Hermione stepped through the Floo, leaving the lounge of her house in London and emerging in a dark, cool room that smelled of old books and, very faintly, of red wine. It had worked. On a sleepless night, she had gained entry to the library of Malfoy Manor late enough that she wouldn't impose upon anyone while she read Astoria's fertility spell book.
If only she could get enough light to read by. Moonlight was diffused through a tall, diamond-paned window, and the fireplace that had flared as she came through had receded to red coals. She found a table lamp by the glow of her wand, but it wouldn't light for her.
She huffed. Leave it to Malfoy Manor to let her in and then be difficult. She stood by the table, one hand pressed flat on the open book, willing herself not to let her mind wander. This house - what happened here the night Fenrir Greyback took her and Ron and Harry captive had unfolded differently than she had always understood it. She now knew that without Draco's help, she wouldn't have survived the chandelier crash to make an escape. But that did not make what she suffered here any less horrible.
"Focus, Hermione," she muttered to herself. There was a drawer in the table, and if she could find a blank sheet of paper in it, she could kindle one of her slow-burning flames and read by its light.
She had the drawer pulled all the way open, rifling papers inside it when from the doorway, someone cleared their throat.
Of course they did.
"Malfoy!" she gasped.
"Oh, come now, You had to expect this," he said, flicking on the lights with a toss of his head, the fine, clean lines of his face appearing not far from her, his eyes narrowed, mouth curved into a smirk. He was dressed in a massive, lavish dressing gown like a Tudor king would wear in a portrait, only its hem fell all the way to the floor. Between the lapels, she could see the lush black of silk pajamas. She thought of Charlie, asleep at home in just a pair of boxers and his freckles, and she rolled her eyes at Malfoy's excess, even in his sleep.
"Actually, I didn't expect to see anyone," she countered, though she had known all along the risk existed. "I was hoping to read here without bothering anybody."
Draco shook his head. "No, the house lets me know whenever someone's come or gone. It's usually just the staff. Edna receiving grocery deliveries, that sort of thing. This is much more interesting."
She straightened her posture, jamming the drawer closed. "Does everything you say have to sound lascivious?"
He raised an eyebrow, still standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, his ankles crossed. "It doesn't. That's just how it sounds to my - special friends."
Hermione folded her arms in front of herself. "It's not just me. Charlie thinks the same. So does Harry."
"Yes, they would," Draco agreed, a laugh in his voice.
She rolled her eyes again. "Give over, Malfoy. Thank you for the lights. Now if you don't mind, I'll read this page on the Gravida Sympatico spell and leave you to your evening."
He squinted at the large clock standing on the floor behind her. "Evening? It's 3am."
"Then I won't keep you," she said. "If you need the use of the library now, I'll see myself out."
Draco gave a rather jovial groan. "Enough, Granger - "
"It's Weasley."
"Of course it is," he said. "You think I don't know that? You think I came down, knowing you were here, and hoping to lure you upstairs for a spontaneous Triadum spell while your great ginger destroying angel sleeps just one Floo away?"
"I'm sure I have no idea what you might have been hoping to do," Hermione said, turning away from him and toward the fire, as if to leave. "You've already been full of surprises today. Now goodnight."
"Look, you don't have to go," Draco said, something newly earnest in his tone. "Read the passage. You're not bothering me and I won't bother you. And you might need my help. It's difficult the first time you read it." He let himself fall to sitting in the armchair, taking a book from the small table at his side and opening it to the beginning.
Hermione let out a long breath through her nose as she sat down. He was right about the difficulty. The spell was written all in runes and reading it would be slower going than her usual speed. She knew Charlie's reading of the spell had been quick, done with Astoria talking in his ear the entire time. She intended her reading to be thorough, attentive, exhaustive.
"Need a dictionary?" Draco drawled as he turned a page. "There's no shame in it. Just responsible scholarship." Without waiting for an answer, Draco raised his arm to summon the dictionary without a word.
Hermione fought to not look impressed, but this library and Draco's command of it - it was spectacular. Not spectacular enough to let her guard down and risk her baby over, but if any collection of mere objects could ever tempt her to do something rash, this would be it.
Draco slid the dictionary across the tabletop to her.
"Thank you," she said.
He hummed and resumed his reading. The library was silent except for the ticking of its tall, thin clock. Minutes passed, both of them true to their word of not bothering each other.
"The spell's requirement of intimacy," Hermione said at last. "It's not clear from the text alone what that's meant to entail. It needn't be sexual intimacy, but even if it was, the spell wouldn't work if the spiritual-magical connection was lacking."
Draco hummed again. "Intimacy? It's there in the preface. There are three pillars of intimacy between the casters: tenderness, tragedy, and trust."
"Yes, but that's for tier two spells, with just one couple. What would it be at tier four, with two couples?"
Draco closed his book. "The same."
"But it doesn't say that."
"It doesn't say it isn't the same either," he insisted, rising from his chair to stand beside her, in sight of the words written in the book. He flipped to the preface, rereading the section on intimacy. "Look, right here. It doesn't say anything about the number of people. It doesn't matter."
Hermione was shaking her head. "It has to."
Draco looked up from the book, close enough for her to see the creases in his forehead as he scowled. "Why do you keep saying that?"
"Because," she began, standing taller as he stood over her and the book. "All three pillars would be too hard to establish between so many people. How could you ever find a group that had them all?"
He shook his head. "What are you whinging about? We have all three of them between us already."
She scoffed. "How do you reckon, Malfoy? I mean, yes, Charlie and I share tragedy with you and Astoria. You and I are connected through the war, and the pair of them through what happened at the hospital. And, yes, I suppose after what they went through, Charlie is tender toward Astoria, and vice versa..."
"And you and I?" Draco prompted when her voice trailed away.
She tipped her head to the side, hoping he wouldn't insist she elaborate. He waited. She sighed and answered, her voice low. "We both know there's been tenderness between us for ages, in spite of everything."
"And so we come to trust," Draco finished, sitting beside her at the table, the chair beneath him disappearing beneath the bulk of his massive dressing gown.
"Trust," she echoed.
"You still don't trust me," he said.
She shoved at his shoulder. "Why in the stars would I trust you? Even in bringing Charlie and I this far into a fertility spell scheme, you've already resorted to manipulation."
"It was harmless though," he argued, not denying it. "Think of it as play, a game."
"But it's not a game," she said. "Not for us. This isn't our hypothetical family and future at stake." Her hand covered her belly and he noticed the outward curve of it for the first time. "How can we let you and Astoria get any closer to us when so much of what you do and say feels like a trap?"
His fingers twitched, as if he was about to cover her hand with his. She saw his throat bob, his eyes on her fingers, on her stomach.
"That magic between the four of us today," he said, his tone finally serious, "that was hardly a game. Not anymore." Draco ran his fingers through his hair, a habit not unlike Charlie's. "Look, I'm sorry that Astoria and I have forced things along. We're desperate, but we should have trust - "
He stopped, catching himself in his own words. She raised a finger and pointed it at his face, her eyebrows raised. "You should have what?"
Draco rolled his shoulders. "We should have trusted you to hear us out if we approached you with frankness."
She sat back, folding her arms again. "See, we need to develop greater trust on both sides. If we don't, and the pillars of intimacy are the same for tier four spells, then this entire project is moot at best, dangerous at worst."
Draco slumped against the back of his chair, exasperated. "What do you suggest then? Corporate Muggle team-building exercises? Want to stand up and do some trust-falls?"
She shook her head. "Something even more primitive. You'll like it, Malfoy. It's based on old school games. Truth or dare."
Something alarming glinted in Draco's eyes, a glimpse of the impishness Hermione remembered from the Yule Ball. "That sounds like excellent fun," he said. "I'll wake Astoria. You hurry back with Charlie."
"No," she said, her hand on Draco's sleeve as he stood. "I won't learn to trust you properly if there are always other people around us, regulating our behaviour and keeping the past from - from - "
"Overwhelming us?" Draco finished.
Her throat was suddenly dry. "That's one way to say it, yes. Sit down, Draco. We'll modify the game to start. No dares, only truths. If it goes well, we can add dares later."
He laughed. "Truths? Darling, I'm a Legilimens. When I want truths, I can take them."
"Yes, and I'm going to TRUST you not to do that and accept only the truth as I speak it," she said. "Go on. Ask me anything."
His eyes glinted again, a truly tremendous smirk growing. "Well, there is something I've been dying to know - "
"Yes, you are an accomplished kisser. No, I will not provide you with a ranking," she said, her voice clipped, intent on moving on from the topic.
Draco was not having it. "Oh, come on, Madam Weasley."
"No," she answered with prim finality. "Now it's my turn to ask something."
"Right. Yes, you were the best snog I ever had at Hogwarts," he volunteered. "The second go in particular. In the astronomy tower."
She shoved at him again, interrupting his low growl of a laugh. "Malfoy, as if you assumed that's what I wanted to ask."
He was shrugging his shoulder toward his ear, protecting himself. "As if it wasn't. No Legilimency required to know that."
She stamped one foot under the table. "You're only saying that hoping I'll admit you were my best snog at Hogwarts."
"I think you did just admit it," he said, laughing again but raising his hands to ward off any more shoving.
"Stop your giggling and ask something else," she snapped. "A proper question."
Draco cleared his throat and straightened his posture. "Alright. Something serious, something that it would be best if you told me while Charlie is out of earshot. How in the stars did you manage to switch Weasley brothers?"
Hermione's expression stiffened for a moment before she dropped her face into her hands, whimpering softly.
"Is that an overwhelming question?" Draco asked. "It is. I'll start smaller, at the beginning. How did you come to throw over the first one - the gangly one, Potter's flunky?"
"Ron," Hermione said, her hands still covering her eyes.
"Yeah, that's him," Draco said. He reached across the space between them and tugged at her elbow, moving her hand away from her face. "Quit cowering and tell me why you left him. I mean, besides the obvious reason that he's never been fit for you, not even for a second."
Hermione gave a little laugh, but it sounded more like a sob.
Draco went on. "Honestly, I never understood what you saw in him in the first place, especially with Potter standing right there the whole time. You could have had anyone you liked in the school - "
"Oh, could I?" she scoffed, hearing her voice sounding far angrier than she'd expected. "Anyone at all, as long as I was content to hide in hedges and towers and never let on to anyone who might snitch to his parents?"
Draco hissed, a shudder running through him. "We're talking about Weasley. The first one. This is my question, the truth I'm asking for. Why did you finally leave him?"
She gulped a huge breath. "I didn't leave him. He left me." She spat the words out, more like a confession than an answer. Never before had she said these words out loud. Not in this way.
Of course, she had talked about the split with Ron countless times, discussing the broken engagement with Harry and the other Weasleys at great length. She had cried about it in Molly Weasley's arms, for stars' sake. But she had never announced it like this before, saying it simply, brutally, not worrying about trying to understand Ron's side, not forcing kindness for him to protect the feelings of people who had loved him longer and better than they loved her.
There was a beat of fraught silence before Draco forced a laugh. "HE left? No, that's impossible."
"It happened all the same," she said, her voice rising. "I'm surprised you don't know. It was in the bloody papers."
Draco shifted in his seat. "Back then, I would have been, erm, occupied. You know, with hearings fighting not to be tried as an adult, and all that. I didn't have much time to read the gossip pages."
It was a bitter admission, the kind of thing that usually would have inflamed her compassion. Under normal conditions, she would generally have changed the subject from her relationship problems to Draco's brush with Azkaban.
But something had broken when he asked about the loss of Ron. Everything she had always held back was spilling out of her now. Draco cared nothing for Ron's side of the story. He didn't want a balanced retelling of it. He had no interest in empathy or fairness or forgiveness. The only story he cared about was hers. Here, finally, was a place to lay down what she had been carrying all this time. Whatever she said, whatever truth she told, it wouldn't hurt Draco. Whatever it was, she could let it go here.
Draco's eyes were still fixed on her as she raised her head. He sat waiting to hear what happened.
"Ron's oldest brother, Bill..."
"The banker married to the Beauxbatons champion, that Veela woman," Draco finished for her when her voice seized, nodding to encourage her to go on.
She cleared her throat. "They had their second baby and needed help while Fleur recovered. So her mother sent - sent her sister."
Draco sat back, his mouth closed in a hard, knowing line. "Veela Junior."
"Yes. Ron had helped Harry rescue her from the lake during the second task at the Triwizard Tournament - "
"Rescued needlessly," Draco scoffed. "None of you was ever really in danger. Idiot Potter - "
"Well, even so, she was young and it left a great impression on her, in the form of a longtime crush on Ron."
Draco shook his head, swearing. "That's no excuse. He'd ruin his engagement to Hermione Granger, for that?"
"For a beautiful French Veela?"
"For anything!" Draco said, throwing both of his hands in the air. "You're telling me this as if it makes sense. It doesn't. What happened? Explain it. And do it without making any more excuses for them. I want to hate them for it with complete perfection."
No one had ever made her free to utterly condemn Ron like this. She leapt at it. "She was staying at Bill and Fleur's cottage by the sea, the same place we fled to when we escaped from here." She glanced around the room, the view now blurred by tears that still hadn't dropped from her eyes. "And Ron went to visit the new baby without me. Being a good uncle but - but even then, I think I knew."
The first of the tears fell. She swiped it away but her face was flushed, her nose was red, and Draco was sitting too close not to notice. He didn't hush her, didn't tell her it was alright. He flourished a handkerchief and tucked it into her fist, giving her hand squeeze as he sat back. "That still doesn't make you responsible," he said. "I said no excuses. But go on."
"The first time he kissed her was on the beach," Hermione blurted, coughing out a sob. "On the beach where we apparated in each other's arms during the war, barely alive, escaped from this house. On the beach where for the first time, I knew for sure I was Ron's. I was so sure I was his to care for, to be treasured for the rest of my life. I arrived at that beach after suffering and nearly dying and no one in the world cared more than Ronald Weasley did. He was mine. On that beach, he was mine."
She was howling now, slipping off her chair, onto her knees on the floor. Draco was out of his own chair and on the floor in front of her, pushing her upright as she bent over at the waist. His eyes were wide, pained with her pain, but still eager to hear the rest. She didn't need prompting, the story gushing out of her.
"And while I was sleeping in our room at his parents' house, wearing his ring, he was sneaking down from the garret of Bill's cottage, to the spare bedroom, to the same bed where he had once lain beside me and stroked my hair and told me how precious I was while I cried and recovered from Death Eater torture. I slept in his arms for the first time there, all pure and trusting. And then he went and had sex there with someone else."
She bent forward again, doubling over with her sobs, but Draco was even closer this time. His arms were around her, keeping her from crumpling, one hand on the back of her head, easing her face against his shoulder. In his dressing gown, he was warm, layered in a softness for her rigid form to sink into. Her posture slackened, her quick erratic breaths taking in the smell of him, not quite the same as it used to be but close enough to remind her of the other times he'd found her wounded by Ron and made her feel beautiful and loveable again.
Draco rocked with her, muttering curses Ron was lucky he was not in range of. "Get it all out," he told her. "Tell me. Trust me, and let me have it. Now is the time. How did you find out what he did?"
She sobbed again. "Bill. It went on for weeks in secret, but finally Bill caught them in her room. And he told Ron if he didn't tell me, Bill would tell me himself."
"Bloody coward," Draco said, the words hot in her ear. Her arms had been folded between them but she was holding on to Draco now, clawing desperately at the heavy fabric draped around him.
"Even then he wouldn't face me until Bill was standing in the Weasleys' garden, about to speak. Ron came cracking in just in time to interrupt and tell me himself." She turned her head, speaking close to Draco's long, white neck. "That night, I had nowhere to go. No family of my own to take me back and comfort me. I thought of Harry, but I couldn't ask him to be any more caught in the middle than he already was. So I took what kindness the Weasleys could manage and I went to my parents' deserted house and…"
Her voice trailed off again. Draco waited quietly, one hand still stroking her back. "And what?" he said, finally. "And you forgave him, like a bigger person than me. You left him to his fancy piece and kept working, making a brilliant contribution to society. And you found - "
"Charlie," she said, sitting back from Draco's shoulder, her hold on him loosening. She sniffed against her tears. "I found Charlie. It's ironic, really. He was the only one of the Weasleys not to tell me they still considered me family, not to press me to stay in touch, keep coming 'round no matter what. What he told me was to go on, if I had to. He promised me there was an entire world of wonderful things and people I didn't know yet, and that the new world would be lucky to get to love me. And then," she looked directly into Draco's eyes, "then Charlie appeared in the new world, coming to me as the best thing in it."
There was the tenderness. She saw it looking back at her from Draco as she spoke of Charlie. Their faces were close, at a distance that had always been a point of no return for them, the point at which he had always proceeded to kiss her. After so much truth telling, her heart was open to him. And more surprising, her body remembered him, their past connections crackling like a field of static electricity, manageable but not powerless.
She defused it with a quiet laugh, raising her hand to cover Draco's mouth. "Just in case," she said.
She felt his lips smirk against her palm and she smiled in return. He hooked one finger over her hand and lowered it, cradling it against his pointed chin. "Come on, Madam Weasley, you don't have to do that. And I will tell you why," he said. "It's not because you aren't even more lovely and powerful and genius than ever. It's not because it wouldn't be nice to revisit my best Hogwarts snog. No, it's because you can trust me."
"Trust you," she echoed.
"Yes, I'm not about to sit here listening to a story of how you were devastated by some unworthy man's infidelity just to try it on with you myself. Look at me, wrapped up in this ridiculous dressing gown thick enough to act as insulation between us in case we ended up too close. Which, inevitably, we have."
She snorted a laugh. "That's why you're wearing this ludicrous costume? As body armour? Against me?"
"Against us," he said. "Against our - what's the Muggle term for it - our chem-ergy."
"Chemistry," she laughed.
"Right," he said. "I very much enjoy our chemistry. I think we can keep it. But it needs to be handled safely, so no one ends up…"
"Overwhelmed," she finished.
"Precisely. And you see I'm trying, Hermione. You can trust that I won't compromise you. Can't you?" he asked, his face closer to hers than it had been yet tonight, his mouth uncovered, their noses almost touching.
"This is the dare part of the game, isn't it?" she said.
He breathed a laugh. "It is. And it's my turn. Close your eyes and trust me. This is all I'll dare."
Hermione closed her eyes as Draco's mouth touched her skin for the first time since school. There was no hunger, no moisture, as he brushed a gentle kiss on her tear-streaked cheek. The touch shook through her, though it was tinged with only a little of the passion she remembered from their past. Tonight, the shaking was almost like the feeling of the baby's movement, but dimmer, unfinished. And though she was not alone, she was suddenly terribly lonely for someone else.
She opened her eyes to find Draco sitting back, his arms still holding her but his face moving away.
"There," she said. "I think - "
She didn't finish. A blast of wind had torn through the library, pages flipping in the open book on the table at their heads. Yellow-green light flashed from the fireplace as, still shirtless from sleep, Charlie came bounding out of the Floo.