When Hermione feels the first strains of consciousness, an almost overwhelming wave of panic rolls through her mind. It is a dark panic she does not understand, does not comprehend, and that does not go away until she feels an arm, strong and precise, about her belly, pulling her closer to a chest that is warm and solid.
The panic slowly ebbs away.
Realising this time, finally, she does not wake alone.
When the arm is followed by a slight pressing of lips against the back of her neck, Hermione feels a warmth, secure as she snuggles her bum back against the man at her back, and when that arms tightens just a little more, she allows herself to fall back into sleep.
Secure.
Warmth.
Allowing her sleep to take on the colours of her magic, but without the dreams that have visited her for the last ten years. Without the feeling of incompleteness, of unreality, that has haunted for such a very long time.
Swirling magic, but peace, calmness, a liquid pool in the middle of a moon-lit forest.
Hermione sleeps.
Even as Draco holds her close, feeling the smooth rise and fall of her breath in front of him. The feel of her skin under his own, against his own, and something long frigid in its completeness, long sustained because of his past, who he is - was - loosens.
Not disappearing. No, never disappearing, but lying down, resting, forgetting the world.
If only for a moment.
But a moment longer than he has ever had before.
The irony of the situation is not lost on Draco as he stares into the leaping flames in the fireplace holding his witch, finally holding his witch, marvelling at it all.
The Slytherin in him is very pleased indeed, even as the Malfoy part of him preens in triumph.
His witch.
But then sobering. The reality. The heaviness of it, the completeness of it.
Lying here. With him too.
And he holds her close to his body because all that he is, and all that he ever was, the better part of him, is lying next to him, and all he wants to do is close his eyes and forget the world.
If only for a moment.
But such is, and will never be, the fate of one Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. As dawn preens over them with soft layers of grey daylight, there is a peck at the window, a peck followed by more pecks.
The pecking is insistent enough to wake Hermione, who stirs in the arms of Draco as she opens her eye and tries to see through the mass of curls about her face who exactly is demanding entrance on this morning.
She will have his arse.
Draco feels her indignation through their magic and the slight stiffening of her body, smiling for a moment before leaning down and catching her ear with his mouth, nibbling. She starts and then moans back into him, all indignation melting away.
His breathe along the side of her neck does decidedly delicious things to her body.
"I believe, my love," Draco whispers along her neck, over her collarbone, "We have an owl at our window."
Hermione, eyes closed now, delighting in the feel of his mouth, incoherently mumbles something that sounds surprisingly like several different curse words all directed towards the owl still pecking at the window.
Draco, smiling against her skin, "What was that?"
Hermione turns around then to face him; the feel of her breasts on his chest and her hands suddenly circling his waist leaves very little thought in Draco's head.
Even as she speaks.
"I said that the lot of them can decidedly fuck off."
Her face grumpy and mischievous, eyes warm and liquid, meeting his, the words, so unlike her, a catalyst. A slight quirk of her eyebrow and Draco is lost, smiling stupidly he knows, as one hand moves the curls from her face so he can attack her lips with his own.
But the owl does not leave and the pecking becomes more insistent. Draco pulls away with a few choice words of his own, rolling out of the covers and into the chill of the morning to let the persistent, and very annoying, owl into the window.
The warmth about him slips away as he notices that the owl is from the Ministry and the parchment tied about his leg is official.
Draco has spent all night making love to a woman he thought he'd lost, and ease and relaxation is in every line of his naked form. Hermione stares at him, her eyes lingering over the swell of his shoulders, the lean line of his backside, the arms, strong and sure. She feels the now familiar warmth of desire pooling in her centre again, wondering even as she does if it will ever go away.
Until she sees that relaxed backside straighten, and the muscles along what was an easy face tighten.
Hermione feels the sudden circling of their magic, shadowed, growing deeper into darkness.
"What is it?" She asks, pulling herself into a sitting position, the blankets about her, pulling one up to cover her chest from the cold, but also as a shield against the shuttered look in Draco's eye as he turns and looks at her.
"Potter has sent us an official invitation to a council meeting that is being held to discuss the new developments in our project."
Hermione tilts her head slightly to look at the man standing naked against the window.
"Okay." She says slowly, not understanding entirely what the matter is. "We knew this was coming after what happened with Lily."
Draco scowls suddenly, a swift scowl that moves over his features before being replaced by the familiar mask of nothing. Though he can't help but pull a hand through his hair.
"Yes. But this an official invitation." A smirk then, slightly, just enough to cause little pin pricks of irritation along Hermione's nerve. "You have never had an official invitation have you?"
Hermione pulls the cover closer to her chest, narrowing her eyes slightly, raising her chin slightly. "No. I haven't." And then narrowing her eyes even further when the smirk does not go away but only grows slightly. "Honestly, are you going to tell me what an official invitation is or are you going to stand there like an arse with that stupid smirk on your face."
Draco shakes his head in mock woe, "And they say she is the smartest witch."
Hermione growls and picks up the pillow next to her, throwing it at his head.
Draco easily catches it, letting the parchment fall to the floor, and stalks towards the bed, pillow in hand.
Hermione feels a jump of something, not nerves, not exactly, but something heated, primitive, watching the lean man with the shock of white hair walking towards her. A predator, she thinks, watching him.
He attacks her with a quick squeak from her and a growl from him, and for several moments they forget about the parchment on the floor, hands and lips doing all the talking until they are once more wrapped up in covers, wrapped up in themselves.
Hermione strokes the arm that holds her close, one finger tracing the contours of the muscle in his forearm.
"So, what is an official invitation?" She asks, hating to break the moment but not able to stop the question.
A slight stiffening behind her, and she wonders briefly if he will pull away.
He does not, though he doesn't regain the languid ease of before.
Draco buries his face in the curls in front of him, inhaling her scent before answering.
"We are under inquiry," he says, quietly.
Hermione turns in his arms to look up at him in surprise. "Inquiry? As in official?"
Draco looks down on his witch, smiling slightly at the alarm in her voice. Bringing a finger up to trace the line of her jaw, across the lip that parts just slightly under the pressure.
It stabs him, that simple gesture, so unknowing, so trusting.
He lets his finger drop.
"Yes. I am assuming that there is a reason, but we are being officially recalled to the Ministry to answer questions regarding our project, and more than likely, regarding what took place ten years ago."
A small line of thought, concentration, appears between Hermione's eyes as she thinks on his words. "Well, that is not so bad then. The Board knows why we did it; they can hardly hold us accountable for the aftermath, or if they do, the results far outweigh what is taking place now."
Draco feels something dark, forbidding, lashing about under his ribs as he places a kiss on that line of concentration between her eyes.
He wonders how this woman has existed so long thinking so good of everyone about her.
She must have felt some of his condensation because she stiffens slightly in his arms, looking up at him again, meeting his eyes.
"What?" She almost snaps, almost.
Draco brings his hand up and cups her face, rubbing his thumb along the smooth expanse of her cheek. "I don't think it's that easy."
Hermione looking confused then, even as she leans slightly into his hand. "Why ever not?"
Draco feels that forbidding again. He lets his hand fall. "Because, Hermione, they don't want to remember what we had to do; they don't want to remember the dark that exists, that existed. They are not going to remember the reasons behind it because they don't want to."
Hermione sits up then, looking down at him even as she shakes her head, curls moving about her face. "What are you talking about? Of course they remember. How can they not remember?"
Draco props his head up with a hand, thinking her glorious even as she glares down at him. But a part of him aches at the trust she has in her friends, in Potter, in Minerva.
"Because they don't want to and they don't have to."
Hermione looks away from him. "That's rubbish," she says, though the heat is not there. She knows of what he speaks of, because even as Draco says the words, the image of Ginny in all her matrimonial and motherly bliss, rises up before her, followed closely by the image of the Minister of Magic and so many other faces.
Secure in their security. Secure in their knowledge that they defeated darkness once upon a time; therefore, obviously darkness no longer exists.
At least, that is what they choose to believe.
Lives, turned away from the shadows that hide about every person.
Draco sees her comes to the knowledge with a pang in his gut, but he does not speak while watching her.
Hermione finally turns to him, bitterness about her face. "So what? Are they going to charge us with a crime?"
Draco slowly shakes his head, or as much as he can while propped up by an elbow. "I don't think so. What crime have we committed? But I do think that we are going to probably be urged to find a solution. And find one quickly or else."
A huff of breath, in irritation lined with a small amount of anger. "We are already doing that."
Draco lets his head fall back to his arm. "Yes, but I suspect we are going to be given a rather shorter time line then we had before."
Hermione looks away, out the window at the grey morning. "When is the invite for?"
"Monday morning, first thing."
A pause.
"Right." She says to herself more than to the wizard at her back.
He is not surprised when Hermione pulls the covers away then, though his breath catches slightly at the sight of her skin free of all covers, the curves of her body displayed as she reaches for the clothes they'd thrown to the ground the previous night.
"What are you doing?" He asks deceptively, devouring her with his eyes.
Hermione did not turn around, not catching the slightly hungry tone in his words.
"Well, we obviously have some work to do. If they are going to be idiots we might as well give them something to be idiots over."
Draco laughs then, laughs because her tone is so pompous, so bossy, so incredibly Hermione.
She turns her head to scowl at him, knickers in one hand, a jumper in the other.
This causes him to laugh more, though when she pulls away in irritation, he grabs her wrist and pulls her back to bed, stopping her protest with his mouth, his hands coming about the curve of her waist.
"We have work to do," she tries, in a gasp when his mouth descends on her breast, playing it with his tongue.
"Hmm," he murmurs.
Hermione's head goes back, shivers running up and down her spine as her hands come down on his shoulders.
"But we can do it later," she says absently, as he kisses down from her breast, along her rib cage, over the slight rise of her belly.
Draco thinks that an excellent idea and pulls her back to bed.
Knickers and jumper forgotten once more on the floor.
Several hours later, the two of them are at the table in the kitchen, tea things between them, Hermione absently twirling her quill as she reads through a parchment, Draco thrumming his fingers along the wood of the table.
"Bloody hell." An exclamation. Quill flying from Hermione's fingers to the table as she glares at the parchment in front of her.
Draco raises one eyebrow at her, fingers stalling in their drumming.
She looks up from the parchment and glares at him. "There is nothing here, not a bloody thing."
Hermione puts a finger between her eyes and rubs. "There has to be something in how to retract the field of magic, anything at all. It just doesn't make sense. I should have died but I didn't, which probably has something to do with the bloodstones, part of the blood magic, and I know if we could just find that first part of the spell, before your megalomaniac and twisted ancestor got a hold of it and made it into a scary Malfoy thing, we could figure it out."
Hermione drops her head to the table, eyes closed, magic swirling about in the blackness.
"Megalomaniac and twisted?" Draco says dryly.
"You know what I mean," comes the muffled reply from across him.
Draco nods his head, though he doesn't agree with her out loud, looking back down at the parchment he'd been reading.
Hermione looks up at him, rising her head just slightly to look through her curls. Draco feels the look but does not acknowledge it with a glance.
A moment. The feeling of Hermione thinking tangible in the room.
Then.
"What did you think you would find at your father's house?"
Draco does not wince, though only through years of training himself not to. He keeps his eyes resolutely on the parchment in front of him, voice level, controlled. "I remember a book there, as a child."
Hermione straightens, putting her elbows on the table and supporting her chin with her hands. "What kind of book?"
Draco feels wariness move through his bones, along the side of his magic, pulsing, deep at the base of his spine. But he keeps his voice occupied, as if not really paying attention to the conversation. As if he is paying more attention to the parchment in front of him – one that he is not reading.
"A family book, an heirloom, that belonged to my mother."
Hermione studies his face; the man across from her, the ease of his words, the neutral expression on his features. If it weren't for the magic between them, the compulsion tight and throbbing, she would think he is perfectly all right with the conversation. As it is, she can feel the tension there.
Tangible.
Thus Hermione's next question is soft.
"Why do you think it's important?"
A slight tremor, alongside the hand that picks up the tea, just slight, barely there, barely discernable.
Hermione catches it, though very few would.
"I don't know."
Hermione does not move, keeping her chin in her palms, studying Draco.
He feels her eyes, but sips his tea and does not look at her.
"You do."
The teacup is placed precisely back on the table.
Hermione continues. "If you know something, something that you think will help…" She lets her sentence trail off, feeling the tightening of their magic, the sudden onset of cold, fury, ice.
Though she knows it's not towards her but towards something else, something hidden behind that cool façade.
"My mother had a book. She always read it when we went to that home, in the summer mostly, just the two of us. A love story, she called it, of our family, though she never quite said more than that."
A moment. Silence between them. Hermione wants nothing more than to gather the man across from her in her arms and hold him close until the frigid cold she feels along their shadows slips away.
But she stays in her seat.
Waiting.
He does not say anything more.
She breaks the silence. "You know it is still at the house?"
When he shakes his head slightly, the light of the fire plays in the white strands of his hair and Hermione's breath catches at the sight, something so elemental pulling at her centre. Pulling.
"I'm not certain, but she always left the book." A pause. Horrid. Rigid. Filled with something dark and heavy.
Then.
"My father would not have approved."
So many meanings in those words.
Hermione does not immediately answer nor continue the conversation. Watching him, grazing his face with her look.
Caught, when he glances up and meets her eyes with his own. Her breath stops to see the emotion there, quickly, a glimpse, but still there, before the Malfoy mask falls in place.
Again. Her question.
"Why do you think it's important?"
Draco looks away again, over her shoulder, at the grey day, the sky heavy, pregnant with moisture that has, so far, refused to break into rain.
"A feeling," he finally says, glancing at her and then away again.
Hermione finds that she understands somehow. She has realised, a long time ago, that some times brilliance comes in moments of inspiration.
"So we get the book."
Stated, a matter of fact.
A harsh bark of laughter between them.
"I am forbidden to go there, don't you remember?"
Hermione letting her arms fall to the tabletop as she shakes her head. "So I will go."
An ironic twist to Draco's lips, a hatred that flashes about her in an instant of freezing emotion.
"Do not doubt, Hermione, that if you pass the threshold of my father's house that he will kill you. Though he might be a squib, he is still a powerful man. I have no doubt about that."
Hermione's reaction is indignation, quickly followed by annoyance. "I can take care of myself."
A sudden hand, snaking across to grab her wrists, eyes glaring, hard, rigid, into her own.
"You will not go to that house."
Ice chips. Falling between them.
Again.
Narrowing her eyes, glaring at him, and then catching it, just the slight emotion, just barely noticeable.
Fear.
For her.
And all her annoyance vanishes.
She turns her arm so that his hand falls into her, lacing their fingers together.
"No. I won't. Not alone."
Draco watches her warily, knowing her too well, knowing already that this is not the end of the matter.
Squeezing his hand in hers.
"But what about Severus?"
Draco shakes his head, "He looked, but he doesn't know the house."
A pause.
A tightening even more of their fingers.
"But you do."
A statement more than a question.
Draco looks down at their hands, away from her eyes, away from her face.
"I do."
A pause.
A long moment as Hermione looks on the wizard staring down at their interlocked hands. A quiver in her chest, the slow and easy movement of her heart in her chest settling, even as he looks up and meets her gaze.
"I suppose we have somewhere to be then," he says quietly, though there is bitterness under the control, bitterness, irony.
Hermione's smile is gentle, understanding, filled with so much between them.
"Can you?" She asks, encryptive, but knowing he will understand.
A smile, smirk, twisted, pain, pulling at her. Pulling. Hard.
"Do you mean, will I be able to control the desire to kill him?"
The question. Heavy between them.
"Yes."
She answers.
Another twist of his mouth.
She brings up their joined hands and kisses his knuckles. The movement surprises him and he looks up at her, meeting her eyes.
"I will be there," she says.
A smart comment, a retort, on the tip of his tongue, that disappears as soon as it is made known.
Because he needs her to be there, and he is past the point of denying it.
She kisses his knuckles once more. Hot breath against the sensitive nerves there, along his wrist.
"We will have to convince Severus," he says, though it is obvious.
She nods in reply. "Of course. To dismantle the wards."
He nods in return.
"I could go," he starts, "just with Severus." A pause, "You would be safer never having to see my father."
History, weighing down on them. Their history. Their past.
So very heavy.
Hermione places their joined hands on the table, examining their fingers intertwined.
"I won't leave you."
Her words are said before she can think what they mean, or even where they came from.
Feeling his magic, then, suddenly, an onslaught of magic.
Hermione does not look up.
She continues. "Not then. Not…" Looking up at him, meeting his eyes. "Not ever."
Draco studies her face. Studies it and she lets him, open to him, the magic between them pulsing.
She sees him recognize her words, sees him process them, the brief flash of relief, of love, of something else, moving across his features before he drops his eyes to their hands.
A slight smile along his lips, pained though, and she wonders at the pain even as this time he is the one to bring their joined hands up, lips descending on her knuckles.
"Of course," murmured there, against her skin. Words softly spoken, so softly that she does not hear the slight catch to his voice.