May

tick tock

In yet another series of events Draco could never have imagined prior to entangling himself in a relationship with Hermione Granger, he found himself sitting in Harry Potter's home on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts.

Strangely, Draco had actually visited Grimmauld Place once before, when he was very young, accompanying his mother to the property upon the passing of her Aunt Walburga. Narcissa had called the home unsalvageable and set her sights on newer properties in the city, should they wish to invest in London real estate. Draco remembered her surprise when his Aunt Bellatrix never claimed the decrepit old home either, leaving it abandoned until Harry Potter and his ever righteous band of Gryffindors took up residence.

Sitting in the home now, Draco found the clash between classic pureblood aristocratic interior design and what he could only assume was the Weaslette's attempt at making the space less, well, nightmare-inducing with a collection of excessively fluffy throw pillows, distinctly disorienting and unsettling.

Nervousness chewed at his skin: a constant, prickling reminder that he did not belong with these people, especially not on this day. Hermione had insisted it would be a small gathering, that they simply liked to spend time together on a difficult day, eating food, having some drinks. She seemed incapable of understanding that his presence ought to be offensive and grotesque, that he would be unwelcome. His protests clattered uselessly against the optimism she wore like armor.

He might have felt proud that he'd so thoroughly charmed her into ignoring his horror show of a history, if not for the fact that those charms had landed him in Harry Potter's living room, loitering in a far corner and trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.

A pink-haired blur threw itself over the arm of his chair, tiny hands grabbing for purchase as Draco heard a breathless oomph from impact. Teddy Lupin looked up at him, pink hair melting into an uncanny white-blond.

"Why are you in the corner?" Teddy asked.

"I'm hiding."

Teddy wrinkled his nose, eyeing the doorway as if expecting Andromeda to appear at any moment to ruin his fun.

"Is it because of the vegetables? I can't have any more sweets until I eat my vegetables. Grandmother says so."

Draco let out a gasp of mock shock. "There are vegetables, too? All the more reason for us to hide, don't you think?"

"I want to play outside."

"You and me both, kid. A game of Quidditch would do wonders for my stress right about now."

Teddy bounced against the armrest, eyes wide with excitement.

"You play Quidditch? Uncle Harry plays Quidditch. He's the best—"

"Let's not be hasty. Potter is hardly the best. He's adequate and infuriatingly lucky."

"You—talk funny."

Draco sighed, wincing.

"Sorry—I don't talk to a lot of kids. I just mean, he's not the best. I played against him in school."

"Did you beat him?"

"Well—I, there was one time—"

"Was there?" Potter asked from the doorway, brows lifted over his stupid spectacles.

"Yes. There was."

"Was that the time—well, one of the times—I was unconscious?"

Draco faltered. Honestly, he wasn't sure.

Potter clearly didn't expect an answer; he stepped into the room and dropped onto a nearby sofa.

"What are you two doing in here? There's food downstairs in the kitchens if you're hungry."

"We're hiding," Teddy said before launching himself into Potter's midsection.

Potter made a strangled sound upon impact, but laughed as he lifted the boy and planted him back on the floor.

"Got room for one more?" Potter asked. Teddy nodded enthusiastically. "I get why Malfoy's hiding, but why are you here, Teddy?"

"Did you know Draco is my cousin?" Teddy asked, completely ignoring Potter's question. "He's really cool."

"First cousin once removed," Draco said beneath his breath. He picked at a loose thread on the arm of his chair, rubbing it between two fingers and expecting the worst. He couldn't foresee any good coming from Potter's decision to voluntarily spend time alone—well, mostly alone—in the same room as Draco.

And on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts, no less.

Potter didn't spare Draco a second glance. Instead, he laid sideways on the sofa, still engaging Teddy.

"He's cool, huh? What makes him so cool, then?"

"His hair."

"I thought you liked my hair," Potter said.

"His is cooler."

That probably shouldn't have pleased Draco as much as it did.

Potter seemed to ponder that before he poked Teddy in the stomach, sending the child scampering out of reach with a shrill laugh.

"What else is so cool about Malfoy?"

"He doesn't like vegetables, either."

Draco heard Potter suppress a snort of laughter. He narrowed his eyes in Potter's general direction, but didn't have a great line of sight from his seat in the corner. He could only see Teddy, animated and excited, talking about Draco as if he wasn't there. More than that, being adorably complimentary about it.

He supposed kids weren't so bad. At least they didn't come with any predisposed opinions about him, his family, or his past. Teddy simply saw him as a cousin with cool hair who didn't like vegetables, which to be fair, was really all someone needed to know in order to make a reasonable character assessment.

"I've got bad news for you, bud," Potter said. "There are definitely vegetables downstairs in the kitchen. And I'm pretty sure I saw your grandmother putting some on a plate for you."

Teddy grumbled, distancing himself from Potter.

"I want cake," he said, bottom lip jutting out in a truly impressive pout.

Potter held his hands up in defense, "Take that up with your grandmother. I'm not in charge around here."

"But it's your house," Teddy said with a stomp, as if property ownership gave a man unlimited authority within his walls. Though technically, at Malfoy Manor and most other pureblood households, that was exactly the case.

Teddy switched targets, skipping back over to Draco and leveling him with a pleading stare.

"Draco, I want cake. Tell Uncle Harry I can have cake."

Oh no.

Oh no.

Draco couldn't tell if it was a trick of his metamorphmagus abilities or simply a gift of cuteness, but the wide, round eyes Teddy lobbed at him, mouth turned into a pout once again, completely dismantled any defenses Draco might have had towards reason.

"Potter, the kid wants cake."

"Malfoy—" Potter started, sitting up. He sounded simultaneously stunned and exasperated.

Draco gave a shrug, already knowing he'd been played. He'd hardly put up a fight.

"What? He said he wants cake. I want cake, too. You know what, Teddy? Let's go find some cake."

He stood, gesturing for Teddy to follow and pointedly avoiding Potter's eyes as they left the room.

Potter laughed and called out: "You can deal with Andromeda, then."

As it turned out, Teddy had already had one slice of cake, and Andromeda did not take kindly to Draco smuggling him another.

It was a worthwhile endeavor, however. Draco and Teddy had a great time, sequestered in the corner of the kitchen, indulging in a sugar high, and discussing some of the finer points of Quidditch, such as: it's called a bludger, not a bugger, that's a naughty word you shouldn't say around your grandmother—or ever and no, the quaffle isn't the most important ball just because it's the biggest.

—

"You seemed more relaxed once Teddy found you," Hermione said as they stepped through the Floo and into Draco's flat.

As it was a Friday, making the next day Saturday—his day—with her, Draco had high hopes of segueing his offer of late night drinks into an overnight stay. Heavy scheduling and a litany of commitments made slowing Hermione down long enough to stay the night a gargantuan task. He'd yet to have the honor, the pleasure, of having her spend the night in his bed. There was always a brunch she had planned or an out of town lecture she wanted to pop to before spending an afternoon with her parents or something else—anything, everything else, it sometimes seemed—that kept her away, kept her busy.

It bred an insecurity that Draco found decidedly distasteful and unnerving. It wasn't as if they hadn't been intimate. They might not have had an excessive amount of sex yet—fucking schedule—but it wasn't as if he didn't know how she flushed when she came, how she'd bite her lip to near bleeding, how her attempts at coherency dissolved into babbles and desperate pleas for more, yes, there and a slew of pretty, unintelligible noises.

And it wasn't as if she'd never put her hands or her mouth on his cock, like he had no familiarity with the ridges of her soft palate and the desperate, dangerous things she could do with her tongue. And how she was eager, so eager, to learn every way she might steal his breath—smiling a wicked grin every time she discovered a new method.

They'd even showered together once: soap and skin and lazy kisses against too-cold tile as they risked injury and tricky positioning for the accolade of having fucked in the shower.

He didn't even want her to spend the night exclusively for sex. Sure, that would be nice, more than nice—mind-blowing, he assumed. But in the scant few opportunities he'd had to hold her in the afterglow of one or several orgasms, Draco discovered a newfound passion for having her in his arms, for burying his face in her curls, for pressing himself so close he could feel her heartbeat against his, everything else around them utterly silent as he imagined them syncing.

Draco's solution came in the form of a gift, an offering to show her that she meant something to him, that this was something, difficult as it may be to articulate. He found a lovely necklace in one of his family's many vaults, selected for its rubies, something suitably Gryffindor for the color of her soul. He checked it for dark magic himself, just to be sure that his gift would do no harm.

She may have been raised by muggles, may not have a lifetime of pureblood courting practices ingrained in her brain, but she was still a learned witch. She would know what it meant, to give and accept family heirlooms. She had to know that giving something like that meant his time horizon ran longer than he was comfortable admitting, truth be told.

"I like Teddy," he said.

"He's really fun. Harry loves being his godfather."

She unfastened her cloak, shrugging it from her shoulders. Draco took it, hanging it on the hook by the door as he shed his own outerwear as well.

He guided her to the sofa and procured two tumblers and a bottle of firewhisky.

"I can't stay long," she told him. "There's a book signing at Flourish and Blotts tomorrow morning. I know it's your day, so I was hoping to head in early before we met for lunch."

He offered her a glass, eyes flicking to the drawer beside the sofa, where the necklace sat, waiting to be presented.

"I could come with you," he said, sitting beside her.

"Oh, that's kind of you to offer. But I was going to go as soon as they open, and then I wanted to take care of a few other errands while I'm out—"

"We could get breakfast and then go to the signing," he offered, treading dangerously close to a ledge it seemed increasingly likely she had no idea existed.

"I wouldn't want you to have to get up so early just to meet me—"

"I wouldn't have to meet you if you were still here and we went together."

He took a sip of his whisky to stifle the swell of frustrating nerves. He shouldn't be nervous. He had no reason to be. He and Hermione—they were something. They were close. This was a simple, easy conversation for a couple to have.

She stilled, staring at the drink in her hands, resting it against her leg. She blinked several times and looked up at him, mouth slightly parted into an 'O' shape.

"You mean—I could stay here?" She sounded genuinely confused.

His nerves vanished, burned away by the laugh bursting from his throat. He tried to hold it in; he had no intentions towards cruelty or humiliation. But the idea that such a thing could be surprising to her, well—there was something distinctly hilarious about it.

"Yes, Hermione. You could stay here."

She frowned, narrowing her eyes at him as she took her own sip of firewhisky.

"You don't need to laugh. It's not like I've done—that before."

"Not for my lack of trying," he said into his drink and mostly under his breath, recognizing it for the idiocy it was as soon as he'd said it.

"Lack of trying? You've never even asked," she said, setting her drink aside and scooting away. She crossed her arms: never a good sign for him.

"I—I'm sorry, do you mean if I had just said 'Hermione, would you like to stay the night?' you would have?"

"Well—yes. Maybe. I don't know. This is the first time you've brought it up. I didn't think you wanted me to—"

"Didn't want you to? What? Spend the night? Share my bed? Of course I do."

"How am I supposed to know that? You never said anything. You just—kiss me, and other things, and afterwards we talk or read or something and then—well, then I go back home."

"You always made it sound like you had to go. You're so busy all the time—"

"That's not—Draco. I—" Her indignation, a physical tension holding her tight, loosened: shoulders dropping, hands unclenching. She rubbed a hand along the back of her neck.

"It's been a long day. It can be emotional for me, the anniversary."

"I know," he agreed, and the room felt off, unusual, out of sorts. If they had a fancy diagnostic spell for a mood being flipped upside down, he imagined his living room would register heavily with red runes. He knew just the thing to flip it back, to correct this strange shift between them.

He twisted, reaching for the table drawer. He pulled out a wide, flat, velvet jewelry box.

"I have something for you," he said. If this didn't tell her what he meant, he didn't know what would.

She didn't immediately reach for the box. He watched her swallow, eyes fixed on black velvet. He cracked it open, savoring the sound of her breath as it hitched.

But she didn't reach for the necklace, either. He set the box down between them, lifting the gold chain with its dangling rubies from within.

"This was my great grandmother Theresia's. I thought the rubies were appropriate for you."

She still didn't move. He started to feel a bit ridiculous, wondering if he should ask that she turn so he could help her put it on.

"Draco, I can't accept that."

"What?"

"That's—a family heirloom? It looks historic, and expensive. I couldn't possibly."

"Of course you can. I want you to have it."

She stood from the sofa, hands flexing at her sides. She shook out her arms, took several steps away, pivoted, then returned, standing next to the coffee table.

The necklace grew heavy, a weight he wasn't prepared to bear. He lowered his hands, jewelry resting in his lap as he looked up at her, not understanding, wishing he did, but also fearing what that meant.

"You can't just—I can't just. A family heirloom?" she asked again, as if it was some kind of inconceivable, wildly foreign concept to her.

She'd repeated herself, and he found himself doing the same.

"I want you to have it."

Her mouth twisted into a shape foreign to him, one he had neither met nor catalogued. She laughed through a strained sort of grimace, hovering near a frown: a host of conflict born by her lips.

"Draco you can't just give me a family heirloom—expensive, historic jewelry like I'm your—your—"

"My what?"

"Your girlfriend."

If her words were a meteor and his chest its destination: she'd carved a crater where his heart used to beat and his lungs used to breathe.

"You—are my girlfriend." He probably should have emphasized the are. But none of the words had emphasis. They tasted sour.

Her look of genuine, unfiltered confusion crumbled at the crater's still smoldering edges in his chest.

"I know you've joked about that before but—"

"What do you mean I've joked about—Hermione, I have never—wait." He had to stop. Impossibly, the crater grew deeper, wider, more cavernous. Hot fear, embarrassment, and something like shame spread from its borders: soaking him, drowning him. "Am I not your boyfriend? Are we not—what is happening right now?"

The necklace slipped from his lap, sliding to the floor with a metallic clatter. He made no move to retrieve it. Rubies on the floor should be offensive, but he couldn't seem to bother with the offense.

He tried to speak again.

"What do you call this, then?" he asked, swallowing back the self-consciousness. She stood just there: three feet away, but impossibly far. "If it's not—a relationship," he faltered, stumbling over his words. "What is it?"

She didn't look at him. He watched as she chewed anxiously on the inside of her cheek, hands twisting and stretching her knit jumper. She'd stretch it too far if she kept going; she'd have to magic the knit together again, but it would never be the same. And if her charm ever failed—unlikely for her, but still possible—she'd have that same stretched bit of fabric, contorted from the stress she put it through now.

"Well that's the first time you've asked me, isn't it? We've—been enjoying ourselves. I thought you didn't want—and it's not like we could ever, with your parents. We could never be fully honest about—anything." Her words came out stunted, choppy.

"You said you didn't want to tell them, either." He meant to protest with force, his own indignation. But exhaustion pulled him down, pinning him under a trap she'd set months before. That thought sparked a wave of hot anger at being deceived.

She finally looked up at him, tearing her gaze away from the seat cushion that had held her attention. Draco hated how he wanted to comfort her, take away the watery look in her eyes, even when she was the one doing the hurting.

Why? He might not have the most extensive dating history—the most recent of which took place on the other side of the continent—but he knew when he was in a relationship with someone. He had a day of the week. A whole day, his: a dedicated portion of her life. How was that not a relationship?

"It's not that I'm not enjoying it—I am," she said, taking a tiny step closer to him, arms halting halfway through the movement, like she meant to reach for him but thought better of it. "This just—it's not real. It—it can't be."

That, above everything else, gutted him. Not real? Pretend, then.

His whole body flushed hot, surges of heat by the names of anger and shame and doubt and embarrassment battling to take up residence in the crater where so many lovely things used to live.

He stood.

He couldn't do this. Handle this. He didn't even feel compelled to occlude in order to survive it. He simply needed to leave.

He looked at her face just long enough to register that she'd started crying, jaw opening and closing as if she sought words she didn't know how to verbalize.

She'd said enough. He didn't want to hear any more of it. He couldn't.

He didn't say anything either, merely walked to the fireplace and Floo'd to Theo's, leaving her alone in his flat.

—

Draco poured himself another drink, watching as Theo tried and failed—yet again—to break through a series of complicated Slavic wards protecting the door to the Nott family vault.

Theo made a frustrated noise, kicked the door for good measure, and then turned to Draco.

"You're sure you don't want a drinking companion? I can think of several better ways to spend a Friday night than trying to break into this impenetrable, fucking irritating vault."

Draco shook his head and sank back against the settee, head heavy and limbs warm from the three shots he'd taken since barging into Theo's home.

"I want you to pretend like I'm not here. Do whatever you'd be doing if I never showed up."

He sipped his scotch, having switched to something more expensive and enjoyable now that he'd reached an acceptable level of drunkenness to simply—exist in his world as it was now.

"I would be yelling at this door and trying to teach myself the Cyrillic alphabet. Why did someone in my family think they needed to borrow ward-theory from the Slavs just to protect whatever's in here?" He kicked the door again, wincing. "You didn't pick up any Cyrillic during your mastery, did you?"

"Not a drop," Draco said, trying to keep his words steady despite the thick, fuzzy feeling in his mouth. "Can't read it, can't speak any of the languages that use it. I'm useless."

"That last bit seems like a lot to unpack, so I think I'll be ignoring it for now."

Theo turned back towards the warded door he'd been trying to break into for the last year. "Must be something worth protecting in there if they went through all this trouble, you know? When I finally get in—gods, it's going to be the best fuck you to my father for never showing me the wards."

"What do you think's in there?" Draco balanced his tumbler in the space between the settee's tufting buttons, too exhausted to manage the effort of holding it when not actively indulging.

"We've got plenty of gold and jewels and whatnot in our Gringotts vaults. So, I imagine it's dark stuff, experimental magic, maybe some ancient family grimoires. I don't fucking know, really. But it better be good. It's been almost five years of this. Between that fucking painting"—he turned his head, glaring at the painting on a hinge beside him—"and now this stupid door, I feel like I've spent half my life breaking these wards."

Draco ran his nail through the intricately carved designs in his glass, tracing the pattern to focus his attention.

"Five years. Right. Because it's still the anniversary."

Theo hadn't gone back to his curse breaking yet. He stood there, on the opposite side of the corridor, surrounded by books on ward theory and curse breaking scattered on the floor around him.

"How did your afternoon at Potter's go?"

"They mostly ignored me. I did the same. I hung out with Teddy for a while."

"Well, do you think because it's—you know, the day—that might have had something to do with the fight I assume you've had with Granger?"

Draco laughed.

"A fight."

He laughed some more. The noise careened through the long corridor, sounding as hollow as it felt.

"If that's what you call being told you were never in a relationship with someone you thought you been in a relationship with for—fuck." He couldn't finish the thought.

"Wait, she said what?" Theo stood very still across from him, grip on his wand flexing.

"What do you think it was? Did she need to get some kind of perverse Death Eater attraction out of her system? I suppose she was disappointed, then, that I glamour my mark every day. I'm—fuck I'm mortified, Theo. All this time I've been—" falling for her "—and she's just been, what? Using me for a good time? I don't understand."

Theo started towards the settee where Draco most certainly did not want company or comfort. He just needed Theo to—be Theo.

"Just break into your fucking vault, Nott."

Theo stopped in the middle of the corridor, watching Draco with a look so close to pity that it made him want to scream, throw something, take it out on Theo even though it wasn't his fault.

Theo cleared his throat and stepped away again.

"Right, well. I'll just be here trying to crack open the secrets to my family legacy that no one saw fit to include me in. Might as well be a little moody about it myself since that appears to be the general tone of the evening."

He summoned the scotch and took a swig straight from the bottle.

"I just want to know what's inside," Theo said. "And why my father never bothered to show me."

"I don't know. You might be better off with him never trusting you. That account Lucius gave me to manage? It's officially losing money. One account, and I've fucked it up, too."

Theo sent the bottle floating back across the hall.

"Just swallow your pride, would you?" he said. "Ask Blaise for help. You know he lives for investments."

"In property. Specifically, properties that make wine."

"Well, he still knows plenty about finances. It's a plight of the nouveau riche, I assume. They have to know that kind of shit because they barely have a single generation worth of gold in their vaults."

"I just wanted to be good at something my father actually wanted me to be good at."

"You're good at other stuff," Theo said. It was the right thing to say, a kind, best friend sort of thing to say. It made Draco regret all the times he'd tormented Theo with the Malfoy peacocks when they were young.

"Not the right stuff."

Minutes ticked by. Draco didn't know how many. Time started blending and blurring as Theo fiddled with the Cyrillic alphabetic and a wall of complicated wards Draco didn't have the first clue how to comprehend. Time stretched; it shrank. It waxed; it waned. Moments passed in minutes, maybe hours, all spent sitting on a settee and trying to discern if the tingling feeling in Draco's toes came from poor circulation or an overindulgence in alcohol.

He wondered how long it was before Hermione left his flat. How long did she stay, standing there in the mess she'd made?

He wouldn't go back that night. Theo had a literal abundance of guest rooms Draco could make use of. He had no desire to risk the chance that she tried to wait him out, offer some kind of pathetic excuse as to how he'd been so idiotic, so presumptuous, to assume that because they did the things people do when they're in a relationship, they must have been in one.

While Theo fought with a particularly frustrating tangle of wards, Draco closed his eyes, engaging every ounce of his self-control to think of anything other than Hermione. He failed miserably.

His chest hurt. His head hurt. His vision spun.

—

The next week, he sent Topsy to keep an eye on Hermione and ensure the guest hall didn't kill her. Beyond that, he spent his time corresponding with Blaise about his failing investment accounts and revisiting the idea of opening his own potions business.

He needed something to occupy his time. Something to occupy his mind.

He'd forgotten to ask Topsy for her discretion. Not that she'd ever intentionally spill his secrets to Lucius, but evidently her occupation did not go unnoticed, and when asked where she spent all her time, she happily reported that she'd been filling in for Draco.

"An elf is no substitute for an actual human member of this household, Draco," his father had said, terse over dinner. "The elf isn't even bound to the estate any longer. It has no loyalties."

Draco might have given some paltry excuse about having other work to attend to. Might have defended Hermione's work ethic; they were under no threat of unprofessionalism from her. She'd been nothing but a consummate, eternal professional, aside from the part where she'd let him believe he'd been in a relationship with her. He might have even defended Topsy as something more than an it, as Lucius referred to her. But he did none of that. He accepted his scolding and left the dinner table as soon as his mother dismissed him.

Lucius made it abundantly clear that Draco's presence in the decommissioning process was required, whether he wanted to be there or not. It was a burden he would have to bear for his family—like all the others—no matter how much it hurt him to do so.

A week after everything went wrong, Draco waited in the parlor for Hermione's arrival. She froze as she exited the Floo and found him standing there, like before. This before and after differed vastly from the one they used to have. This one involved dreams and nightmares and the belief that he'd been in one, only to wake up and find himself in the other.

She parted her lips to say something, a half step of momentum bringing her towards him.

"Don't—Hermione. Please don't."

They were the most difficult four words he'd ever had to force out. Unease slithered beneath the surface of his skin as he cut her off. Whatever she planned to say—platitudes or apologies or expressions of relief—he didn't want them.

He turned and left, heading to the guest hall, where he made himself comfortable on a settee as far from where she worked as possible. Pretending she wasn't there. Pretending he wasn't there. Pretending the last year wasn't there, lingering in his memory.

thank you for reading!