest war." She raises an eyebrow. "I'm the Muggleborn, Draco, I know this."
"And then after that war," he keeps talking, because he needs to get her to understand why it's like this, "they say it's never going to happen again, right? They have the, the Army of Nations or something-"
"League of Nations."
"Right. And then it gets bad. And then it gets worse. And then we're back where we've started." He bites his lip, trying to figure out how to say what he wants to say. "This," he says fumblingly, "this is utopia. This is it. This is us, making Grindelwald, making the Dar-" Draco swallows, and the words tumble out faster, "Voldemort, this is us killing the people who saved us – Dumbledore, Mad-Eye, Black, Lupin, Weasley, Po- Harry," and that one will always hurt even though he doesn't know why, "because they're better than us, they make the world better, and that can't happen. It won't. This is it."
He's panting by the time he's finished; he stitches up souls for a living, feels life run through his fingers, but right now he feels like he's pulled his own soul out, bared it open for Hermione to examine and judge.
"You're right."
Draco flinches, because that's not what he wants to hear. He opens his mouth to speak, but she leans across and places a finger on his lips, silencing him.
Her skin is warm and soft, and he wants to taste it.
"You're right," she repeats, drawing his attention back to her. "I knew that when I was forced to have this." Her other hand rises to pull down her shirt and show the binding symbols, dark-light against her pale skin.
That's something else he has never asked her, Draco realises. How she got that, why.
"But…" A hesitation, and he thinks she's about to pull back. Panicked, he leans forwards into her hand, grasping her arm in a way that he realises mirrors every time she's taken hold of him. It feels like he's holding onto a lifeline, clinging to the only thing keeping him above right now. It feels desperate, pathetic, good.
She's never wrapped an arm around his waist before, though.
Her eyes flicker down and back up, impossibly wide.
"You were saying?" he tries, wincing internally at the deepness of his voice, an octave or more below its natural pitch.
She pauses again, before sighing. Something seems to flow out of her, something that leaves her arm and waist relaxed and pliant under his hands. "Farenheit 451," she says softly. "It's a book, a Muggle book. At the end, one of the characters is talking about phoenixes. About how we are phoenixes, because we burn and rebuild and burn and rebuild."
When Hermione pauses for a long moment, he lifts his hand from her arm to brush her cheek softly, tilting his head in silent inquiry (because he could talk around her finger but he's not, he's giving Hermione her chance to bare her soul to him, open and bleeding.)
"But we aren't," she finally murmurs. "And the author, he knows it. Because, 'we've got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.'" She smiles up at him as she moves her hand from his mouth – moves it to cup the back of his neck as she slides closer, closer, till they're nose-to-nose.
"We're those people, Draco," and her words are sweet, intoxicating, almost as addictive as her breath against his lips, almost as wonderful and realas the feel of her body in his arms.
Just before he kisses her, he murmurs, "and we'll remember."
She smiles into his mouth, and it is beautiful.