A/N: There is a part in this chapter that touches on Viktor Krum asking Hermione to visit him during the summer following Fourth year. The books hinted that she refused the offer, but my story will say different.

Enjoy the chapter. Read and review, please.

If his eyes had been open, he would have vaguely seen from the corner of his eye, his father silently shouting at him, demanding to know what was going on. But he didn't notice, so he wiped his mouth, grabbed his wand, and Apparated in front of Hermione's apartment suite. Shuddering uncontrollably, he knocked on her door and wiped his mouth again, removing any external evidence of his malady. Moments later, the witch opened the door, and he threw himself at her with his arms wrapping around her middle and head resting on her shoulder.

"Mr. Malfoy!" Hermione exclaimed in surprise, her body tensing against his at the abrupt contact. "What's wrong?"

"I'm sorry," Draco sputtered and buried his face deeper into the soft material of her nigh-shirt. "Please forgive me. I know I don't deserve it, but please."

"Uh…" Hermione awkwardly wrapped her own arms around his back and patted him gently. "It's not your fault entirely, Mr. Malfoy. I have some blame in this, too."

With his arms still around her, Draco leaned away from her shoulder to focus his watery gaze upon the witch's face and choked out a response. "What? You have no blame. It's all me."

A deep, troubled crevice appeared between Hermione's brows and she said, "As much as I would like to put the entire blame on you, Mr. Malfoy, there is no denying my participation in the event that caused this. We both took the risk of the Contraceptive Potion, knowing there was still that point-one-percent chance of failure. You don't need to feel at fault, and I'm clearly not as broken up about it as you are. Here," she pulled him into her living room and closed the door, "sit on the couch, and I will make you some tea. Or would you prefer hot chocolate? I'm afraid I don't have any coffee. I've given that up along with smoking for the time being."

Draco inhaled deeply while depositing his body onto Hermione's couch. When the cushion hit his bum, he realized he had a meltdown after reading the letter and rushed over in hopes she would forgive him for hurting her the way he had. In his distressed haze, the fact she did not remember him flew out of his brain, and he probably appeared to be a raving lunatic groveling at her feet.

"If you have water," he whispered, knowing teas proclivity for being scalding hot would surely clash horribly with his cursed illness. Bloody hell, he shouldn't even be here. He cast a longing glance at the door.

"Of course," said Hermione as she rifled through the kitchen.

Draco tried to compose himself, swallowing the coppery bits in the back of his throat. Once the inflammation became bearable, he opened his eyes and noticed some pictures on the shelves next to the television. Gingerly, he arose and made his way towards them. The photographs were Muggle, no movement anywhere, probably keeping them that way on purpose in chance of having Muggle visitors.

There was a picture of her parents smiling and posing in front of Hermione's childhood home in Surrey, looking about the same as Draco remembered them. Another picture displayed Hermione with her natural curly brown hair, sitting on a twin bed with a nameless girl beside her. It must have been from Hermione's earlier years at Uni. There were several types of pictures similar to that one; Hermione ageing little by little. He came to another one that caused him to arch a brow. Her long curls were gone and in their place was a very short haircut. Not many British witches, regardless of Blood Status, cut their hair so short. The shortest style he had ever seen on a girl had been Pansy when she had favored the 'bob style' in her teenage years and Madam Hooch.

Draco wondered if she had not favored the hair style because in the following pictures her hair began to lengthen. In one of them, it was of Hermione with her hair straight, chin-length, and honey-blonde. She was frozen with her lips puckered in preparation of blowing out the candles atop of a birthday cake. The candles were reflecting blurrily off the camera lens, so Draco had a difficult time counting them. He reckoned twenty-seven or twenty-eight of them, and there was a man standing next to her, his arm around her shoulder and smiling.

Draco frowned.

Then the frown turned into a snarl.

It was Krum!

"Here's your water," Hermione chimed and Draco tore his eyes away from the photo and accepted the glass.

"So you knew Viktor Krum?" Draco asked nonchalantly, gesturing with to the picture.

Hermione smiled uneasily with a hint of befuddlement. "Well, yes. He came to Hogwarts that one year. Don't you remember? We dated. Merlin, it was all over the Prophet among other things." She rolled her eyes as if recalling an absurd memory. "If you hadn't guessed, we resumed our relationship much later after school."

"If it's too personal…" Draco hinted with politeness though he was dying to know the whole story.

"No, no…well, yes, it is personal." Hermione blew on her hot tea, and Draco caught a whiff of lemon and ginger. "But I kind of think we should…know things about each other. With all things considered…"

"Right." He swallowed thickly and studied the glass of water I his hand. It was nice and cool, so he sipped at told her, "Thank you."

"You're welcome," she replied and turned away from him to face the couch. "Like I said, though, Viktor and I dated at Hogwarts but broke things off when the year ended, and he had to go back to Bulgaria. He did invite me to visit him during the summer, and I did for a week. We wrote each other for years after that. Even when I attended Uni in the States."

Draco appeared interested and calm on the outside. On the inside, he was irked, greatly irritated and feeling hypocritically betrayed. He had no idea she spent time with Krum outside of Hogwarts, and she had never mentioned anything about that sod when they had been together. He had oncce thought Ron Weasley was going to be his biggest challenge in winning her over all those years ago, and that fight was pathetic because there really hadn't been one. Now he was facing the ghost of Fred Weasley and the almighty Viktor Krum. He wondered if there was anyone else he never knew about before he and Hermione started their relationship.

"Then when I graduated from business school, I had to set up shop, and I set my sights on Paris first. The Bulgarians were playing the French my first weekend there. One of my investors gave me a free ticket, and I thought 'why not?' I'd thought I would surprise Viktor, and he was very…" she blushed and tucked a curly blonde strand behind her ear. An ahem sound escaped her lips and she continued, "surprised. One thing led to another, but we were very private in our relationship. Something that seemed impossible to accomplish when at Hogwarts, but we were both adults and despised the media. We didn't even tell our friends how serious things got between us. We were careful, and we had a lot of fun." She gestured for the both of them to sit down on the couch. "But both of us wanted different things at different times. I was juggling two new shops in Berlin and buying up some property in Rome to open up a third. Viktor was talking about retiring which was fine. I didn't decrypt his talking for actually wanting to settle down and get married, though."

"He proposed to you?" Draco inquired, unable to cover the slight jealousy in voice, his hands gripping the glass of water, sort of imagining it to be the neck of Krum.

"Yes, and I accepted." Hermione paused to take a sip of her tea and admitted, "For about five minutes. That's how long it took for the flattery to subside and the reality to set in. We parted ways soon after that, and he married someone else if you hadn't already heard. Some Russian girl from an old family."

An awkward silence settled between them, so Hermione sipped her tea and he sipped his water. Draco was a bit peeved about the whole Krum revelation. It was in Hermione's past, so there really wasn't a reason for him to be affected at all. In fact, he had little right to even be bitter. He gave her up a long time ago, and he was just going to have to deal. Nevertheless, these few moments together would be the last they would have for several months.

The acidy-burning was returning, and Draco knew he needed to flee as soon as possible, but he became aware of her night attire. It was a Quidditch jersey from Magical Yale. She must have noticed his questioning eyes because she piped up with an indulgent grin, "No, I do not play Quidditch. This is my ex-boyfriend's jersey I acquired my second year at Yale. We shared an apartment for a semester before he packed up and headed back home for the summer. He left this, and I never saw him again. He transferred somewhere else that fall, so he wouldn't have needed it anyway."

"But you still wear it," Draco stated, his voice hitching with uncontrollable possessiveness.

Hermione licked her lips and set her cup down on her glass coffee table in front of them and stared at him evenly, like she knew that jersey and Krum bothered him and told him, "It's comfortable, and this probably makes me look a certain way, but it's not the only one I have. I won't lie, Draco. I've dated quite a bit. Before…well…this," she gestured to her stomach, "I've rarely been without a male companion."

A deafening void of silence dispensed between them, and Draco was no longer able to look at her. Instead, he drank more of his water and thought he liked it better when Ginny had told him of Hermione's dating habits instead of the words confessed from the girl herself.

"I play Quidditch. I was Seeker for a couple of years at Hogwarts," Draco offered, having found something to break the unbearable muteness.

Hermione's lips twitched and then split into a smile. "So you were. After our meeting in my shop, I went digging through my yearbooks to see if I could rouse a memory. No luck there at all, weirdly, but I saw a picture of you and your team. You looked adorable."

Some water had lodged its way into the wrong pipe at her words. The witch laughed while she patted him on the back.

"Adorable?" he questioned incredulously.

"It was you in your second year. You were a tiny thing, and you still had baby fat in your cheeks. You and your son resemble each other very much. He's quite adorable, too."

"Indeed," Draco agreed with a half-smile. "And he knows it and uses it against the most vulnerable. Like his grandmother."

"Aw. I bet he's spoiled rotten. He runs around with Ron and Pansy's kids, right?" she inquired and finished off her tea.

"Yes, sometimes the Potter kids, as well, if Harry and I are feeling up to it which is…almost never."

"It's strange." Hermione frowned and scratched behind her ear. "Our friends run around in the same group, but we have never officially met until just two months ago."

"Mmm," Draco noised vaguely, while avoiding eye contact and draining the rest of his water. When he finished, he set glass down next to her empty teacup on the coffee table. "Well, I best get going now that I know...you aren't angry with me for…right."

"It is rather late…or early," Hermione informed with a shrug, and Draco glanced at his watch. It was one in the morning. Bloody hell, he must have woken Hermione up. Damn, he was such a dozy sod!

"I'm sorry. I didn't realize the time when I came bounding over here like a mad prat."

Hermione waved her hand dismissively. "It's okay."

"Well…" Draco paused. "Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight." Hermione quipped and stuck out her hand for him to shake. He gripped it with his own and froze as did she. Their eyes drug from their clasped palms to each other's eyes and without thinking, Draco pulled her towards him and kissed her. She moaned into his mouth and clung to his form, jumping up and wrapping her legs around his waist only to have him turn and lay her on the couch and cover her body with his.

"We have to stop doing this," murmured a sleepy, post-coital Draco into Hermione's hair. She was as naked as him and curled up on his torso, her head resting on his chest, heavy pants escaping her.

"Do you really mean that, Mr. Malfoy?" she wheezed, amusement in her voice.

"Call me Draco, and I have no bloody idea because I want to do it again. Right now, in fact."

Hermione raised her head a fraction to look him in the eye and bob her head up and down. "Okay."

"No, no," Hermione whined and patted Draco's flushed cheek gently. His eyelids fluttered back open as she demanded, "More."

"I'm hungry," Hermione gasped and climbed off of Draco. He pushed himself up on his elbows, watching his prey gingerly maneuver herself off the couch and stagger into the kitchen. His sexual high was diminishing, and the pain in his abdominal area was returning. When she reached the refrigerator, he growled and lunged, tackling her onto the tile floor. She giggled and flipped him over and straddled him and yanked open the door.

"Are you hungry, too?" she breathed out while her hand sprung out a squeeze-y bottle of chocolate syrup and butter caramel.

Grimacing as coppery acid crept up his esophagus, Draco shakily inhaled while lying down on the cold, tile floor of Hermione's kitchen. Hermione lay asleep and curled up on his chest with no idea how excruciatingly and how quickly she was killing him.

She wasn't heavy but the added weight painfully assisted the seeping, boiling matter splashing around inside him. He clenched his teeth together and balled up his fists, his fingernails pressing into the palms of his hands. His lungs quivered in readiness to dislodge the gore of which they had accumulated. Sweat beaded up at his brow and pooled at the back of his neck; the skin of his back suctioned to the floor.

Draco had to leave. He was shortening his lifespan and living on borrowed time. He looked down at the curly blonde hair for as long as he could bear. This was the last time he would be able to properly see her, and he needed to hold on for just a little longer. He needed to feel the softness of her skin one last time.

"Draco?" whispered Granger, her breath tickling his chest and making him hitch his breath in surprise.

"Yes," he whispered back wetly. He swallowed and refrained from hacking up his liquefying insides. He cocked his and strained to see her eyes. They were closed, and her puffs breaths were shallow against his chest. She was sleep talking.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"I'm right here," he replied, a little confused but far too deep in physical anguish to press the matter further.

"I've missed you. You went away," she groaned, and Draco lightly coughed, splatters of blood hitting the back of his front teeth. Hermione curled herself deeper into his form, and he felt her lips lightly brush across his skin. His hand drifted downward and caressed the ends of her hair and the raised bumps of her spine while he swilled his tongue around his mouth to clean his teeth.

"I haven't gone anywhere." He chanced for a light cough but gagged as blood coated his tongue. His eyes opened wide and focused on the ceiling and accepted he was not going to be able to reverse Hermione's memory and lift the curse in time. He came and exposed himself repetitively in the most intimate of ways. Maybe if hurried, he could Apparate to St. Mungo's without being splinched and prolong his life just enough to sort out any last-minute affairs.

"Then where have I been?" Hermione asked in a breathy whisper, and Draco closed his eyes. Her words had barely registered to him. He craned his head to the side and pressed his heated forehead into the cool, tiles of the floor. He lightly gripped Hermione's shoulders and ground his back molars together, aware that if he refused to cough, he would literally drown in his own blood. He dully thought it'd be cleaner that way.

"You hurt me," she said.

He distantly felt wet drops drip onto his skin, and his own tears escaped their caverns. His became clogged by solid chunks of coppery wetness. Squeezing his eyes tighter, he waited.

"I forgive you, Draco."

A frigid sensation pooled in the pit of Draco's stomach and burst into an icy fluid consistency and spread throughout his entire body. The energy lulled him into unconsciousness and if he had been awake, he would have felt the inflamed muscle and bloodied tissue within himself be replenished and healed.

To be continued...