Draco slowly became conscious of a sense of satisfaction surrounding him like a blanket. He felt incredible, both exhilarated and exhausted, like he'd just won a quidditch match. He felt—as though he had been shagged within an inch of his life. He could feel it down to his toes; the release in tension throughout his body. It had been ages since he'd had sex, not since—
He became more conscious.
He had had sex.
There was a sated and tender sensation that could only be the result of a night of frenetic coupling.
Sex.
Which should have been completely impossible, given that he had been imbibing enough libido tamping potions to chemically castrated a giant.
And there was only one person who had the power to burn through them.
He opened his eyes and found himself tangled up in the arms and legs of a slumbering Hermione. Blurry memories from the previous night slowly began coming back to him. They felt strange, removed from him, like viewing another person's memories through legilimency.
He wasn't exactly surprised. Once he bit her, sealing the bond had only been a question of when. He'd assumed that if he awoke it would be because she had come to him or his magic had reached a point where it couldn't be contained. Either way. The bonding had been inevitable.
He stared at her, savoring the sensation of her body pressed against his. She was a very cuddly sleeper if the octopus-like manner in which she was entwined around him were any indication. He could feel the warmth of her steady breathing against his chest.
The magic of their bond was thrumming happily between them. Set in stone. Tied to their very souls. If he closed his eyes he could feel her heartbeat through it. The relief of feeling her safely alive in his arms made him shudder.
The panic of experiencing her dying had nearly driven him mad.
Standing in the WRA celebration party he'd felt the bond suddenly become confused and muddled and then she'd disappeared from Diagon Alley as her consciousness slipped completely away. Without the bond he would never have been able to track her to the unplottable house she'd been hidden in.
He suspected it might be a trap, but he could feel her growing fear and couldn't wait. His instincts to protect her overrode any Slytherin calculation he might ordinarily have made.
It had been a mistake. Almost soon as he tore through the wards he knew it had been a mistake. They had been waiting for him. He'd barely crossed the threshold of the house before Hermione's fear spiked dramatically and she was dying. It was like his sense of her was being sucked down a whirlpool.
Who ever it was, he suspected they hadn't wanted to kill her. The timing was too precise. They wanted Hermione mostly dead by the time he got there, so that there would only be one way for him to keep her alive. The puppeteer who had been moving more and more aggressively to make him to bond Hermione had finally checkmated him.
Draco pulled Hermione against himself firmly. The relief of having her safe and in his arms was enough to make him weep. He wanted to kiss her deeply on the mouth, and then gradually across her entire body so that he could memorise every inch of her beneath his lips. He wanted to make love to her, slowly, the way he'd always dreamed of, rather than the animalistic mating frenzy it'd been last night.
The memories of it remained hazy, but his recollection of thrusting into Hermione's body as she lay spread out under him, seizing with pleasure; that was vivid.
He grew hard.
And the more he tried not to think about it the more he began remembering. The breathy moans as he pulled her bra away and fondled her perfect breasts. And the way she had pulled him down to kiss her, hungrily, her irises blown wide with arousal as he slid inside her. The arch of her back and the way her fingers had tangled in his hair when he tasted her. The way she has peppered open-mouthed kisses from his jaw down to his cock, her tongue flicking out and dancing over his skin with every kiss. And the sensation of her hand, gripping him, guiding him inside her as she rode him.
Draco felt ready to explode. His burgeoning erection was poking up against her thigh and he was almost certain that if he shifted just slightly he would slide into her sweet, velvety warmth. His eyes rolled backward in his head at the thought.
He tried to think of anything but how tight and wet she has been... The taste of her... The sensation of her clenched around him…
He fought back a groan.
He would not take her.
She'd already had sex with him, Merlin only knew how many times, because of a mating imperative. He was not going to touch her again unless she consciously wanted him to.
Which was unlikely to ever happen. So his body might as well hurry up and accept it.
He tried inching away from her but she gave a frustrated huff and then proceeded to press even more of her naked body against his own. She slid her thigh over his cock and wrapped her leg around him more firmly causing him to end up nestled right between her legs.
Fucking hell.
The universe hated him.
There was nothing else for it. Loath as he was to do it, he had to wake her up. The situation was not sustainable. As much as he was dreading the conversation they would then have, he would rather do that than continue to lie there in a state of semi-heavenly agony waiting to find out the precise limitations of his self control.
With a sigh he rested his forehead gently against hers and then pressed a small kiss against her temple.
Then he slowly extricated himself from her cephalopod-like grasp. She hummed and sighed slightly as she began to stir. He could feel her dawning consciousness in the back of his mind.
Her eyebrows knit together and she stretched out giving him an excellent look at her breasts and flat stomach in the daylight. Her eyes cracked open and she looked up at him.
He slid further away, trying to give her space as reality set in. But before he could get far she reached out and clasped a hand around his wrist.
"Where are you going?" she asked, her voice was fuzzy with sleep.
"I—wasn't sure how you'd feel about my being here," he said, staring at her like a deer trapped by a lumos spell.
"Stay," she commanded, managing to use her bossy tone even half asleep. She tugged him back down against her. He followed orders, gingerly lying down next to her, trying to make sure his erection wasn't anywhere near her invitingly nude form. She snuggled up against him with her head resting on his chest.
"Just give me a minute to turn my brain on the rest of the way." She yawned and then closed her eyes again.
All in all, she seemed to be taking everything considerably better than he'd expected. But, perhaps that was because she wasn't fully awake yet. It might change once she had more time to think and reality set in fully—
"Stop overthinking." Hermione interrupted his thoughts without opening her eyes. "I can feel you worrying."
She poked him slightly in the ribs.
"Overthinking things is supposed to be my job," she added.
"You aren't angry with me?" he asked quietly, not able to hold the question back any longer.
"About bonding with me?" Her large, doe-like eyes opened and she looked up him shaking her head slightly, a tangle of curls cascading around her face. "I told you to do it."
"Right." Draco said cautiously. "But you didn't exactly have many other options at the time. And that was my fault."
"Why?" She demanded, with her eyes narrowed. "Are you responsible for what Pansy Parkinson does?"
He stared at her in shock.
"It was Pansy?" he choked.
"Oh. Yes. I thought you knew, already."
"No. I hadn't really had time to think about it." He admitted, his mind was awhirl. Looking back, noticing the many clues in hindsight.
"She's in love with you, you know."
Yes. Draco did know. He had tried to ignore it. He'd thought that Pansy would prefer it that way. He'd thought she'd started to move on.
"I—" his voice died. What could he say? That he should have worked harder to protect her. That he had trusted Pansy when he shouldn't have. Apologies couldn't fix it.
"She said she could live with you loving someone else, but not with you dying. That she didn't care if you'd hate her for it or decided to try to kill her," Hermione told him.
Draco instinctively hugged Hermione closer.
"I will kill her," he swore.
Hermione stared up at him, studying his face for a minute before asking.
"Draco, if I hadn't been dying, if there'd been any other way to save me, would you have ever told me?"
"No." He admitted in a whisper.
Hermione sat up and, seeming aware of her nudity for the first time, pulled the sheets up over her breasts as she looked down at him.
"I don't understand," she said, a faint tremble underlying her tone, "why would you do that? All the time we've worked together, we could have been moving toward this intentionally. Why? Weren't you willing to—were you really going to just let yourself die? Pretend to go to Asia and I'd never hear from you again?"
The tremble had turned into a wobble by the time she finished. Draco was quiet for a minute.
Then he began.
"I watched as you were tortured, Granger," Draco said in a flat voice. "In this house. I stood and I watched you scream. I just—stood there. I didn't- you were lying on the floor of my drawing room and my aunt was—and I didn't try to save you. I didn't try to spare you anything. I just—stood there and watched you convulse and scream until—until—you stopped moving."
He breathed deeply and forced himself to look up into her eyes.
"I stood there and watched because, awful as it was, I preferred it be you than me. I watched. I admitted who you were and let my aunt torture you until she couldn't even rennervate you anymore. And then she was going to give you to Greyback, and—I still didn't do anything."
Hermione's face was impassive. She just listened so he pressed on, looking away, studying the canopy of his bed.
"Even before the war started I was the one who tried to hurt you. Just because you were smarter than me I wished you'd die. I did everything in my power to harm you—I thought that if I could hurt you, it made me better than you. But I could almost never manage it. You didn't even care whether I bullied you most of the time, and it made me hate you even more. Until I'd obsess over interacting with you, trying to get a reaction from you. I wanted you to pay attention to me. To think about me as much as I thought about you. And eventually I even felt possessive, that I was supposed to be the only one who could hurt you."
His voice trailed of slightly but he forced himself to continue.
"I don't even know exactly when it started to change. I just slowly realised my hatred and rivalry with you wasn't the same after a while. That I had started imagined myself kissing you to make you stop talking in class rather than hexing you. And I thought it was just a phase, something I was going through because you were forbidden and filthy and I was horny and adolescent. But, it didn't pass."
He met her eyes again.
"I liked you. I had a possessive, obsessive crush on you when I agreed to become a Death Eater, but I still did it; when you were brought to the manor and I told them it was you, but I still did it; when Bellatrix tortured you until you couldn't scream anymore; when they dragged you up off the floor to hand over to Greyback. I liked you then. And I stood there and I would have watched you die if Potter hadn't come to save you with that elf."
He blinked repeatedly.
"Even my father never did anything to you unless it was under orders. And Bellatrix tortured you because she thought you'd broken into her vault. I am the only one who always tried hurt you just because I could. Even when I thought I cared about you, I was still willing to watch you scream if it meant I wasn't. I was always more worried about me. Every choice I made during the war was the easiest way out, the one that kept me safest. That's the kind of person I am. I—am the last person you should ever be bound to. God, Granger—I am so sorry I did this to you."
His voice cracked and he paused, breathing raggedly. He felt unable to look at her.
Hermione was silent for a long time. So long that he tentatively reached out through the bond, almost out of habit, to try to gauge how she felt. But instead being able to glean her emotional state from her subconscious as it had been, it was like reaching out and taking her hand; a mutual interaction. He started and withdrew, glancing up he found her staring thoughtfully down at him.
"When did it change?" she asked softly.
"What?"
"When did you stop caring more about you?"
He looked back up at the canopy again.
"After the war. When I started wondering what the point of it all had been. My family and I had survived and all that seemed to matter was restoring the manor, getting my NEWT's, and recouping the galleons we'd lost. As though we even needed them. And I didn't understand what we had supposedly been fighting for. What was worth killing muggles and muggleborns for. What was supposed to have been better about a world without you in it. Because I wasn't doing anything that mattered. My mother thought it was so important for me to stay alive she defied Voldemort, but I had never tried to do anything that mattered. All Malfoys are supposed to care about are the Malfoys, I'd always believed that it made sense, but after the war it didn't anymore."
He sighed.
"And, I thought that after the war that you'd change. That you'd stop being so bloody self-sacrificing and I could tell myself, 'She was only that way in order to survive. We were all just doing things to survive.' But you didn't change, you kept giving. And it drove me mad watching. I couldn't understand how someone so smart, so unbelievably smart and talented and beautiful could ignore what the world owed you just for being in it and instead choose to help outcasts who would never pay you back."
He paused and forced himself to continue.
"And by the time I figured out it was just your nature to care and give yourself, I was lost. I wanted to figure out how you did it. I thought, if I could understand, it would show me a path to find some kind of redemption. Not for the sake of the Malfoys, but just personally, to make up for—everything. I had no idea it was even possible to bond with you. By the the time I realised, it was too late."
He glanced at her and but she still wasn't betraying anything through her expression.
"So, I thought, here's my chance to be Granger-like and sacrifice myself for something because I care about it. But—even then, I couldn't stay away from you. And you were so frustrated and sad at the Ministry. I thought if I helped you pass the WRA that it would make up for some of the ways I'd hurt you."
Reaching over he gently grasped her wrist and turned her arm upward to expose the slur carved into it. Then he lifted up his left arm and laid it beside hers. The dark mark was stark against his pale skin, while the crudely carved letters on hers remained twisted and puckered slightly, still angry and irritated-looking from whatever spell had been used to make it permanent.
"The reason I was never going to tell you was because I was sure that if you knew, you'd try to save me. Once I realised what I'd created between us, I knew that the only thing I could truly do to redeem myself would be sparing you. Freeing you from the taint my family and I would cause. I knew you wouldn't be able to make yourself say no. So I decided for you. I'm not supposed to be someone you save. I'm a coward. A selfish coward who was willing to stand and watch you be tortured and killed—There is no set of circumstances where you'd deserve to be bound to someone as awful as I am. I wish there had been any other way to save you. I just—want you to know, I am so sorry, for everything."
He fell silent.
There was nothing left to say. It was almost a relief to have finally apologised. To have finally said everything he had wanted to—
Except, she was only there, hearing it, because she had bonded with him.
He'd failed to spare her.
And he didn't know what he could possibly do to fix it.
Hermione's right hand tentatively reached over and brushed across the dark mark, slowly tracing along the outline of it. He flinched slightly and she stopped.
"When I heard you were going to Asia," she said quietly, not looking up at him. "I thought about how relieved I should be about it. I thought, I'd finally be free of all your looming over my desk and insulting my hair and telling me how awful and exhausted I always look. But—all I could think about was how much I didn't want you to go. Not because of the reasons I told you father, about postwar efforts and all that, but just selfishly—I didn't- want you to go. And I couldn't understand it at first. But when I thought about it, I realised that our past didn't matter to me anymore."
She looked up from his arm and met his eyes shyly.
"Somewhere along the way, when we were working on the WRA, I stopped thinking of you in terms of school and the war. I saw you as my colleague. Someone who was as smart as me. Who I didn't always have to explain my reasoning to. Someone I could trust to take on some of my work without worrying they'd get it all wrong. Someone who could balance out my good intentions with pragmatism. I didn't know how much I'd leaned on you, how much I'd relied on your ability to support and enable me until I thought about the tremendous chasm that would be in my life when you were gone."
She was fidgeting with the edge of the sheet now. Twisting it and smoothing it under her fingers, her voice slightly shrill and hurried as she nervously kept speaking.
"When I thought you were leaving—I felt so awful. I thought—maybe I had driven you away. That you'd decided you couldn't bear to stay in Britain because of people like me—who were never willing to fully trust you, or forgive you for mistakes you'd made in the past. And I realised how unfair that was. That I'd taken stupid things like your comments about my hair and assumed they meant that nothing about you had changed since the war because—because—it was familiar and comfortable to be prejudiced against you."
Tears welled up in her eyes and started slowly trailing down her cheeks. She blinked rapidly and kept fidgeting with the sheets.
"I'm so sorry." Her voice shook. "I'm so sorry that I didn't bother to realise how much you'd changed. That I didn't ever tell you or even realize that I'd forgiven you. That I made you think that you were so irredeemable that you deserved to die—"
Her voice cracked and her shoulders trembled.
Draco couldn't help himself. He sat up and gathered her into his arms.
"Sweet Circe, Granger," he chided. "You do not owe me any apologies."
"Yes I do." She sniffed into his shoulder. "So let me get through it so I can get to the part where I'm very angry with .you."
But she kept clinging to him for several more seconds before composing herself and sitting back to look at him again.
Draco stared at her cautiously. The conversation had not gone in the direction he had expected and it had his heart racing with the a mixture of hope and fear over where exactly it would end.
Maybe she wouldn't send him away entirely. Maybe she'd let him stay in her life, just a little. Perhaps she'd let them still work together. The fear that she would never want him near her again, that she'd never forgive him once she realised the extent of the bond, was like an icy tearing sensation in his heart. But daring to hope she wouldn't was almost as terrifying.
"Draco," she said, staring him in the eyes. "I forgive you for how you were and what you did at school. And for your part in the war. I wanted to tell you that. It was part of a goodbye speech that I was writing in my head for after the WRA passed. That was why I wanted you to come to that party. I wanted to tell you. That I was sorry for the way I treated you. That you didn't deserve to have been doubted by me like that. I wanted to tell you that you were incredible person to work with. I don't think I'll ever encounter anyone else as talented as you. Looking back over the last several years, I don't have words to express how much I appreciate that you worked with me to pass the WRA."
She drew a sharp shivery breath.
"I was going to tell you, that you are a truly remarkable person. And I hoped that only good things would happen to you in Asia. Because you deserve to have only good things happen to you after—after everything you have done to try to redeem yourself and your family since the war."
Draco stared at her with wide eyes, feeling as though he was shattering inside from sheer disbelief.
"That," Hermione said, straightening, "is what I wanted to tell you when I thought you were moving to Asia. But, seeing as you weren't actually, I have few other things I need to say to you now."
Draco braced himself.
"First of all," she glared at him. "I cannot believe you obliviated me!"
She finished the sentence with a shriek of outrage.
"I am so angry with you for that I am barely restraining myself from slapping you. That you violated my mind in that way is truly reprehensible. I cannot believe you tampered with my memory." She was hissing with fury. "If you ever do such a thing to me again I will never forgive you."
"I am sorry, Granger," he whispered. "I didn't know what else to do."
"Literally anything but tamper with my memory," she snapped back sharply. "You should have started there and moved forward."
Draco stared at her at loss.
"I thought it would hurt you the least," he said. "If I had died you would never have known. If I'd let you stay aware it would have haunted you for the rest if your life. You told me that."
"So are you saying I asked you to obliviate me?" she said icily.
"No," he said meeting her glare. "But you didn't know what to do. We talked. I can show you the memory if you want. It was a stalemate. You were there because you couldn't bear to think you'd somehow be indirectly responsible for my death and I refused to have you to bond out of obligation. There was nothing else to discuss. If I could go back I would do it again."
Hermione glared at him angrily but there was a softening thoughtfulness behind her eyes.
"I was just there because I felt guilty?" She asked stiffly.
"More or less. You wanted to see if there was some arrangement we could work out." Draco said tightly. "And you were angry because I never allowed our relationship get closer. Because, you said, that maybe we could have been friends, that maybe you might have been able to care about me, if you hadn't always just seen me as someone who was using you."
"That's what I said?" She paused and asked, "Malfoy, why didn't you ever let us become friends?"
He stared at her steadily.
"It was easier to not give myself any false hope. I was afraid that if we became friends and I let myself think was a chance and told you, you would feel like I'd done it all to manipulate you into agreeing to it."
"But—this was your life we are talking about. I don't understand why you weren't willing to risk anything," she argued.
"Because it was also your life," he retorted, "Trying to come up with a way to survive was always secondary to making sure I didn't do anything that would make you realise what had happened."
"But being friends wasn't going to make you give in. It would have just given this a chance to develop more naturally." She gestured between them.
"You don't have any idea, Granger," he ground out, "how hard it was. The process of bonding on my end is hard to even explain. I didn't mean to involve myself in your life. I just literally couldn't help it. I meant to stay away. I tried to make myself leave Britain, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'd find myself lurking around places you might be. I'd always rationalise some excuse for it, that I wasn't there to try to see you. I'd pop in at the Ministry because I had to say hi to Blaise or Theo and then happen to miss their floors and end up in the Magical Creature Department. And later I'd nitpick over over every section of the WRA so I could drop by and ask you a question about wording. Whenever I noticed you were upset I could not stop myself from going to find out why. The extent that I involved myself in passing WRA was the best I could do not to involve myself in your life..."
Just thinking about it made him shake.
He continued, "If we'd been friends you would have smiled at me. And invited me to have drinks. And hugged me with those suffocating hugs you always are giving Potter and Weasley." He realised he sounded weirdly jealous as he said that last bit. "And I wouldn't have been able to hold myself back if you were like that toward me. It was hard enough to manage when you were constantly shooting me suspicious glances and disapproving looks."
Hermione stared at him with an expression of frustrated resignation. Her face had a pinched look of disapproval that was highly reminiscent of their school days.
"You know," she grumbled at last, "for someone who spent so much time complaining about Saint Potter, you certainly have done an excellent job adopting his martyr complex."
He rolled his eyes.
"Unlike Potter my martyr complex is very contained. It extends to you and no further."
Hermione blushed and fidgeted the sheet in her fingers.
"Draco," she said nervously. "There's—something I wanted to tell you."
"What is it?" he asked carefully.
Her expression was hard to read, both embarrassed and determined. He wasn't sure whether he was supposed to brace himself for what she was about say.
"When—when I thought you were leaving. Realizing—that I'd forgiven you and valued you as a colleague wasn't the only thing I realised. I realised that I cared about you. That, the idea that you were going away made me feel ill, because—"
She paused and bit her lip.
"Because I felt like you belonged to me. And when the WRA passed, and we were coming toward each other in the crowd, I was going to kiss you. Because—I think, I've been falling in love with you. And I just—didn't realise it until a few days ago."