Chapter 15
"Where's my husband?" Parkinson demands when Hermione and Blinky appear in the Headmaster's sitting room.
"The Dark Lord summoned him," Hermione says.
"When?"
"Less than an hour ago."
"Why didn't you tell me, Mudblood?"
It didn't occur to me that you'd care, Hermione thinks, but she doesn't say it. The balance of power here is clearly in Parkinson's favor, and both of them know it. When they were in school, Hermione could always kick Parkinson's arse without breaking a sweat in Defence class. They haven't dueled since, but Hermione has continued to practice with Draco and she's pretty sure Parkinson hasn't bothered to keep her skills sharp. But they won't duel. Hermione will hold her tongue and let Parkinson threaten and insult her.
But Parkinson doesn't threaten or insult. Instead, she sighs and says, "You win."
"Pardon?"
"Draco. You can have him."
Hermione frowns. "I don't understand."
"I'm leaving him. Being married to him is just too demoralizing. Do you have any idea what it's like to be in love with someone who doesn't love you back?"
Hermione doesn't say anything.
"No, of course you don't. Granger the golden girl. Top marks in all our classes in school. Now top marks with my fucking husband."
Hermione opens her mouth to say something—what, she has no idea, but Parkinson cuts her off."
"Save your breath. I don't want him anymore. I'm marrying Blaise, who won't whinge and moon about the way my current husband does. The Dark Lord's given his approval. So, go on and give him a passel of Halfbloods brats, and get as fat as Molly Weasley."
Hermione stares, speechless.
Parkinson sneers. "I thought you'd be overjoyed."
"The Dark Lord will just make him marry some other Pureblood to get his heir."
"Better the devil you know?" Parkinson asks with what would almost seem like humor if Hermione didn't know better. "I suppose so, since at least he hates me."
Hermione looks at the woman who got her tortured in this life, but appeared to be her best friend in that other life, the one Becky and Gus obliterated with their trip to the past. "Do you ever wonder how things would have been if our side had won? What kind of life you'd have had? Whom you'd have married? Whether you'd have children? Who your friends would have been? Who knows?" Hemione muses. "You and I might even have been friends."
Parkinson barks out a laugh. "Gods, Granger, I think you've gone round the bend."
"Perhaps I have," Hermione says, then hesitates before adding awkwardly, "I hope you're happy. You and Blaise."
Parkinson looks at her as though trying to figure out what her angle is, then says, "Thanks, Granger."
Hermione walks from the Headmaster's chambers back to her own much smaller rooms, chosen for their location on an upper floor that affords her a view of the castle gates. When Draco is unharmed, he Apparates directly back into the castle from wherever the Dark Lord summoned him, but when he's been too badly injured, another Death Eater dumps him outside the gates, leaving him to make his way back in as best he can.
When she opens the door, Draco is inside, apparently unharmed. "I'm divorced," he says.
"I know."
"How?"
"As crazy as it sounds, your ex-wife told me."
"The soon to be Mrs. Zabini."
"She told me that, too." Hermione draws a breath. "And who's to be the next Mrs. Malfoy?"
"You are."
She can't help hope that flares in her, but she stamps it out. "That isn't funny, Draco."
"It's not meant to be," he says. "There aren't enough Purebloods left. Between the ones who died in the war and the ones the crazy bastard killed in one of his fits of temper we're a dying breed. And when we marry each other, half the time our children are Squibs. Did you know Theo Nott married a Muggleborn?"
"No."
"They had a daughter six months ago and she's already manifesting magic. Theo and his first wife had two Squib children before they divorced. Two. Gods, can you imagine?"
"So after all these years and all that propaganda, suddenly Muggleborns are no longer the bane of the wizarding world?"
"It would appear so."
"Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia," Hermione mutters.
"What?"
"Muggle novel," she says, then asks, "Does this change things?"
"The children, you mean?" he asks.
She nods.
"It shouldn't. The Dark Lord is still in power. He's still a fucking lunatic. He could still kill or torture either one of us at his slightest whim."
"Or our children, if we have them."
"Or our children," he agrees.
"I want to have them," Hermione says. "Even with the Dark Lord here, I want to have your children."
"I want that, too. You know I do. But what about the child you do have? The one who's sleeping just down the hall?"
"What about her? How do we know her timeline is the right one? Who's to say ours isn't? What gives that Hermione Granger more right to live her life than I have?"
Draco pulls her into his arms. "So many rhetorical questions," he murmurs into her hair.
"Who says they're rhetorical?" she snaps, wiping angrily at the tears she can no longer hold back.
"Tonight, they don't have to be. Tonight, you're the woman I'm going to marry, the woman who will bear my children, the only woman I've ever loved and ever will love."
Before she can answer his lips capture hers, caressing, seeking, devouring. She presses herself against him as he pulls her closer. The desire that floods her system blots out all thought of children and Horcruxes, Dark Lords and timelines, right and wrong. There is only Draco, and nothing else matters.
The moon shining through the window bathes the room in silvery light when Hermione wakes hours later. When she returns from the bathroom and slides back into bed, Draco is still sleeping. He's beautiful when he sleeps.
"Draco," she whispers. She remembers the first time she called him that. They'd been lovers for nearly a month, but their initial couplings were rough, angry bouts of hate sex, and they remained Granger and Malfoy, growling insults rather than whispering endearments. She hated herself even more than she hated him – or told herself she hated him – during those first few weeks when they both kept saying never again, only to come crashing together as though drawn by a force greater than either of them.
The shift happened when Blinky brought him, bleeding all over his Death Eater robes, to Hermione's rooms. She tended to him as he lay in her bed trembling and babbling incoherently. Her name was one of the things he said. Not Granger, but Hermione.
They are Draco and Hermione in that other world, too, but friends, not lovers. She watches him sleep, wondering how that other Hermione could have broken their engagement, broken his heart. How could she not want him, when in this world she's never wanted anyone but him? There was her schoolgirl crush on Ron, but after that, nothing.
Draco was her first lover, though she wasn't a virgin. The Death Eater who raped her as she fled with Minerva after the battle saw to that, before she killed him. But there was no other man she'd given herself to willingly, or wanted to.
What are she and Draco like in that other world? Carefree, from what she saw in Becky's memories. What is it like to be carefree? She can't remember. That other Hermione knows, as does the other Draco. So does the other Snape. Severus, who plays Quidditch with Harry and Ron, who read stories to Becky when she was little, who looks at that other Hermione with a desire that appeared to be fully reciprocated.
Intellectually, she knows that other Hermione Granger—Hermione Snape—is happy. That Hermione loves not Draco but Severus and Becky and a beautiful boy she named after Lucius Malfoy. But this Hermione Granger—soon to be Hermione Malfoy if not for those damnable children and their damnable Time Turner—doesn't love anyone but the man sleeping beside her.
Draco murmurs something in his sleep and reaches for her. She settles into his embrace, breathing in his scent, listening to his heart beating under her ear. She doesn't know how much time they have left together in this dark, awful world, but she is determined to wring what happiness she can out of every last moment.