August

tick tock tick tock

Draco put the ring away. He took it back to the vault—not in an act of symbolic permanence, but mostly to prevent Hermione from finding it in one of her bouts of reorganization. She had a tendency towards filling the rare blank spaces in her planner with persistent productivity, a restless requirement that she organize a random drawer as she waited for the kettle to boil, or dispose of expired soaps and shampoos while her shower water warmed. As time passed, as she grew more comfortable in the home they shared, she ventured out of her spaces and started inserting herself into his, too.

The books on your nightstand weren't in any sort of order. I alphabetized them for you.

Several of your potions ingredients were nearing their expiration dates. I ordered replacements for you.

And so on and so on: tiny incursions on his lifestyle that should have irritated him. Instead, he found it oddly comforting—endearing, even—that she cared so much about the state of his life that she took the initiative to make it better. Though, it didn't bother him that his books weren't alphabetized. He kept them in order of publication date, as potioneering advances tended to build upon each other. He didn't have the heart to tell her such a thing when she'd kissed him on the cheek and told him she'd alphabetized them instead.

With such a relentless organizer living in his midst, he returned the ring to his family vault and temporarily set it out of his mind. Instead, he focused his efforts on figuring out what requirements their relationship lacked that would propel them from not ready to ready for the next step.

"Are you ready?" Hermione asked, stepping out of the bathroom as she struggled to clasp a necklace.

He'd been leaning against the fireplace, prepared for their dinner at the Potter's for the last several minutes as she fought with her hair. He'd stopped offering his assistance in the high humidity months—her irritation with her frizz ran deeper than logic, and she'd threatened to hex him once when he offered her use of his smoothing potions should she fancy them. She did not, it seemed, fancy them. So fucking stubborn.

He met her halfway between the bathroom and where he stood, taking over the job of clasping her necklace. She sighed, allowing him to help as she turned within the circle his arms had created around her. She pulled her mass of curls to the side; he failed to suppress his chuckles as her hair almost prevented the clasp from meeting at the base of her neck. He pulled her curls free when he finished, lips brushing her exposed neck as the opportunity presented itself so easily, so freely, just there.

"We should go," she said. He hummed against her skin. "We shouldn't keep a heavily pregnant woman waiting," she added, leaning against him nevertheless.

He pulled back. "I suppose you're right. We wouldn't want you to lose your godmother status for such an offense."

She turned: smiling, laughing, happy. He watched as she walked to the Floo, grabbed a pinch of powder from the mantel, and tossed it in the grate. For that short series of seconds his life felt entirely unreal: a wild, unbelievable world wherein the sound of Hermione Granger's laughter sent warmth blooming from the center of his chest, filling him with an impossible supply of Patronus-worthy thoughts.

Draco shook himself. If he looked so directly at such a perfect gift for too long, analyzed it too closely, he worried he'd find the cracks, the backdoor to the wards that would let the nightmares back in. He'd had far too many nightmares in his life. He much preferred the dreams.

He let her pull him through the Floo, to Harry Potter's home, where the dream continued, beautiful and undisturbed.

"Don't you think you're cutting this all a bit close?" Draco asked over dinner, sipping his wine and lobbing a smirk in the Weaslette's direction, as close to an insult as he could bring himself to sling at a woman solidly nine months pregnant.

She narrowed her eyes instantly.

"Look, Ferret. Which of us is the professional Quidditch player here? If anyone is annoyed that my due date is irritatingly close to the World Cup, it's me." She released a breath, winced, and leaned a bit to the left.

Potter mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like, "Me, too," through a bite of roasted potatoes.

Weaslette's gaze snapped to Potter. Draco held back a snort of amusement at seeing Potter in trouble with his wife. Hermione pinched his elbow in what he assumed was meant as a rebuke, but her own smirk forced its way to the surface of her face.

"Don't you dare, Harry James Potter. This child has a vendetta against my spleen. I cannot even express how ready I am to evict him, but I am intentionally trying to will him to wait another week. That way I—not you—can go to the cup after missing last year because you had a huge case."

Potter lifted his hands in supplication, fork still in one hand, a potato falling pitifully back onto his plate.

"Well if someone hadn't been so put out that her team didn't even make it into the qualifiers the year before last—"

"Potter," Draco cut in. Perhaps this act of goodwill would satisfy the life debt he owed. "I'm fairly certain there are rules against arguing with pregnant women. Ginny is inherently correct, in everything she says, when she's carrying your child."

The Weaslette burst into laughter across the table from him.

"—used my name," she said between laughs. "What fine aristocratic manners, gods." Hermione seemed to find it funny, too, amusement held in her shoulders as they shook just slightly from the giggling she appeared determined not to give into.

Potter, at his end of the table, grumbled something that Draco couldn't discern over the sound of being laughed at. He rolled his eyes, shook his head, and sipped his Pinot as Potter lifted his voice.

"You ought to be a little more invested in this timing, Malfoy," he said, gesturing towards his wife. "Hermione says you have tickets to the cup, too. Do you think you're going to get her to go with you if Ginny is in labor? Or has just had our kid, her godchild?"

Draco shrugged, draping a casual arm around the back of Hermione's chair. "My friends are going. I'll just spend time with them."

Hermione did not hesitate to smack his leg beneath the table. He'd been expecting it, knew he'd earn some display of her irritation with that comment, and as such, didn't so much as blink when her palm made contact with the side of his thigh. He titled his head towards her, a slow smile spreading across his face.

"You wouldn't really go without me and miss this, would you?" Her question seemed caught between genuine inquiry and performative snark for the benefit of her friends.

He shoved away his disappointment at the touch of doubt he heard.

He indulged in an overly dramatic eye roll, the sort of eye roll that only the likes of Theodore Nott could get away with in normal conversation. Here, with Hermione, it would tell her everything she needed to know about exactly how serious he had been.

"They're your friends, Granger. Although, I'll admit that Ginny has grown on me—primarily owing to her taste in red wine." He lifted his glass in a silent toast.

"Flaunt it some more, Malfoy. My hospitality has its limits. I could give you the swill Harry suggests every time you visit."

He lifted a brow in her direction. She lifted her own right back. Her gaze slipped to the glass in his hand, then to the water in hers.

"What I would give for a Cabernet. Or a Zinfandel. Or that Pinot—just right there." She looked perilously close to snatching Harry's glass out from under him before she twisted her lips into a frown and blew out a breath, sending a sheet of red hair flying away from her face.

In a reluctant, dark, terribly embarrassed corner of Draco's consciousness, he hated to admit that he didn't mind his social engagements with the Potters these days. This particular dinner had added palatability owing to the absence of one Ronald Weasley.

As if willed into existence by his thoughts, Hermione asked about Ron and Lavender.

"—back for the cup? Are they meeting you there?"

Potter nodded, "Straight from America to Italy."

"I wonder if he's going to propose," Weaslette asked with a wistful sort of look at Potter.

Draco didn't like how he tensed: chest, shoulders, neck, back. It took several seconds for him to identify why, and she sat right next to him. The question of Ron Weasley proposing to someone, knowing that he'd once proposed to Hermione, that she'd declined, and that she didn't want Draco to propose, either—at least not yet—sent a tension coursing through him, pulling muscle fibers taut.

He realized that Hermione's hand sat idly, easily, on his leg. Had it been there since her playful slap? Or had she just put it there? Either way, the pressure, the weight of it, didn't so much as shift at the mention of Weasley potentially proposing. She just shrugged at Ginny's question, as did Potter: a quick moment, nowhere near as intrusive as it felt inside Draco's head.

He covered her hand with his, perpetually astonished by the ease of casual touch, of organic conversation, of meals that—even when served by Harry Potter—brought so much more enjoyment than the stark, regimented routine enforced by his parents.

Four days later, Draco sat at his parents' table, a meal meant as a concession before he spent a week in Italy with Hermione. First at the cup, then just together: a trip through the countryside she'd wanted to take for most of her life but had never had the chance.

It seemed polite, if nothing else, to engage in a dinner with his parents, formal and stunted and awful as they were, before he disappeared for a week. Short of the Weaslette going into labor, he intended to accept no owls, respond to no firecalls, engage with nothing and no one besides Hermione and whatever bed they found themselves in, in whatever Italian city they travelled through.

He kept expecting for the tension at the table to ease, for his parents to find something to talk about that didn't touch on any of the varied, forbidden topics between them. But dinner with his parents continued to feel like an exercise in silence, a quiet punishment for having said too much before.

Objectively, the food was of much higher quality than that he'd been served at the Potters'. The ingredients, the technique, all of it technically surpassed that other meal. Yet, he'd enjoyed his experience at Grimmauld Place so much more. Draco almost felt guilty, knowing that the elves had likely worked for hours to pull yet another multiple course meal together, only for it to be consumed in near-silence. It simply didn't taste right. It had that same lingering sourness that many of his experiences in the manor had.

A headache pressed against Draco's sinuses, pressure prickling into pain. He felt stuck on repeat, a strange sense of rolling repetition in the meals with his parents, a routine he once loved. With each iteration, however, they grew less and less palatable.

Narcissa said something about coming back for breakfasts in the future.

"Honestly darling, it does not do to laze about in the morning." She sliced a cooked carrot on her plate, careful, precise movements, as cautious as her words. "One should start the day with a good meal and vibrant conversation."

He watched as she brought the bite to her lips: chewed, swallowed, smiled.

"I'm hardly lazing, Mother. I'm still starting my day with a meal and vibrant conversation."

At the end of the table, out of Draco's periphery, he heard the thunk of silver hitting the table, muffled by the tablecloth. Silence swallowed them whole.

Draco knew both his parents had no misconceptions as to what he'd meant. He'd flaunted Hermione by glancing mention in front of them once again. The passing beats of silence counted the depths of their disappointment. Draco couldn't bring himself to care.

Narcissa diverted, redirected, steered the conversation elsewhere as if they could simply will the Hermione issue out of existence. Draco might have laughed if not for the exhaustion biting at his bones, gnawing.

"And you'll be gone this weekend?"

With a sigh, "Yes. Much of next week, too." Draco dared a glance at his father, seated at the head of the table. "With the match on Saturday, we were planning on spending the rest of the weekend and some of next week enjoying Italy."

Draco saw it, the moment Lucius's comprehension caught on the word we. The muscles around his eyes tightened, knuckles around the stem of his wine glass whitening from pressure. Draco expected no other response from his flaunting, from such a casual, careless almost-mention of Hermione. But it disappointed him all the same. Every time, without fail. He couldn't shake the hope that maybe, this time, the shock would ease, the distaste would waver, and acceptance would sneak in.

Lucius's mouth pressed into a thin line, gaze locked with Draco's.

"I do hope you enjoy Italy," he said with absolutely no conviction. If anything, Lucius's tone suggested that he hoped for bad weather, portkey problems, and a touch of food poisoning.

Draco looked down at his plate. He had enough of that here.

"It's been so long since we've travelled there," Narcissa added, voice overly wistful in what felt like a painful attempt to counterbalance Lucius's tone. "Perhaps we ought to visit again, this winter?"

Many moments in Draco's complicated history with Hermione Granger had been very, very poorly timed.

Meeting her as a child, parroting the things his father said, thinking they made him sound powerful and impressive when they only made him cruel. That memory tasted like regret.

Crossing paths with her at the last Quidditch World Cup he'd attended, just before Death Eaters, his father among them, turned the sporting event into a dangerous political message. That, too, tasted of regret.

Standing in the manor's drawing room, not quite capable of avoiding the issue of her identity, or of doing anything to prevent the terrible pain dealt to her on that day. That regret tasted so sour, so vile, that it never truly left him.

But seeing her Patronus swim through Malfoy Manor's austere stone walls as if they were nothing but a calm pool of water? That tasted of relief, perfectly timed.

The silver otter swam through the air, twisting playfully as it did a circle around his chair before coming to rest in front of him, sitting on Narcissa Malfoy's fine china. Through the semi-opaque silver creature, Draco saw her frown.

More importantly, he felt himself smiling. He could have called the Patronus poorly-timed: interrupting a meal with his parents, making the thing they'd been avoiding unavoidable. But the relief it brought him— the sheer, stupid joy of it—was the most perfectly timed in thing in the world. Until, of course, it spoke.

Hermione's voice echoed through the dining room, reverberations catching on even the farthest corners as her words came out in a rush, too loud, spoken in a panic.

"I'm sorry," she said, through the otter: breathless, beautiful even though he couldn't see her. A nervous, manic sort of giggle followed her apology. He heard her clear her throat. "It's Ginny. She's gone into labor. Harry said the baby is coming fast—I'm heading to St. Mungo's now"—a pause—"meet me there?" The question in her tone, the uncertainty, it hurt.

Silence followed. A new silence, a different silence that sounded of broken barriers and irrefutable truths. The otter didn't dissipate. Draco counted several breaths before—

"I apologize for interrupting your dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy. I know how much they mean to you."

The otter finally vanished.

Draco laughed.

Draco left dinner with his parents almost as soon as the Patronus vanished. He barely spared a second thought for the fact that he would not get to attend the Quidditch World Cup. Still, he arrived too late: delayed by Topsy trying to send food home with him, Crookshanks insisting on being fed the moment he stepped through the Floo, and the incomprehensibly long wait for his visitor's badge. By the time Draco stepped off the lift into St. Mungo's maternity ward, he faced an actual, literal, inconceivable horde of red heads all swarming the corridor outside the Weaslette's room.

The visual disorientation alone set Draco's teeth on edge: so much red, so many freckles. Then there was the noise. Evidently several members of the Weasley brood had already started breeding, populating the corridor with red heads, redhead hybrids, and so, so many voices: talking, crying, screaming. Shoes slapping on linoleum. Sneezing, snotty faces. And then there was Draco, in Italian wool and french cuffs. Bright blond in a sea of ginger.

Well, not entirely a sea of ginger.

Draco stiffened as Lavender threw her arms around him in a quick, far too excited hug. Her blond waves whipped behind her as she turned to announce his arrival to the swarm. Draco would have preferred to maintain whatever marginal anonymity he had when the Weasleys had been pretending he did not exist.

Lavender rounded on him again.

"Ron and I got here not long ago as well—had to grab an emergency international portkey." She smiled, huge and knowing. "Ron didn't believe me."

Draco almost didn't want to ask.

"Believe you?"

"That the baby would be early. The tea leaves said so—certain of an early birth. I told him our trip to New York would interfere. But the shop paid for the portkey because of his work thing so he insisted we take advantage of it." She sighed, not even sounding remotely annoyed.

Draco nearly laughed. Hermione would have had his head for such a thing, and he'd have deserved it.

"They're in the room now," Lavender added. "Ron and Hermione."

Draco glanced at the door surrounded by various loitering Weasleys.

"Everyone else has had at least one turn with them, I think," Lavender said from beside him. When he tilted his head to look at her, she had the most peculiar, expectant sort of look on her face.

"I don't—" he started. "I'm not—I'm just here for Hermione."

As if spoken into existence, the door to Ginny's room opened, and Hermione stepped out. She smiled, looking around, looking flushed and excited and happy. Draco wished he had a camera to capture that look on her face, knowing it showed a very specific kind of joy: new to him, possibly new to her, too.

Her smile, impossibly, grew when her eyes landed on him. He'd been trapped and he didn't even realize it. Lavender gave him a tiny shove forward as Hermione reached out and encircled his wrist with her hands, pulling him towards the door.

Discomfort reared its head, a garrote choking him at the collar. He felt misplaced, out of sync, wrong in the same way he'd felt the first time he'd been forced to associate with Hermione's friends. He'd gotten used to them, but it had taken two long years to desensitize himself to the people who'd once so terribly agitated him. But this sort of moment, such a personal, axis-shifting sort of experience: he had no place in it.

It was like being at the Leaky all over again. For the first time in well over a year, Occlumency called to him, a desperate attempt to escape, to defend, to survive the unsurvivable. Because there could be no version of reality in which Harry Potter had any interest in letting Draco around his newborn child.

He slipped by Ron Weasley leaving the room as Hermione dragged Draco into it. The door clicked shut behind him; he noticed four distinct things.

First, Potter looking fucking exhausted.

Second, Weaslette looked even more exhausted.

Third, they both look obscenely, criminally happy.

And fourth, that wrongness he'd felt had slipped out the door with Ron. Draco felt oddly welcome, and that almost unsettled him more than the alternative.

After a brief moment of shock, Draco locked eyes with Potter, then the Weaslette.

"Congratulations Potters," he said, eyes landing on the small bundle he could only assume was a newborn child cradled in Potter's arms.

Weaslette laughed.

"Have you run out of hair potion, Ferret? You look positively unkempt. Plebeian if I had to put a word to it."

Draco blinked. Then, he narrowed his eyes: child in Potter's arms, Weaslette in the bed.

He arched a brow.

"Have you slept this century, Weaslette? The bags under your eyes might have more carrying capacity than Hermione's little beaded monstrosity."

She held his gaze, a beat of silence, then, she laughed. Draco allowed himself a smirk. Beside him, he heard Hermione sigh. When he turned, she shook her head with a tired sort of patience, but laced her fingers with his own.

She squeezed, a comforting pulse against his palm. Draco squeezed back, realizing too late that he'd been giving her permission.

She leveled Potter with a pointed stare.

Potter did his best to arch a brow back at her, but he seemed to struggle with the expression, everything about his face sluggish and a bit stupid. With a sigh, Potter took a step towards them, bundle in his arms held a little less tightly to his chest.

"Would you like to hold him, Malfoy?"

Draco wondered how many conversations had come to pass between Hermione and Potter in order to culminate in this moment. Potter looked a few seconds from putting his newborn child in Draco's arms after what had only been minimal hesitation.

"No. No thank you, Potter," Draco said, shifting back. He lifted his hands, a kind of defensive posture. "I try not to handle other people's valuables. Liability concerns."

Hermione laughed, intercepting.

"I'll take his turn, then."

And as if it were the easiest thing in the world, Hermione took the child, who Draco should probably start calling James, knowing his name and all. A real name for a real, new person. But very little inside that hospital room felt especially real. From the cohabitating exhaustion and joy on the Potters' faces to the image of Hermione holding a child.

Draco took a cautious step towards her, finally catching sight of the tiny, pink-skinned human in her arms: raw, and swaddled, and so terribly fragile looking. Draco almost reached out, the muscles in his left arm tensing as they prepared to lift and rotate and reach to touch a finger to the impossibly tiny hand flexing open and closed from where it had escaped its blankets.

He felt calm. Strangely, oddly, peacefully so. His eyes travelled from James's face—pink, a bit squished, and not entirely human-looking yet—to Hermione's—awestruck, beautiful, if a little unsure of herself. She swayed, an easy motion in her hips, entirely focused on the child in her arms.

Distantly, Draco realized that Potter had taken a seat beside Ginny's bed and that both of them were watching Hermione, just as Draco did.

His chest panged, something reverberating off his ribs, a longing he couldn't quite place. The way Hermione doted and beamed, staring at a newborn child, struck him with a sense of rightness, so keenly on the heels of the wrongness that had felt so certain mere minutes before. She looked at James Potter as if she'd never seen something so miraculous in her entire life.

And it suited her.

Draco had never thought of Hermione as especially maternal. Not as a slight to her womanhood, but it just—never seemed relevant.

But the more he looked, watching her reverence, the more he understood it. He took a small step closer, so tiny that his dragonhide shoes never fully lifted off the linoleum floors. Really, it had been more of a shuffle. Narcissa Malfoy would have been appalled.

He watched a curl tumble over Hermione's shoulder. She'd let it grow out, grow longer, spirals past her shoulder blades now. The curl fell almost perfectly into James's tiny hand: it opened, it closed. Hermione made a sound, straddling the line between shock and amusement. Draco took another cautious step closer.

Such a tiny person, barely born, and already he knew to hold tight to the precious things life handed him.

Draco had never really thought about children before. Not too closely, at least. A thought struck him, wild in how obvious and yet utterly insane it seemed.

He'd dined with the Potters on Monday. There had been two of them, then. And now—

He watched as James opened and closed his tiny hand again, curl expanding and contracting in his grip.

Three.

The Potters had walked into St. Mungo's as two people and when they left there would be three. Could that really be how that worked? It had to be how that worked. Obviously, that was how that worked. But it was madness, too. Magic. This little thing in Hermione's arms: magic made life.

James had been nothing. No one. And now he was.

Draco's throat had gone dry. He swallowed against a foreign, intrusive, overwhelming sensation of want bubbling low in his throat, stemming from his chest.

Heirs had always been an abstract thing to him: an indistinct, indefinable future state that his future self would deal with. They were a duty. Never a want.

He could see it now, and it ripped through his chest with so much want that Draco had to wonder if the others in the room could see it, as well. He gave into the impulse and lifted his hand, offering his index finger in place of Hermione's curl. Dimly, he wondered how long it had been since he'd taken his eyes off this baby, off Hermione with this baby.

Another image gripped him. Hermione with his baby. Their baby. An heir. It didn't feel so abstract anymore. In fact, it felt like simple maths. Him, with her. Two becoming three.

He swallowed, the motion dragging against his dry, aching throat. James's tiny grip pulsed against his fingertip. Draco forced himself to look up, to look away, lest he lose himself in this strange, sinew-twisting want.

"I suppose we have Potter to thank for saving us all from having to deal with another redhead."

It was half insult, all instinct.

Potter stood, approached, and clapped Draco on the shoulder with a casual familiarity they definitely did not share. And then Potter laughed. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed, hovering too close behind Draco, peering over his shoulder at the dark haired bundle in Hermione's arms.

"Yep," Potter said, hand still resting, inexplicably, on Draco's shoulder. "That was all me."

It's been a while since I've done an author's note. So hello, hi! I hope you're enjoying this story! I also post on AO3 and Wattpad under the name 'mightbewriting' (no 'i') and am active on tumblr under that same name if you ever feel like dropping by and chatting with me! We have a good time over there! This story updates every Monday and Friday around 4PM EST and will be 48 chapters in total. FFN does a weird thing with my chapter titles and they don't display properly, so if you're curious what they're supposed to be, I'd recommend popping over to AO3, which is my primary platform. It's doesn't disrupt anything major, the way FFN displays them, it'll just be less payoff for the easter egg later. I hope everyone is well, thank you again for reading!