November
tock
Three weeks of waiting slipped by before Lucius finally summoned Draco to his office. It came as no surprise, Draco had been expecting it—waiting for it—since the moment his mother had lifted her hand in complete fury and disappointment. Three weeks of stunted, almost-nonexistent conversations at breakfasts and dinners. Three weeks of riling Granger while watching her work and finally feeling like a free, normal person in her presence. He knew, but hadn't fully realized, how much effort it had taken for him to occlude most of his days away, or pretend not to think half the thoughts he had. The absence of that effort left room for so much more living.
Three weeks of refining his experiments, trying to bind his potions to the theory he'd learned from Granger about her diagnostic spells. Three weeks of the scars on his chest burning less and less, fighting back against his attempts at healing them less and less.
It happened like this:
Draco knocked on the heavy paneled door a moment before his father's voice carried through it with a sharp, "Enter."
He walked into the office with hardly any expectations. He expected a lecture. He expected disappointment. Beyond that, he expected little else.
Lucius didn't look up from the parchments in front of him, and that image echoed with a boom, reverberating through Draco's memory. He'd been here before. Done this before. He took his seat across from Lucius's desk, waiting for neither direction nor permission.
Silence stretched on the razor-thin edge of one man's patience and another's ire. Draco felt it, considered the balance, teetering, and let out a breath, enough to totter.
"You're displeased," Draco said.
Lucius paused, quill against parchment. Draco stared at the grandfather clock behind the desk, just above his father's head. He watched the second-hand tick, counting the time between his words and his father's response.
Another echo rattled through him, one of sand in an hourglass, counting a different kind of time.
Lucius set his quill on the desk and offered Draco the parchment, a sneer twisting his lip to something sour.
"The dissolution of your betrothal agreement. It requires your signature."
Draco didn't look at the parchment. Instead, he watched his father's face, trying not to shrink under the withering discontent he found there. Finally, he glanced down at the parchment in his hands.
"This was initiated by the Greengrass Estate."
"Of course it was."
"You weren't going to—after Astoria and I—"
"I had no intention of sabotaging a year's worth of negotiations because you said something idiotic. But the girl clearly convinced her father—"
"—Because neither of us wanted it—" Draco broke off, blanching. He held a breath deep in his lungs, appalled at himself for interrupting, knowing it would only make his father's mood worse.
"The Greengrasses are a fine, respectable family."
A beat. Draco took the silence to mean he should respond.
"She didn't want to marry me, either, Father."
"The point of a betrothal is that it isn't a choice. It is a strategic partnership between families."
A knuckle in Draco's left hand cracked, distractingly loud in the large office. He hadn't even been aware of how hard he'd clenched his hand into a fist. There were several things Draco wanted to say. He took a breath, and with past regrets and future hopes battling for attention, Draco said one of them.
"I'm not available to act as a pawn in games of strategy, Father."
Lucius laughed a liquid, toxic laugh that washed over Draco's skin and burned away his confidence.
"It was difficult enough to broker that match. With the Parkinson girl out of the picture it will be difficult to find another household willing to marry into ours."
Draco had been completely ignored. So he said another of the many things he wanted to say.
"That predicament is our own doing."
Lucius didn't respond. It was as if Draco had no voice, or that his voice had no sound.
"You've accepted more responsibility in the family affairs. The account you're managing, how is it performing?"
"Well."
Barely. He tracked profits and margins almost as obsessively as he brewed his experimental potions. It was boring, dull, tedious work. It meant a parliament of owls to and from Gringotts and subscriptions to several herbology periodicals to familiarize himself with his investments. He'd considered owling Neville Longbottom in one or two moments of exceptional frustration. He barely had a profit to show for any of it. But this was the one piece of involvement in the family affairs he'd been given. So he handled it. He tried to appreciate and enjoy it.
"You aren't allowed both, Draco."
He blinked. Confused at what his father meant, but a hot flush behind his ribs felt like a warning.
"You will either accept your role as heir to this household and all that it entails, or you don't."
All that it entails. The wife he did not want. The business that did not interest him. And yet, the only paths to belonging.
And if I don't want all that it entails? He wanted to say it, he could feel it—just there—poised on a traitorous tongue. But he'd already delivered so much disrespect, upset his father in so many ways. There were limits, lines that could not be crossed no matter how much he wanted to cross them, just to see the other side.
Granger's frustratingly optimistic voice floated through his head, suggesting that his life did not have to operate in ultimatums. That he could be his family's heir and still have some measure of control over the path his life took. Especially now, after already having surrendered so much control for so long. It seemed like the sort of reasonable optimism she would spew.
But Granger's logic had no place in a meeting with Lucius Malfoy. Logic and tradition did not mix. Ultimatums and history did not listen to reason.
Draco bit his tongue, holding his treasonous words inside.
Lucius dismissed him, and the tightness in his face looked more like disappointment than anything else. It sank something inside Draco's chest; even when he won, he lost. He'd clawed himself out of one pit only to stumble into another.
He paused at the door. He wondered.
Change didn't have to be their enemy.
Did Lucius even know how hard he fought it?
—
"I distinctly remember being told I'd have a part in this process," Theo said as he sat next to Draco in the middle of a November afternoon. Granger had been working inside the room across from his chaise for the last forty-five minutes, and Draco had started growing twitchy, resisting the urge to check up on her. Knowing she'd be annoyed by his overbearing concern—her words, not his—kept him reluctantly rooted to his seat.
"Afternoon, Theo. Welcome to my home."
"Not exactly your home. Not anymore."
"Semantics."
Theo snatched the book from Draco's hands and tossed it on the floor, where it slid along granite tiles with an obscene sort of scraping sound. Draco blinked, watching as it finally came to a stop several feet away.
"What the fuck was that for?" Draco asked, rising, only to fall back down, stumbling from a jelly-legs jinx. "Theo." The threat in his tone landed flat, mostly exasperated.
"We need to talk," Theo said as if this were a perfectly reasonable way to initiate a conversation.
"And my book was an impediment to that?"
"And since you haven't actually invited me to be here"—he spoke over Draco's question, gesturing around them—"I've taken it upon myself to 'distract you,' isn't that how you put it?"
"Theo—"
"And what excitement to witness, wouldn't you say? This corridor, thrilling. You reading, I can hardly contain myself—"
"Theo—"
"Where's Granger?"
Theo's tone dropped, performative pitch abandoned in favor of something suddenly serious. Facing moderate whiplash from Theo's shift, Draco nodded dumbly towards the door across from them.
"Does she know?" Theo asked.
"Know what?"
"I'm not generally a very violent person, Draco. But I find myself wanting to hit you."
His betrothal. Or rather, lack thereof, then.
"It hasn't come up—and how do you know anyway?"
Theo breathed a disbelieving sort of laugh.
"Obviously, Pansy told me after Daphne told her after Astoria told her after you apparently told her you didn't want to marry her over a lovely crudité and tea service, you fucking twat."
Draco had his eyes glued on the door across from them, newly invested in Granger taking as long as she needed to decommission that particular room.
"What happened to only having supportive things to say?" Draco asked, turning to Theo and hissing the words in as low a whisper as he could manage.
"Me being supportive and you being a twat aren't mutually exclusive—Oh, afternoon, Granger."
Draco's eyes snapped back up, Granger had exited her room and stood at the doorway with her head tilted, looking at them with curiosity.
"Question for you, Granger: whales?"
She blinked, blank with confusion before she smiled.
"Whales?"
"Yes. Do muggles believe in those?"
"Yes, Theo."
Theo made a thoughtful noise, "Interesting."
She laughed, shook her head, and then walked to the next room.
"I've got work to do so I'll just leave you two to—"
"Yes, yes, Granger. You're a very busy woman, don't let us keep you."
Draco must have dropped into an alternate reality, inter-dimensional travel, a dream world. The door clicked behind Granger, and he turned back to Theo.
"Whales?"
"Muggles don't think dragons are real. Makes me wonder what other animals they don't believe in."
"Whales aren't magical."
"They breathe air but live underwater. And muggles don't know about kelpies; I'm fairly certain whales and kelpies are related. And then there's business at Loch Ness."
"There aren't enough hours in the day for you to pick up a magical creatures hobby, too."
"Maybe that's what I made that time-turner for."
Draco sighed. Theo was in one of those moods. He did not relish having to reign in his focus.
"About me being a twat?"
Theo lifted his brows as if to say you brought it up, not me.
"Did you do it for her?"
"I'm not—Theo, don't."
"I'm neither blind nor an idiot. And I'm friends with both of you now. I see things."
"Theo she's not—I doubt she'd ever," Draco's shoulders sank, words stalling.
"I hope you did it for her—is what I mean to say," Theo added with a shrug. "Blaise might be the only Seer amongst us, but I have a good feeling about the two of you." Theo paused, then shuddered. "And please don't make me repeat that. It was hard enough to say the once."
Draco felt his eyes widening, brows furrowing, confusion and disbelief and something distinctly grateful winding its way around his throat, choking his response.
Theo settled against the back of the chaise, a forced and familiar air of nonchalance overtaking his demeanor. "This is boring. Is this what it's like watching me try to break into my family vault?"
Theo's nonchalance—a shift executed with practiced ease—suggested a strange, unlikely approval of Draco's situation with Granger, denied for so long.
"This is much more exciting. Granger actually accomplishes something," he said, knowing Theo would take offense.
—
Even with shrinking and featherlight charms, packing up and moving the manor's haphazard potions lab turned out to be no small task. Draco kept finding vials he'd forgotten about: all manner of colorful concoctions he couldn't remember if he'd already tested. He couldn't even confidently identify many of them. In a month's-long string of iterative potions experimentation, fuschia, magenta, mauve, and maroon all started to look the same, mean the same. Knowing Draco's luck, at least one would burn a hole straight through his skin.
The cauldrons were complicated. He couldn't move them with active brews, which meant finishing all his experiments and resisting the urge to start new ones until he'd set up a new lab in his flat. It would be worth it though, for the independence, for the space he needed.
"I had to ask Topsy where you were."
Draco startled, nearly dropping the cauldron he'd been levitating. He brought it to rest on the workbench and turned to find Hermione at the entrance to his lab—or, what would imminently be his former lab.
He smiled, mostly against his will.
"I'm sure she was honored to assist you."
Hermione's mouth twisted and her shoulders sank. He saw the tiny twitch towards a smile at the edge of her lips, betraying her.
"Overwhelmingly so."
"She has a touch of hero-worship, causes me indigestion. Or perhaps she's considering nesting in your hair."
Hermione rolled her eyes and took a step into the space with him, curious eyes scanning the room as she tried to hide her grin with a very unconvincing scowl.
"You're not concerned I'll ruin your ancestral home today?" She glanced at her watch. "I've been alone for almost two hours, who knows what havoc I've already wreaked."
No, he was not worried in the slightest. She'd probably implode from disgrace at her failed duty before she did anything even remotely unprofessional. Which could be interesting to watch. But moving his lab had been an excellent excuse to avoid her. Day after day, her proximity grew exhausting, overwhelming, tangible in a way he couldn't explain.
He needed a break from the overwhelming want of her: her acceptance, her friendship, her laugh, her pretty fucking lips. His father would be furious if he found out Draco had left her to her own devices. But on the extensive list of things that made his father furious, a little autonomy for Hermione barely registered when Draco had things like familial duty and failed marriage contracts to consider.
He shrugged.
"I trust you."
She paused, eyes catching on what probably looked like chaos in stasis around him.
"What are you doing?"
"Moving my potions setup to my flat. I—don't like being here more than I need to be."
He could have told her about breaking off his betrothal then. It was but one of many opportunities he'd had in the last month. But he couldn't do it. Every time he thought he might, he hid from it. Telling her felt like placing expectations on her, like there was some unspoken thing they'd agreed upon that said his betrothal was the problem, the thing holding so much at bay. But being unspoken meant that there was the very real possibility that he'd only imagined it, assumed it. Being almost-friends with her without the weight of his looming nuptials could be enough.
The problem, though, was that he knew it wouldn't be. Because while he didn't have expectations, he had wants. So fucking many of them. Most of them involving his mouth and her skin. Her lips and his cock. Her head and his heart.
"Would you like some help?"
With getting the image of you, naked and bent over one of these tables, out of my head? Yes.
That runaway thought stole his ability to answer with anything but a strangled, "Sure."
Which was how he ended up with Hermione Granger in his fucking flat.
Hermione helped Draco move several cauldrons and a fair few more boxes of ingredients into the room he'd set aside in his flat for brewing. She worked diligently, methodically, and as if helping him move his potions set up was the most important thing about her being there. Draco had difficulty separating her actual purpose from the strange and overwhelming intimacy of having her in his home.
This place was his, not his family's. It felt like cracking open a part of himself and letting her peek inside. He'd only ever had Theo and Blaise over. And now Hermione Granger could be added to that limited list. Brilliant as she was, he knew she'd see the differences. Dark grain wood floors that echoed in a key entirely unlike granite and tile. Bright white walls and high ceilings, as far from masonry and brocade wallpapers as he could find. Green and black and silver, bookcases and broomsticks, a grandfather clock with a miniature snitch zipping behind the glass face: light and life and everything he could think of to make a space entirely him, entirely unlike the manor.
With the last box ferried through the Floo, Hermione collapsed on the green velvet sofa in his main living room, helping herself to his hospitality, it seemed. She smiled, giving the cushion beside her a fond sort of pat.
"My old friend," she said wistfully, leaning over and letting her head rest again the arm. From where Draco stood near the fireplace he heard her stifle a giggle. "It's not very comfortable, is it?"
"Don't insult your first conquest."
She made a humming sound, sitting back up. She rolled her neck, stretching as if she'd been lounging for hours and not the scant handful of seconds she'd spent pretending to rest.
"My first of many."
On the topic of conquests, Draco couldn't help but include himself in that count.
She popped up from the couch, crossing the room with such speed he wondered if she'd used magic to propel herself. She stopped in front of his bookcase.
"You have books."
Obviously. But there was something so earnest in her tone that any snide responses evaporated in his mouth, leaving something only partly playful.
"I do know how to read."
"The snark's not necessary, Draco." She smiled as she said it, fingers trailing the spines of several books in front of her.
And even though she wasn't even looking at him, certainly wasn't touching him, he could feel her observation. He could feel her fingertips, grazing book spines or his own, it felt the same. Reading the titles felt like reading him, knowing him. He could feel the prick and tingle of scrutiny shooting a thrill through him: a surge from being seen. These were his books. Not the manor's. Mostly potions texts, a few on herbology, an odd novel or two. Hardly a complex collection, but things he'd chosen to bring with him when he moved and that felt like it mattered.
"I rather think the snark is essential to my personality, actually."
That he spoke at all was a bit of a miracle, dry throat trying to hold the words in.
Her hand dropped, fingers finished in their exploration. It felt like a loss. She turned away from the bookshelf, facing him again.
"Do you like fiction?"
"I do."
She bit her lip, a litany of thoughts rushing across her face.
"Do you—would you—read muggle fiction?"
Draco didn't know if that offended him or not. Perhaps it should? Or perhaps it didn't matter? Was the point that she thought he might not read muggle fiction? Or did it matter more that she thought he might be willing to try? All he knew was that he wanted to touch that bottom lip of hers, taste it, take it for himself and wrench whatever lovely sounds he could from her in the process, books be damned.
"I'm not opposed, no."
She didn't elaborate. Instead, she smiled, lips spreading wide.
He had to get her out of his home. She'd already generated enough fantasy fodder to last him a lifetime. He couldn't take it anymore.
"We should head back," he said.
Her eyes widened.
"I'm supposed to be working."
She looked like someone had just prophesied her early death, color dropping out of her face, horror spelled in the soft 'O' made by her mouth.
Draco laughed, even when she frowned at him for doing so. Gods, it was so fucking earnest, so precious, so beautiful he could hardly stand it.
"I won't tell if you won't, Granger."
She looked at him for the space of another breath—enough time for him to remember how very seriously he needed her out of his flat—before she reached for the Floo powder and returned to the manor and, presumably, her work.
—
Since forcing Hermione to teach him the theory, incantation, and wand movements associated with her diagnostic spells, Draco experimented with every method he could conceive of to bind that magic to his potion. Its simplicity had to be the answer: a way to identify and isolate the dark magic, to pull it from the scar tissue where it could then be destroyed, no damage done to the body. Every iteration thus far had been a disaster. Until—
He massaged his chest, fingers tracing a smooth expanse of skin without interruption: nothing upraised, nothing mottled, nothing sore, nothing cursed. Draco transfigured a mirror from a shard of glass—what had once been a vial for his potion before he'd dropped it in surprise—and examined his chest.
The largest of his sectumsempra scars, the one that bisected his torso, twisting around his ribs on the left side, formerly red and purple and generally quite irritated, had vanished. Or, more appropriately, Draco vanished it with a simple scar smoothing potion, something that only worked to any degree because his other potion, the one he'd finally managed to bind part of Hermione's diagnostics spells to, had successfully rid the scar of lingering dark magic.
It had been a simple thing, an easy thing, once he knew how to do it. Success merely required the right combination of ingredients, magic, and time. No different than any other potion he'd ever brewed. The act of trial and error simply expanded time's role in the equation.
He started brewing a larger batch immediately, buoyed by the adrenaline of discovery. He was a fucking genius. He'd done a thing—invented a thing—that not even the healers at St. Mungo's had done.
He brewed for too long. Which made him late for breakfast. Which made him late meeting Hermione.
She surprised him, waiting for him instead of the other way around, standing in the middle of the most recent corridor she'd been working in. She tapped her foot, eyes narrowed, arms crossed, with a parchment crushed in her hands, practically vibrating with what looked suspiciously like furious energy.
She marched straight up to him, eyes definitely alight with anger. She whacked the parchments—a copy of The Daily Prophet—against his chest, forcing him to take it. One day earlier and the action would have smacked directly on the scar he'd removed mere hours earlier. It stalled him momentarily, marveling at the absence of what had been there for so long.
"What is that?" she asked, a stiff jerk of her hand towards the paper he now held.
He raised a brow, in too good a mood to be put off by whatever had soured her so severely.
"Is snark still disallowed, or shall I explain what a periodical is?"
"Table the snark, Malfoy. Page three. What is that announcement?"
He tried to think of the last time she'd called him Draco. He missed it. He'd almost grown accustomed to his given name spoken by her lips, even when she used this swotty, authoritative tone.
He opened the Prophet and flipped to page three. Ah. He tried not to sigh, knowing she would probably catalogue his every last reaction, but the breath slipped from him regardless.
"It looks an awful lot like a statement rescinding my betrothal announcement."
Because of course the dissolution of a marriage contract between two Sacred Twenty Eight families warranted a news piece.
"Why?"
"I'll need you to narrow down the scope of your question, Granger. Why is there an announcement? Because the contract has been dissolved. Why has it been dissolved? Because neither Astoria nor I had any interest in engaging in—"
"Why didn't you say anything?"
Draco literally could not fathom of a worse 'why' for her to want the answer to.
"It's hardly a casual conversation topic," he said, hedging. "Oh, Granger, did that snuffbox shock you? Also, did you know I'm no longer betrothed?"
Her frown deepened as she crossed her arms. Draco let his hand holding the Prophet drop to his side, pinching at the bridge of his nose with the other. He didn't know what she wanted from him. He'd not told her specifically to avoid upsetting her, not wanting her to think he meant or expected anything by it. But now, she was upset that he hadn't said anything.
"When did it happen?" she asked. Her voice lost a bit of its edge, quieting.
"Last month."
"Last month?"
"After."
He didn't elaborate. He simply watched her face, waiting for recognition, if there was any. Was there a before and after for her, too? There certainly had been for him. Before that moment in the greenhouse, and after. Two separate states of being with a line between them painted by her hand on his chest.
Her brows lifted, just enough.
For her, too, then.
He shouldn't have felt a rush of excitement at that little realization, but he did all the same. He probably ought not wish for her to have experienced even a fraction of the strange, half-existence of not really acknowledging whatever was or was not happening between them.
The fact that for her there had been a before where now there was an after; it felt like a snitch behind his ribs in rapid flight, struggling to escape.
"Oh," she finally said, looking past him.
"It didn't seem fair to marry her," he elaborated, entirely unprompted. "And as it turns out, she didn't want to marry me, either. We both would have been doing it out of a sense of misplaced duty."
"Misplaced duty," she said, an almost silent repetition of his words. She still looked past him, somewhere over his left shoulder, not totally a participant in conversation with him.
"I think I've had enough of misplaced duty in my life."
Her eyes finally flickered to him, an expressive, open brown.
He wondered then if he should kiss her. Really kiss her. Not a theoretical wondering in an inappropriate moment. But rather, a real moment where he could actually dip his head and bring his mouth to hers. Every muscle in his body practically pushed him to do it: warm and thrumming and drawn to her. He probably could. Maybe he should.
But he didn't. He didn't want to kiss her for the first time, or possibly any time, in his family estate. Nor did he think it should happen after enormous, likely confusing news.
But gods, he really wanted to kiss her.
And for the first time, he wondered if perhaps she might actually let him.
"Right," she said with a small jolt, as if she had to physically throw off whatever had been on her mind. He knew what had been on his. He hadn't even considered what might be on hers. "We almost have this wing finished, we should get to work."
"We?"
The smirk formed slowly, almost calculated, and coupled with something mischievous behind her eyes.
"You're effectively my assistant, Malfoy."
"Draco," he said, before he could even consider taking it back.
She blinked, smirk shifting into a smile.
"Hermione," she said.
"Hermione."
Her name tasted of chocolate truffles and apple caramel ice cream and dangerous new beginnings. Of things that came after.