A/N: A huge thank you to everyone who's read, reviewed, followed, favorited, told their cats about this fic, etc! I love you guys. This has been a blast.

I have a tendency to listen to songs on loop while I'm writing. This one's was "You Belong to Me" by the Boxer Rebellion. This was also one of my favorite chapters to write, and this fic should be wrapping up soon enough – most likely wrapping up in just one more chapter! So enjoy this people! *cackles and retreats back into cave shadows*

Chapter Seven

Hermione considered going on vacation. She needed one. She hadn't had one since she and Wendelin had started the firm, so she was rightly due for one. She entertained thoughts of sun rays and warm beaches and tropical drinks with umbrellas in them. Of being away in a place seemingly so removed from reality. She would do some soul-searching. She would get a tan. She would discover a newfound purpose in her life, possibly while swimming with dolphins.

She deserved that, didn't she? As much as any woman who had just made out with her best friend's sister's boyfriend?

She pulled her coat a little tighter around her, afraid to look down at her wristwatch. The sun had gradually shifted downwards and was now gracing its last, meager light for the day, dipping into the ocean. She tried to think of the last time she had been here, and came up blank.

She watched an older couple – also bundled up – taking a stroll on the sand. They weren't physically touching, but their closeness told her they didn't need to be. They moved in sync, in a steady and lingering pace, laughing sometimes, but wholly enraptured in conversation. Hermione watched them with a tight throat, realizing in a flash of bitter self-awareness that she almost couldn't even stomach her own jealousy.

Somebody leaned against the wooden railing beside her. "I thought you'd be here."

She glanced at the man next to her, his raven hair already windswept and chaotic. It took him a few hours, but she should have known somebody would find her. "How'd you know?"

"Ginny went by your office. Heard chatter about how you stormed out, and you weren't in your office, so she asked me to check up on you. I checked about every other place I could think of that you'd possibly go to hide from the world. I hit up nearly every bookstore in wizarding London – all twelve of them, specialty bookstores included," he said. "This was the very last place on my list."

Hermione snorted softly. "I hate the beach."

"I know."

"But there's something calming about being by the sea. Your thoughts don't seem so loud, I guess." She bit the inside of her bottom lip. "So? How am I looking?"

Ten minutes ago she had caught a glance down at herself: coat haphazardly thrown on top of a suit blazer, deep wrinkles in her painstakingly pressed clothes, sand everywhere. She was her own worst nightmare.

He looked at her. "Crazy. But alive. And alive is good."

She laughed quietly. Harry was quiet for a moment. They both watched the couple talking, huddled together.

"Did you quit?"

"Yes. No. I don't know," she sighed. "I just left. Though I'm not sure it matters. I don't know when I'll be going back, and I'm sure Malfoy's even keener on firing me now. To save face, if anything." She took a deep breath, closing her eyes to keep them from burning, but they stung, anyway. "Harry, I. . . feel lost. I mean, I remember the girl I used to be. I was straight lines and due dates and logic. Now I don't know what I am. Nothing's been the same since the war, sure, but I thought I was fine. Then Malfoy showed up."

She kept her eyes to the front of her, the couple blurring out of focus. "When I look at him, my bones shiver. And I know how much power he has over me; I fight it every day. It keeps me up at night, and it makes me a mean, petty human being." She let out a shuddering sigh. "He gets inside places a person should never be allowed into. And I don't know how to get him out."

To her, he was a mushroom cloud. Beautiful, terrible, fatal. And fucking inescapable.

His voice was steady, consoling. "You want who you want, Hermione. There's not really any logic behind that."

"If I forgive him, I relinquish control."

Harry laughed, shaking his head. "Hermione, there is no such thing as control. Control is a myth. A widely-accepted one, yes, but still a myth."

"I don't believe that. We make choices, Harry. We live with them. We might not get to control everything that happens to us, but we decide what we do about it. And I've decided on Malfoy. I've decided that not being with him would be the better thing. The right thing."

"Right by who?" he asked, his brow crinkling with the weight of his question. "Because you're haunted, Hermione. And you're going to continue to be haunted until you stop being scared of what it is you actually want."

"He would destroy me." This was a promise. She knew it that first day she had sent him flying across the room. Knew that if she let it happen, if she gave in, it would shatter her.

A breeze picked up around them, sending tiny bits of sand up in the air. She tore her eyes away from the distant figures, turning to look at her friend. She almost felt her heart break at it; the serious way he looked at her, with a face full of waiting. It was so unlike how she felt – all frayed edges, unraveling seams, lost buttons. Unhinged and unsecure, wandering, lost.

"You won't let him."

ooo

She did not go back to work. She slept in, made herself pots of tea, helped Harry at the bar, and began chipping away at the stack of books that had been waiting to be opened in over two years. She had breakfast with her parents. She spent some time with Ron. In her quiet hours, she even went back to the beach to look for that same couple, in a very low-key manner. She didn't know why. Perhaps she was just that desperate to find something real; some kind of reassurance of a love that existed that didn't have to eat you alive.

She responded to the incessant, worried owls and occasional knock on her door with the words "personal time" and "vacation." In her off moments, she dreamt that she would wake up one day and he would be at her doorstep, knowing that she was putting him in shoes he would likely not fill. Still, it comforted her that she still knew the lengths he would not go to keep his pride. She welcomed the reality of an empty doorstep, even if her heart did not.

She was about two weeks in when she found out, for herself, that Draco Malfoy did not understand the concept of doorsteps. He Apparated right into her living room.

It surprised her that she could still talk albeit the fact that she had stopped breathing. "You have three seconds to get out or I'm going to hurl every hex I know at you – and I promise you, I won't miss."

She hated him. Hated every ounce of him with her being. But damn, if he didn't look good standing in her living room, looking at her the way he was, in exactly the way her stupid, inconvenient heart ached for and precisely the way she wished he wouldn't. It seemed highly possible that he existed on this earth solely to make her hate herself. Could God be that cruel?

He was composed, stern. "Come back to work."

She gripped her wand tightly. "No."

"You're being a child, Granger. This hardly professional behavior for someone like you."

"Professional? You want to talk about professional behavior?" she scoffed. "Go on. Tell me. Tell me how you're not even sorry. You don't even have a single sorry bone in your body, do you?"

He clenched his jaw. "I'll admit, it didn't happen in the ideal circumstance."

"Try a million leagues away from the ideal circumstance, then you're a little bit closer." She glared at him. She wanted to tear away his regality, his appearance of control. She wanted the level playing field. She wanted him as fucked up and messy and on the brink of sanity as she was.

"You know, she came into the building right after me. What was it? Did you call her in just so you could have a quickie before lunch? But I bet that was before I marched into your office, wasn't it? Before you realized – why have just one when you can have them both?"

He swiftly crossed the room and he grabbed her arm, tightly enough for it to hurt. His eyes were dark and his nostrils flared with rage, his face just inches from hers. "Don't," he said warningly. "You're being petty and delusional and it doesn't suit you."

"Fuck what doesn't suit me." She wrenched her arm back, ignoring the shoots of pain she felt as she did so. She turned around, her back to him, trying to compose herself. "I want you," she said lowly, "to leave. Now."

Silence. She would have thought he actually had left except that she hadn't heard him Disapparate, and for the fact that the air around her still boiled with his presence.

His snarl was rough, angry, passionate. "Do you still want me?"

She stared at the wall in front of her. Her breaths heaved through her lungs. "What?"

"You heard me, Granger," he growled. "Do. You. Still. Want. Me?"

"No," she said, forcefully.

She tried to mean it, she really did. She tried to mean it more than she had ever meant anything in her life. Tried to mean it more than the first time she ever told him she hated him. Tried to mean it more than the first time she told herself she would be happy if she never saw his face ever again. She had never wanted anything more than her life than to mean it, right at this very moment, to him.

"No, I don't want you. It sickens me," she said, "even the thought of wanting you."

He scoffed loudly. "You are the worst liar in the entire goddamn universe, do you know that? It's almost lamentable. Your knees quiver when you lie. And, I bet, if I walked around to the front of you right now, you've got your eyes fixed on one focal point. You aren't blinking. That's what you do when you lie."

She blinked. "I'm not lying," she hissed, whipping around. "And you don't know that because you don't know me."

"I've fucked you," he said. He was so close to her and the proximity of him was making her blood boil, all the way up to her brain, where it scattered her thoughts, vaporized them.

"I know what makes you scream. What makes your toes curl. What makes you drag your teeth across my skin. What melts your bones. I know you."

"Only you," she said, "would mistake fucking for any kind of real intimacy. Human to human intimacy. You know, the kind that real relationships are built off of. Stuff that was strategically bred out of your bloodline. Stuff," she spat, "that you aren't capable of."

She remembered the night he'd said that to her, years ago. How they'd laughed about it. How she'd secretly envied him because she'd been half-convinced it was true, and she thought about how utterly convenient that was, to never ever feel stuck on someone. To never want someone who you couldn't have. To never yearn for something so wrong and impossible.

He just stood there, looking at her like he hated her, along with something else – and it was that something else that made oxygen so hard to come by. Was it still so unspeakable? Was there a word for it? The way he looked at her, so intensely. He looked at her the way he kissed her.

"You don't get to do this, Malfoy," she said, heatedly. "You're the one who's with Ginny. You don't get to come in here and make me feel like shit. You don't get to be the fucking hero who leads me to an earth-shattering revelation about who I am and what I want, okay? That's not how it works here, in real life. You're with her. So do that with her. But you don't get to have me, too. Not like this."

He began to blur in her vision, brimming her eyes. She blinked, feeling water trail down her face. That's it. That's all I'm giving him. That's all he gets from me.

"I won't," he told her. "You stupid idiot. I'm not with her anymore. It's only you."

The wall was gone. His face was an open book, just like hers, and she wished she'd never been here to see it, but she was. She could see inside, see the veins pounding underneath every scant word, saw the clumsy translation of everything it was supposed to mean, bottlenecked into so few words.

It's only you. How her entire heart pivoted on those words. Stood in complete awe of it. Quivered in fear, and fell face-first.

"I'm sorry," he said, and the apology rang in her ears. "I got good at pretending. I was terrified. Whatever we were, it wasn't over for us. I got good at pretending otherwise. But I'm not going to chase after you, Granger. I'm not going to play games. If you don't want to be with me, if you don't want to end this hellish limbo that we've both been living in, then tell me. But I won't linger, and I won't look back."

Her reply was a stuttering breath. "I don't want to be with you."

He shook his head, eyes shining with vindication. "Mean it, at least."

She tried to muster up the conviction, tried to funnel up every ounce of honesty she could gather in her sad, frozen body. But when she couldn't, when all she could successfully do was fall short of it, she said nothing.

He stepped away from her, eyes minutely lowering in disappointment. "Your firm is well on its way. I've decided that my company no longer needs to have an active presence in your office. I'll be out by Thursday."

With a resounding Crack!, he left.

ooo

She doesn't remember leaving her bed. She remembers staring at walls and ceilings and windows looking out into nothing. Harry must have dropped by at some point, leaving her a plate of food – which she hadn't yet gotten to – and possibly checking her pulse before tending to his own life.

She replayed him in her living room. Replayed him during the war. Replayed him at Hogwarts. Imagined giving into it, mapped it out in her mind – would it lead her off a cliff? It was high risk and yes, she had done plenty of high risk things, but this was different, somehow. This was close to her. This was inside of her. This was all of her.

And he was Malfoy, all or nothing Malfoy. Malfoy who knew every inch of her like the back of his hand. Malfoy who had seen her broken but also victorious and had kissed her in every mood, and said her name like it was the closest he would ever get to praying. Malfoy who made her feel euphoric highs and cataclysmic lows, whose presence put her on edge but only because she was always pulling away. It would be so easy with him. Falling into him would be like gravity.

It was three in the afternoon when she heard a knock at her door. She uncurled herself from her couch and took her time to the door, peeking through to the hallway.

Well, knock her over with a feather.

She hesitantly opened the door, her eyes thinning with suspicion. "Pansy."

The newlywed socialite was wearing a sleek white dress, complete with matching five-inch stilettos. Pansy was nothing if not thorough in her appearances.

"Granger." She barged in, studying her surroundings with certain distaste. "So this is where you live. How quaint."

Once a snob, always a snob, she thought to herself. Even marriage doesn't change that. "I don't believe I told you where I lived."

"You didn't," she said, turning around. "Not that I would have even asked."

Hermione shook her head. "Why are you here, Thomas?"

There was a smug satisfaction in hearing her new surname. "I heard you quit."

She crossed her arms. "That's completely none of your business. And – it's actually not as clear as that, at the moment."

She looked her over with a hint of disgust palpable enough for Hermione to resent her for. "You're in stained pajamas with wrinkles that go in for miles – I'm pretty sure that's as clear as it gets."

"I'm not going to stand here in my home and be judged," Hermione snapped. "So if you've got something to say, say it. Otherwise I would like to invite you to leave."

Pansy's eyes narrowed at her. "I know when he's gone to see you. He has that look on his face like his favorite Quidditch player has just died. He also starts acting like a moody, misunderstood, teenage boy. Which," she said, "I'm sure you never get to see. Draco's a master at masquerades, Granger. You're lucky if you ever get to see in." She paused, studying her. "And I've known him and his family for years. There's very little he can hide from me – not that he doesn't try, and fail miserably."

"Still not exactly sure why you're here," she said.

"See for yourself," Pansy said. She pulled a large photo out of her hand bag, lifting it up for her to see. "See this? This was supposed to hit the stands two weeks ago. Luckily, Draco's still got a few loyal friends at the Daily Prophet, so he caught a whiff of it before it ever made it. He paid off the Daily Prophet scum that rigged his office with hidden cameras with enough money to buy himself a bloody island. Any guesses on why?"

Hermione stared at the photo. It was that day she had stormed into his office about the memo. The image moved in front of her, and she felt flustered as she watched herself and Draco passionately kissing, his hands moving down to undo the buttons of her blouse.

Her eyes moved back to Pansy. "You can't pass this off as a favor to me, Pansy. Draco had just as much at stake as I did. Ginny would have dumped him, and his reputation—"

"His reputation as a handsome, wealthy, and very eligible man would have stayed perfectly intact," Pansy interrupted. "And you're wrong about the Weasley girl—"

"Her name is Ginny," Hermione interjected.

"—whatever her name is," Pansy said, clearly not caring. "They were over before this picture was even taken. And it was a very amicable break-up, from what I've heard."

Hermione shook her head. "No, I saw Ginny when I left, she was—"

"Meeting him for lunch, as friends. Some nonsense about needing closure on her part. My point is – think whatever you want to think, Granger, but I'm stating the facts. He wants you – for what ungodly reason, I cannot dream of ever attesting to, but that doesn't change the fact that he is so pathetically in love with you that it's practically ridiculous. He ensured this rat bastard's retirement fund to save your reputation, Granger. To keep you on that upper tier of self-righteousness you like to dance on. Frankly, I would have enjoyed seeing you get knocked down a peg or two and watch you stew in your own existentialist crisis that is your head up your own ass. Draco didn't have to do that. He could have let you burn. He would have gotten out of it just fine, but you? I'm not so sure."

She could hardly take all of this in. She wanted to find something in Pansy's face to reason some doubt, to trigger some justified skepticism, but there was nothing. Pansy hid nothing. Pansy was no friend, and she had a tendency of being cruel, but she wasn't exactly a liar.

There was no dark agenda she could think of that would make Pansy Parkinson-Thomas come here, to her median-income flat, and try to convince her to be with Draco Malfoy.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked her, quietly.

Pansy hesitated, but spoke anyway. "In the beginning, he was the only one I told about Dean." She didn't say anymore. Hermione understood. She remembered what Pansy had said about that night she had seen her and Draco at Fleur de Lys: He's helping me with my marriage.

"Make an informed decision." Pansy stuffed the photo back in her purse, walking past Hermione to the door. As she opened it to let herself out, she stopped. "A word of advice, Granger: you've got to forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for wanting him. For entertaining the inconvenient. For being human."

Then Pansy Parkinson-Thomas closed Hermione Granger's flat door behind her with a soft click.

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