September

tock

After the incident with the blood curse, Granger elected to leave the guest wing for another time. Not because she couldn't handle it—she'd made a point to inform Draco of that fact—but more because she couldn't bear his redoubled hovering after her unfortunate injury that first day.

"Accidents happen, Draco," she'd insisted with a huff, gesturing for him to step back. Admittedly, he'd been lingering rather close, watching as she contemplated which room she might try and enter. "It's an expected part of this job. I've been trained to handle these sorts of things." A pause, a sigh. "Would it ease your concern if I tackled a different hall instead?"

"I'm not concerned."

She rolled her eyes.

"Obviously not."

But she'd abandoned the idea of returning to the guest wing after that. Instead, she moved back to the library, working her way through the adjacent corridor. While Draco made a concerted effort not to hover too closely behind, he still couldn't quite shake his unease as he lounged on a settee in the hallway while she worked in one of the many flanking rooms.

He winced, shifting against his shirt fabric; the placket rubbed uncomfortably against a new burn on his chest where a recent attempt at cursed scar removal had failed spectacularly. He crossed moondew off his list of possible ingredients with excessive vigor, quill tip ripping the parchment as his face contorted, a sharp inhale at a stab of pain.

Considering different ingredient combinations had become Draco's preferred distraction technique as Granger worked her way through the corridor adjacent to the library and then started on the second floor. He trailed her, book and parchment in hand, reading and scribbling, contemplating his options, and dodging her curious questions about what had him so enthralled.

It became a helpful method of avoiding his worries that something else in his home might attack her, and more than that, from thinking too long about the unfortunate not-date they'd shared the month before.

He sighed as a shadow stole the sunlight filtering through the enormous floor-to-ceiling window next to his settee, aggravating his reading process. He paused, looking up as he realized what room Granger stood in front of. He'd been dreading this.

He spoke just as she directed one of her diagnostic runes to the wood panelling on the door, letting it sink in: purple.

"While I can't speak for the other rooms in the manor," he said. "I can assure you there's nothing of interest to you in there."

In a made-up, imaginary world, Granger would have taken that at face value, perhaps thanked him for saving her some precious time, and moved to the next room.

That imaginary world did not know of Granger's impossible curiosity and unending stubbornness.

She turned towards him, narrowing her eyes as she tapped her wand against her thigh. She engaged in an excellent impression of a Legilimens trying to see right through him.

He could have tried harder, could have tried to stop her with real effort. Instead, he sighed, setting his book and parchment on the window sill and stood. He stepped forward and dismantled the wards for her. It wasn't difficult; they belonged to him, after all.

From his periphery, he saw her gaze shifting from the door, to his face, and back again. He let the door swing open, already resisting the tug of awkwardness he knew would follow.

"This is my bedroom." He stepped inside, opting to ignore the tiny intake of breath he heard from behind him. He braced himself for the backwards reality where Hermione Granger was alone with him in his bedroom. The potential ease of Occlumency called to him like a siren song. But he could do this, survive without it. He didn't want every interaction with Granger to result in him hiding behind mental magic.

She entered, head swiveling to take in his bookshelves, plenty and packed, his desk, his four poster—suspiciously similar to those provided at Hogwarts, though substantially larger—the telescope by the window, the small sitting area in the corner, the door to his private facilities, and with a turn, glancing back at the threshold she'd just crossed.

He leaned against the corner of his desk, letting the pointed edge dig into the back of his thigh, a distraction from imagining several other scenarios where they might have ended up in this room together—each new vision as impossible as the last.

"You—still have furniture here? I thought you'd moved out."

That helped distract him from a particularly errant fantasy about what Granger might look like pressed against the door frame behind her—Merlin, he had to stop.

"I did move out."

Her eyes widened as if she'd realized something obvious.

"So, you must have just—bought all new furniture, then. Of course."

Draco frowned, finally distracted in full from his increasingly libidinous train of thoughts. "No—I didn't buy my furniture, Granger."

She quirked her head, lips twisted between amusement and confusion.

"Why did you say that like it was something—I don't know. Wildly offensive?"

"Because I don't have to buy my furniture."

She smiled like he'd said something funny.

"See, you did it again. What's so offensive about buying your furniture?"

He leaned harder against the corner of the desk, denting the muscle in the back of his leg. He realized his mistake only a second before he saw the light of recognition cross her face. He'd been caught being an aristocratic arse, and he hadn't even noticed.

"We don't"—it took concentrated effort not to cringe at how he was about to sound—"buy furniture. It's inherited. We have plenty in storage. I furnished my flat from that. I only took a few pieces from the manor—the green sofa, for example. Buying one's furniture is so…"

"Working class?"

He blanched. She outright laughed, doubling over, amusement spilling in gasps. Draco was fairly certain the corner of his desk had made contact with his femur, piercing through skin and muscle.

As uncomfortable as such exposure made him feel, he appreciated the opportunity to marvel at Granger's laugh: a true, unguarded sound. It shined like sunlight, coasting across his skin with the softness of silk.

Granger straightened, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

"I don't really know how," she started, a smile pulling the apples of her cheeks into a flushed, round shape. He hated how lovely it made her look. "But I sometimes forget how obscenely wealthy you are. Which is hilarious, considering I literally spend all day traipsing around your mansion."

"You hardly traipse."

She giggled, and the sound of it danced around the room. He wondered, briefly, if such a sound had ever existed in this place before she breathed that noise into existence.

"Well. I can assure you. Of all my family's beliefs, our views on furniture are the least problematic."

She sobered, the pitch of her laughter falling, fading into steady breaths. She pulled out her wand and cast her diagnostic runes, offering him a sad smile as she did.

"I believe you."

He wasn't sure what she meant. He didn't have the courage to ask.

He pulled away from the edge of the desk, leg protesting in pain as blood rushed to the muscle he'd crushed. He watched the series of mostly purple runes hovering in front of her. Three outlying runes, two red and one yellow, disputed his earlier assessment that there would be nothing of interest in here. Disappointment sank inside him; he'd been sure he'd kept this room, this place, separate from so much of the darkness that permeated the manor.

Granger held her wand to the single yellow rune, prodding it towards the desk where he stood. For a breathless moment, he thought she might direct it to his chest again. He worried about the state of his scars, in various stages of healing from the experimental torment he'd put them through.

She passed by him instead, lowering the rune to a drawer on the far side. She opened it with a quick spell, levitating a fancy eagle feather quill from inside. She pressed the yellow rune into it, watching as it glowed, evidently learning something from the process.

"Ah—that was a gift from Goyle a few Christmases ago. Haven't used it," Draco said, watching as she worked, muttering something and pulling her yellow rune back out of it. She recast her diagnostics: almost all purple, excepting for the two red runes.

"I'm surprised about the red ones," he said.

Granger smiled sadly, "I'm not." She gestured between them with her off hand, "it's you and me."

Draco felt fear drop hot in his stomach, and he almost gave into the instinct to freeze it out. But in his room, perfectly safe with Granger; he didn't want to.

"How does it work?" he asked. "Those spells of yours. They seem—complex."

She hovered her wand at one of the red runes, just as she'd done months before, in the library when she first touched him with this magic.

"I should have asked, last time—I just performed magic on you without your permission. It was presumptuous."

"You can do it now—if you want." His voice had dropped. They stood close together; they didn't need volume to communicate. Any worries he'd had about the state of his scars had completely evaporated from his mind, burned up by the morning sun, by the warmth behind Granger's eyes, blazing with curiosity.

She gestured the rune closer, letting it sink against his chest. It disappeared, the tint of the room dipped, strangely cool in the absence of red light. It only took another blink for the glow to reappear, tracing the scars along his torso and neck.

"It was developed by the Department of Mysteries. It's a combination of arithmancy, ancient runes, and some powerful cleansing charms. The flashy part is the glowing runes, helps me identify where pockets of dark magic are hiding, how severe they are."

"But how do you—how do you know? You just walk around, following the runes. It's—" otherworldly, ethereal, unreal "—interesting."

"It's a lot of intuitive magic. It took me—well, it took me quite a while to get the hang of it. Intuition isn't my forte."

Draco made a humming sound, agreeing, but not so strongly as to annoy her. Too enthusiastic an agreement that Granger needed rules, order, boundaries, and specific incantations to feel in control felt like asking for a hexing.

He pressed his hand to one of the glowing red lines beneath his shirt—evidence of his scars—running along the left side of his ribcage. When the idea struck, it nearly crushed him under its weight.

"Does it work on people? You and me? Can you not—use this to take the dark magic out of our scars?" Perhaps he'd spoken too quickly, with too much enthusiasm, with too much raw hope.

Because when he looked away from his scars and back at Granger, her eyes had gone glassy. A sad smile decorated her face, fading quickly despite what looked like intense effort to maintain the facade.

"No. It doesn't work on living things. Pulling dark magic out of something that can't be hurt by the process is one thing. Pulling it from something animate…" she lifted a hand, reached out, close to touching the glowing scar peeking out from his collar, but stopped. "The most it can do is identify dark magic living in our scars, nothing more."

It wasn't the answer he wanted, but it was enough of a start. Maybe if she'd be willing to teach him the spell, he could experiment with it, try to find a way to bind it with his potion or otherwise leverage it for his uses. He closed his eyes, blocking out the glowing runes in front of him and the scars still illuminated on his chest. His mind raced, considering the new possibilities. How had he not thought of it before?

"Are you okay?" Granger asked. He opened his eyes again; she stood even closer, within a single step of him. She'd canceled the glowing runes, leaving the space between them unnaturally deep and dark and cavernous. With the right impetus, he could see them disappearing inside such quiet, dark caverns. "I had a similar thought when I first learned about it, too."

She rubbed at her left forearm, hidden beneath her cardigan.

She looked so earnest, so concerned for his emotional wellbeing, and he didn't deserve such a thing. Not in the slightest. He felt something crumble in his chest, belatedly comprehending her words and grieving for the fact that she had wondered it, too.

All the more incentive to figure out a potion that actually worked and didn't just leave patches of raw, irritated scar tissue behind, just as cursed as it had been before.

In the meantime—

Fuck.

The impulse to kiss Granger, the absolutely overwhelming compulsion towards it, reached out from the floorboards and nearly shook his senses from him. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to kiss Hermione Granger. Badly. And with that thought came the reluctant admission that he wasn't even a little bit annoyed at their accidental not-date the month before. In fact, he'd enjoyed every minute of it: awkward, stunted minutes included. Because Granger was interesting. And so fucking compassionate. And brilliant. And standing right there looking oh-so-kissable, if only he leaned forward, stooped down and met her lips with his own.

"My birthday is next week," she said, staring up at him with a sort of open-mouthed awe he knew she must have seen reflected back at her. The oxygen in the room thickened, weighing him down, wearing him out. Whatever threads of self-control he had left were slowly being compressed, strung out.

And she'd chosen to break the tension with her birthday?

"Happy early birthday?"

Perhaps Draco's brain had been compressed as well, smashed to pulp from the roar of blood rushing through his skull. Happy early birthday? Where was a rogue avada when he needed one?

"I'm not really celebrating," she said, tucking a lock of curls behind her right ear. He would pay a substantial number of galleons to do the same, to touch that curl, to wind it around his fingers and see how it felt. "I'm just going for some drinks at the Leaky, probably."

"Well, that should be fun." Draco's brain had ground to a halt inside his head. Was she asking him to come? He couldn't tell. And he didn't know if he wanted her to.

Fuck, he wanted her to.

"Harry and Ginny—Ron, and everyone, well, they know I'm working with you."

"Right."

"They know you're not—that you're different than you were. I've told them."

He made a noise, caught between agreement and confirmation he still had control over the use of his lungs.

She looked up at him, still standing so close.

He looked down at her, still incapable of beheading those treasonous thoughts about kissing her running rampant through his brain.

She didn't ask.

He didn't prompt.

The staggering inappropriateness of their present situation struck him like a bludger to the gut. They were in his bedroom. She hadn't been doing actual work for what felt like several eternities. And, just in case he'd already forgotten, they were in his fucking bedroom.

He didn't want her to ask it. She shouldn't ask it. If she asked, he wasn't going to be able to say no.

"If you wanted to come by…"

"Yeah, alright."

—

Draco spent the better part of that week regretting those two words of agreement: yeah, alright. They didn't even sound like him. They sounded like something Weasley would say: slightly idiotic, a little dim. What had he even been thinking? Clearly he hadn't been. No scenario existed wherein Draco Malfoy could have a normal pub night with the golden trio, which was essentially what Granger's invitation boiled down to.

Either Potter or Weasley—or both—would hex him on sight, or they'd bicker until Granger ripped all her hair out by the roots and never spoke to him again.

Or maybe Draco would lose his temper first. Perhaps he'd send a jelly-legs jinx at the boy who lived and could then sustain himself on that image for the rest of his life. Honestly, the idea had its merits.

It became increasingly obvious throughout the afternoon of Granger's birthday, as he tried and failed to act normal around her—which mostly meant reading about experimental potions and ignoring her as she worked—that Occlumency, much as he wished he could avoid it, would be his only option to survive the night.

Towards the end of the workday, he slipped away to find a pain potion so that he might preempt his inevitable headache. He'd require a heavy dose of Occlumency if he was expected to socialize with Ronald Weasley for any extended period of time.

He met with Granger in the parlor, pain potion coursing through his system, gift in his hand.

He held it out to her.

"Happy Birthday, Granger."

She looked surprised, brows lifting as she took the book-shaped package.

"So, you've remembered?" she asked. "I couldn't tell with all that brooding and ignoring me you've been doing all day."

"I wasn't brooding."

She laughed, tearing at the paper to her gift. She paused, staring down at the still mostly wrapped book. She looked back up at him. Draco resisted the urge to look away, to occlude. But he'd be doing plenty of that later. He could survive a simple gift giving without having to freeze out every last errant emotion, even the frustratingly fond ones. He did rather like that little look of surprise on her face: lips parted, eyes wide, a slight blush warming her skin.

"You're not giving me this," she said.

"I believe I just did."

"Draco—it's. This is practically priceless."

"You needn't qualify. I'm certain it's actually priceless."

He saw her grip on the gift wrap tighten.

"I can't accept it."

"Of course you can. Didn't you tell me Hogwarts: A History is your favorite book?"

"Favorite nonfiction book, yes—but that doesn't mean you should be giving me your family's priceless first edition of it," her voice pitched higher, the first sign of panic creeping in.

He'd expected a little resistance. He hadn't expected her to look so terrified of the thing.

"Granger." He took a step forward and pulled the book from her grip. He almost smiled at the resistance he met, a slight reluctance to let it go. He ripped away the rest of the wrapping and gave it back to her. "I sincerely doubt anyone other than you and I even know this book exists. Furthermore, I am certain that you and I are the only people who appreciate it. And I want you to have it."

She looked down at the book in her hands. It looked comically big in her grip: a huge tome in little hands. He watched as her front teeth sank into the flesh of her bottom lip, pressure turning it white from lack of blood. He realized that if he was close enough to see such a thing, he should probably take a step away. But he didn't move, waiting for the moment she released her lip, knowing it would flush the prettiest shade of pink.

He'd lost his gods damned mind.

He stepped back.

"Come on, Granger. Pop it in that impressively spacious bag of yours and let's get this over with."

That seems to snap her out of her staring contest with the book she so clearly coveted.

"I'll buy another one if I miss it terribly," he assured her. She narrowed her eyes at him, and he enjoyed the thrill of watching her try to decide if he'd been serious or not.

She took another moment to consider before sighing, a long-suffering kind of sigh that Pansy Parkinson would have been oh-so-proud of. She opened her little beaded bag and carefully added the book to whatever monstrous collection lived inside that undetectable extension charm that he'd been tactful enough not to point out.

—

Arriving at the Leaky Cauldron with the intention of meeting up with Harry Potter, at least two Weasleys, and an unknown number of extraneous Gryffindors, felt like an out of body experience. Doing so with Hermione Granger as his unofficial guide felt downright dreamlike.

Granger spotted Potter several seconds after Draco had already found him tucked away in the far corner of the pub—a lifetime of picking Potter out of a crowd apparently didn't stop being a skill when it went unused for several years. He'd have one drink. He'd fulfill his obligation to come and socialize because Granger had told her friends that Draco wasn't that bad anymore, or something to that effect.

Granger waved. Draco tried not to sneer when he made eye contact with Weasley.

He was betrothed. This was a friendly birthday outing. This was not inappropriate. This was not uncomfortable. He could do this.

He'd been about to excuse himself to get his single drink and sink into his Occlumency when Granger pulled him forward and tugged him through a maze of tables and chairs, stopping them in front of a large booth containing Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Ginny Weasley, and Neville Longbottom. Every set of eyes at the table, and what felt like the rest of the room, stared at Draco. He could feel Granger looking up at him, too, from where she stood by his side.

Potter was the first to move, standing from the booth and offering Granger a hug. No one else moved, least of all Draco, who felt a little bit like he'd walked into some kind of trap. Absurdly, he wondered if he didn't move, didn't speak, didn't breathe, he might be able to avoid springing it.

Then Ginny Weasley sprang it for him.

"Evening, ferret."

"Pleasure, she-weasel."

He heard Granger's little intake of breath beside him, nearly as crushing as the force of awkwardness trying to suffocate them all. He froze it out, sank into his Occlumency, and slid into the booth next to Longbottom, as neutral a party as he was going to find. In the fog of his mental wards, Draco realized they'd intentionally left that seat open: poor Longbottom had the honor of being neutral territory.

At some point, Draco finally got his drink. And eventually got roped into a second. He engaged in neutral, barely coherent conversation, occluding himself into such a fog that not even Ron Weasley's inability to hold his liquor—face growing red, limbs growing sloppy—was enough to pull Draco to the surface to engage in an insult or two. Nor did Potter's ever-suspicious glare convince him to snap or sneer.

Draco said something about Herbology to Longbottom.

"Well, the Sneezewort yields have been finicky with us having such a warm summer, you know?" Longbottom said, taking a sip of his butterbeer.

Draco did not know. He didn't remember what he'd said to elicit an assessment of Sneezewort crops. So he just nodded, sipping his own drink in turn. He could feel the weaslette's eyes on him with about as much subtlety as a bombarda. He refused to look in her direction.

He dipped into a calm, placid pool of conversation topics and picked one for Longbottom: voice level and listless as he did.

"Are you enjoying teaching at Hogwarts?"

Longbottom said something. Draco didn't pay attention.

This time he felt Granger's eyes on him. Her thigh pressed up against his as he sat sandwiched between her and Longbottom, unfortunately central in the booth. Her gaze irritated his temples; he packed that up and flaked it away, too. He should have banished the creeping warmth running along the side of his leg where she sat flushed against him, but for reasons he refused to acknowledge, he let those treacherous feelings slide.

When he'd drained his drink, he had Granger let him out of the booth. He offered a series of lifeless goodbyes and left, opting for a walk through Diagon Alley as he pulled back his Occlumency. Flooing while heavily occluded felt like asking for the headache he'd been trying so hard to avoid.

He focused on the cool autumn air, pulling the ice from his mind and to the surface of his skin, reassembling the discarded parts of himself he'd chipped away in order to survive a social gathering with Harry Potter and the like.

"Draco."

He turned, Granger had followed him onto the cobbled street, clutching a butterbeer; her third of the evening by his count.

"You're really leaving?" she asked, a slight unsteadiness to her step as she shifted her weight from foot to foot. The soft glow of the streetlamp amplified the flush creeping up her neck, though whether that coloring came from drinking or something else, Draco couldn't tell.

"I am."

He held tight to the fragments of his Occlumency he'd yet to dismantle.

"Why? You've barely said a word since you arrived." She took a step forward, then three more in rapid succession, marching herself into his personal space. She seemed only to remember the drink in her hand when she stopped, grimacing as the golden froth sloshed over the rim and dripped onto her hand. Undeterred, she stared up at him and made a triumphant sound. "You're occluding. You have been all night, haven't you?"

"I appreciate the invitation, Granger. It was very kind of you to include me with your friends, but—I don't fit in with them. I don't want to ruin anything. Wouldn't you like to have a pleasant birthday?"

"Kind of me?"

She rolled her eyes and took a sip of her drink. Draco reached for her elbow, pulling her gently to the side so as to make room for a passing couple.

"Draco, you are one of my friends."

For the first time, it occurred to him that she'd been using his first name. For how long? The whole day? The week? He couldn't recall. But it was that use, in conjunction with the assertion that he was her friend, that struck him.

She kept talking, chatty from the alcohol.

"I've probably spent more time with you in the last eight months than I have with Harry, Ginny, and Ron combined."

"I'm—I'm not your friend." What might have sounded mean, sounded cruel as a straightforward statement, mostly came out confused, disappointed.

"Yes, you are. And quit occluding. You don't have to. We're just having some drinks. They've all promised to behave."

"You didn't make me promise to behave."

"Because I knew you would."

He had to physically step away from her. That level of trust, that was too much. She had no reason to even remotely believe so highly of him.

"Hermione." Had he ever called her by her name before? "We're not—we can't be friends. I wouldn't be a good friend for you."

Primarily because he kept forgetting who he was, who she was, and who he was meant to marry more often than not in her presence. Especially when she had her thigh pressed up against the side of his leg. His focus had gone into rapid decay, a planet nearing a black hole, torn further and further to shreds with each revolution.

She frowned, taking her own step away from him, back towards the Leaky.

"Well, that's fine. I'm a good enough friend for the both of us," she said, tucking a mass of curls behind her ear. "I'm fine with waiting until you sort yourself out."

She turned and left, disappearing inside the pub before Draco could fully register what she'd said, or more, what she'd meant. He let the rest of his Occlumency fall, heat rushing him, doing battle with the chill in the air.

He couldn't decide if he was more stunned or impressed. He nearly walked back into the Leaky, just to follow the pull of her, daring him to do it.

—

When Draco finally stepped through the Floo, a Malfoy eagle owl waited at one of the windows to his flat, perched on the tiny sill and tap tap tapping with its beak.

It was only as he offered the bird a treat and sent it away that Draco realized what its presence meant; his parents had figured out he'd left the manor. He groaned, breaking the wax seal he recognized from his father's office, fully prepared for a written lambasting.

Instead, he found something startlingly like a business proposal. Or rather, a very taciturn notice that Lucius had transferred management of one of the family investment accounts into Draco's name. It required his signature to complete.

Draco stared at it, trying to make sense of the sudden gift of responsibility, of inclusion, in something he'd been frozen out of for the entirety of his life. It looked like an olive branch but felt like a trap.

He poured himself a drink, sat on the green velvet sofa in his living room—with only a brief thought to Hermione's protests that perhaps they ought to consider a custody arrangement over it—and stared at the letter from his father sitting innocently, too innocently, on the table in front of him. Suspicion, exhaustion, and hope warred inside him: a fight to the death, most likely.

He'd spent years in a stalemate with his father. Living under house arrest together had pushed them from disagreements to disappointments to simple avoidance, mutual and permanent. At least, Draco had assumed the permanence.

It didn't make sense. It didn't feel right. His stomach churned, and likely not from his extended use of Occlumency that evening. Something else unsettled him. He tensed at the sound of a clock chiming. He counted, barely nine in the evening, and he felt utterly wrung out. As the reverberations from the chime faded, a small thought surfaced in Draco's mind.

He and Theo had toyed with time. They'd changed one small series of events involving his father. He'd only thought of the turner in passing over the past few months, never really lending any credence to the potential implications of changing the trajectory of time. And he'd almost completely forgotten the original version of events from that day: where Draco had not been included in Granger's initial arrival, where there'd been no interruption, no lecture, none of it at all. He wondered which piece, if any of it, set into motion a version of reality where Lucius offered Draco more authority in the family affairs.

He groaned, leaning his head back against the sofa. Or maybe none of it. Maybe this would have happened regardless, and the things he and Theo did or did not change had absolutely no impact.

His head hurt.

All Draco knew was that he'd sought his father's acceptance for so long that even this small showing of faith felt like belonging, more so than he cared to admit. Gods he wanted to belong, to something, to someone, to fucking anything. The business opportunity tempted him, wildly so. But to accept it would mean accepting more of Lucius Malfoy into his life.

He'd thought it was best to cut himself out entirely. He'd left and studied abroad; he'd bought his own flat when he came back. He'd tried to excise the rotten flesh, slash and burn the crops, amputate the dead limb. But he still felt the phantom pains from time to time; a piece of parchment held the cure.

He set his empty glass down on the table and summoned a quill. If his father was willing to try, Draco could as well. He signed the document, waiting for a rush of adrenaline to give feeling to what should have been excitement: finally a participant in the Malfoy family investments. Finally in control of an account. Finally trusted to carry on part of the family legacy.

But he only felt more phantom pains, remembrance of a limb he'd already abandoned. And he wondered if that meant it was too late.

The clock chimed again. An hour had passed in a moment.