Worth the Wait

Chapter Eight

"He did what?!"

Hermione tucks her feet up on the edge of her chair and wraps her arms around her legs. She rests her chin against her knees.

"I just… I opened the door and there he was," Hermione says quietly, her mind still processing the last hour of her life.

Hermione notices Harry's jaw tick. She sees Ron cross his arms over his chest. She watches a few emotions flash across the face of Ginny Weasley-Potter– confusion, hope, concern. Pansy is seething– if this were a cartoon, she'd have smoke billowing out of her ears.

Hermione knows that all of her closest friends– these four sitting around her– would caution her against allowing Draco Malfoy back into her life, but Pansy would be the most adamant. Pansy herself went through a Draco-Malfoy-induced heartbreak in sixth year, and then she had to console her best friend through the same years later. Hermione thinks that Pansy probably hates Draco even more than she herself did– but then again, what else is a best friend for if not to hate their best friend's ex more than they do?

"What the bloody hell did he want?" Ron asks, his voice tight.

Hermione bites her bottom lip.

"He wanted to explain himself, I suppose," she responds.

Pansy scoffs– loudly. She shoves her chair back with a scrape and stands from her seat, stalking over to the fridge. She opens it and yanks out one of Harry's bottles of Muggle beer and takes a swig.

"Sure, help yourself, Parkinson," Harry laughs at the same time as Pansy says, "Pointy bastard has nothing to explain."

Hermione can't help but snort out a laugh.

"Oh, come on, Pans, he's not that pointy anymore," Hermione says, grateful for a mild reprieve before she has to explain the more emotional aspects of her evening.

Pansy shrugs, leaning against Harry's kitchen counter and says, "Fine, but he's still a bastard."

Hermione shrugs in return, not disagreeing.

"Well, go on, Hermione," Ginny says quietly, reaching across the table to take one of Hermione's hands in her own.

Hermione takes a deep breath. Where should she even start?

"He told me that his son was born yesterday," Hermione starts, and she notices Harry move to rest his hand on Ginny's back. The couple have two sons of their own, so Hermione imagines that that hits home for Harry.

Pansy does seem to pause for a moment. She is still close friends with Astoria Greengrass' older sister, Daphne, from Hogwarts. Hermione assumes that Pansy is of two minds at the news of the birth.

"He also told me that he and Astoria are divorcing."

Everyone seems shocked by that, even Pansy, which tells Hermione that Daphne wasn't aware either.

"Wait, can they do that?" Harry asks, scrunching his eyebrows together, looking to the three Purebloods in the room for an answer.

Pansy tilts her head from side to side, as if contemplating.

"Technically, yes. It would depend on the specifics of their contract," Pansy responds, knowing that she's the only one in the room with any experience in Pureblood marriage contracts. "I would've expected the Malfoys to draw up an infallible contract, but Draco and Astoria must've found some sort of loophole."

Hermione doesn't think it wise to mention that the aforementioned loophole was Draco and Astoria's son. She decides to keep that piece of information to herself.

"What else did the tosser have to say?" Ron scoffs, making no secret of which side of the line he stands on.

Ron never liked Draco anyway, so Hermione isn't surprised by his hostility. Harry had come around eventually– Hermione even has a photo somewhere of Draco holding Harry's oldest son James the week after he was born. Ginny had actually become friends with Draco, which surprised approximately nobody– the two have very similar personalities and senses of humor for two seemingly opposite people.

"Well…," Hermione frowns. She knows that this part is the part that's going to cause a ruckus. "He sort of… He basically admitted to spending the last three years pining for me."

Pansy snorts so loudly that Hermione thinks she might've been about to shoot beer out of her nose.

"As he bloody well should have! You're Hermione Granger! Stupid git lost someone he never should've had in the first place! It's no wonder he's spent three years feeling bad about it!"

Hermione smiles, reaching the hand not holding Ginny's out toward Pansy. The dark-haired witch reaches her own out and takes Hermione's without hesitation.

"Sorry, Granger," Pansy sighs. "I'm not yelling at you, I'm yelling at him."

Hermione nods in understanding. She knows that, and she loves Pansy for it. Hermione thinks that if she ever had to go into battle again, she'd want Pansy Parkinson by her side. The witch could be scary when she needed to be.

"I'm with Parkinson on this one," Ron agrees, unsurprisingly.

Hermione stays noticeably quiet for a moment. She knows very well that Draco has her in his sights again after speaking with him this evening. She has to make a decision on whether or not she's okay with that.

Hermione knows how deeply she loved him. It wasn't just a passing fling or a casual romance. She loved Draco Malfoy with every fiber of her being. She loved him with everything she had, and that wasn't something that just happened.

It had started when Draco approached her in the beginning of their "Eighth Year" at Hogwarts. The pair were chosen to be Head Girl and Head Boy, respectively, and were due to share a private dorm. Before Hermione could beg Headmistress McGonagall to reassign her to the Gryffindor dorms– which she had every intention of doing– Draco approached her to apologize.

He explained that he was court mandated to finish his schooling and to be on his best behavior, otherwise he'd be sent to Azkaban, and that he had no intention of making the year difficult for her. He just wanted to finish school and get on with his life.

He spent more time than Hermione had expected apologizing to her. He apologized for everything from the moment they met until the present day. He apologized for his treatment of her in school. He apologized for using that word, to her and about her, but also in relation to anyone else too. He apologized for Katie Bell, for Dumbledore and for letting the Death Eaters into the castle. He apologized for not stopping Bellatrix. Anything Hermione could've possibly held against him, he apologized for, unprompted.

Hermione did not believe that Draco belonged in Azkaban for his crimes during the War. He was nothing more than a child soldier, and she knew that he likely would not have made any of the decisions he made without coercion– a fact which Draco himself confirmed to her later on in the year.

Lucius Malfoy belonged in Azkaban. Hermione did not think the same was true for Draco.

Following Draco's apology, Hermione decided to maintain her Head Girl status and dorm. She decided to give him a chance. After all, hadn't she just fought a war to end discrimination? Draco had apologized and gave her no current reason to distrust him.

The first couple of months of her Eighth Year were quiet and uneventful, but then the end of October rolled around and Hermione found herself frustrated with her Potions work. She knew that there was one student in her class who seemed to understand Potions even better than she did, and he happened to be her roommate.

She loathed asking for Draco's help, but she found him receptive and helpful. She expected him to be condescending, but he wasn't. He answered her questions and even brought out his own class notes to better explain certain points.

From that point, the roommates would occasionally study together– or, rather, they would study in the same room as one another, even if not necessarily together. At that time, Hermione actually thought that she would get through the year without any unnecessary drama– the first non-dramatic year of her Hogwarts career.

And then Draco started to ask for her help in classes like Transfiguration and Charms. Hermione was no stranger to the fact that Draco was always just behind her in marks, but she also knew that the prior year was anything but easy for any of them. It was only natural to fall a bit behind, just as she had in Potions.

So, she helped him, just as he had helped her.

Over a couple of weeks of actually studying together, then, Hermione found herself looking forward to those study sessions. She found that Draco Malfoy could actually be funny, and kind and that she really liked the way his brain worked. That was actually the thing that drew her to him the most.

Of course, she'd known how intelligent Draco Malfoy must've been, given his class rankings, but upon actually speaking to him (rather than just trading insults) and studying with him, she found that his brain was the most intriguing part of him.

Hermione could swear she'd never felt more embarrassed in her life than when, right before the Christmas hols, she and Draco were doing their Potions homework side-by-side, and she kissed him. He'd turned to her to ask her for her opinion about adding lavender to a particular brew, and she just did it.

When he didn't kiss her back immediately, Hermione pulled back and nearly tripped over herself to run out of their dorm. She hid in one of the greenhouses with Neville, who was working on a project for Herbology, until she was sure that Draco would've gone to bed.

Unfortunately for her, she hadn't waited long enough. Draco had clearly been waiting up for her return. When she walked into the dorm and saw him settled on their sitting room sofa, she stood stock-still, unsure of what he would do to her for kissing him without his permission.

She certainly wasn't expecting that he'd walk right up to her and kiss her himself. She especially hadn't expected him to say, "I've been wanting to do that for weeks." when he finally pulled away from her to breathe.

And that, as they say, was that. In the following months, Hermione found herself becoming closer and closer to Draco Malfoy. They spoke candidly about their pasts, both individually and their past together, and continued to foster a relationship built on an actual foundation. So much so that, at the end of the following May, Hermione wasn't even surprised when Draco told her he loved her for the first time.

"Where's your head at, 'Mione?" Harry asks, his Auror perception likely telling him that Hermione's mind has gone elsewhere in the previous few minutes.

"Just thinking."

"We haven't really asked how you're feeling about all of this, have we? Some friends we are," Ginny points out, squeezing the hand she's still holding, as if in apology.

Despite her best efforts, Hermione feels tears start to prick at her eyes.

"I loved him," Hermione says quietly, biting her lip again as the tears begin to slip down her cheeks. "Part of me wonders if I could possibly even consider giving him a second chance after what he did to me. He was so selfish. He completely destroyed my heart, and I've only just started to feel whole again."

Pansy sits back down beside Hermione, letting go of her hand only to rub gentle circles along her back.

"But then the other part of me remembers what it felt like to wake up next to him nearly every morning for four years, and it remembers how hard we fought for each other– with our friends and with his mother. We put all of that effort in, and for what? For him to run off and marry someone else?"

Pansy sighs, and Hermione knows she's about to say something that's difficult for her.

"He had to, Granger. It's an expectation in Pureblood families. As you know, that's why my own parents no longer speak to me. I refused to enter into one of those insane contracts because my parents waited until I was seventeen to start looking into suitors. Draco never had a choice. His marriage to Astoria was arranged before either of them could walk," Pansy states, and Hermione can tell that it's hard for her to defend Draco. "He was bound by a contract. Daphne told me that the penalty for refusing to marry on either of their parts was Azkaban for them both. Surely Draco told you that."

Hermione nods, sniffling.

"He did, but admittedly, I wasn't the most avid listener when my boyfriend of multiple years told me that he was, in fact, engaged to be married to another woman."

"Understandably so," Pansy agrees, but Hermione knows, still, that her friend is not finished. "You had every right to be angry. Nobody would blame you if you still were and chose not to pursue anything with him again. But now that you have all of the information, so to speak, how do you feel?"

Hermione shrugs, looking around to the faces of her friends.

"I think I need to see him again and see how I feel being around him when I'm not completely caught off guard by him just showing up unannounced before I can make any firm deductions."

Pansy straightens up at this.

"Well, good thing, then, that the both of you will be at my birthday soiree. Perhaps you can use that event for a test run. There will be no media coverage because Blaise keeps his estate quite private, so you wouldn't have to worry about prying eyes."

Hermione thinks about that for a moment. That could work. Perhaps she should write a letter to Draco to let him know that she won't hex him if he tries to say hello to her.

Hello, friends! So, I'm uploading this chapter a little early because my sister is getting married this weekend, and I'm the Maid of Honor, so I expect to be very busy. I also just wanted to get this chapter out.

I might start uploading a little more often because I want to get the rest of this fic uploaded before I leave for a trip I'm going on for a month, on which I don't plan on bringing my laptop so I don't want to leave y'all hanging for a month.

I'm going to try not to anyway, lol.

ANYWAY. I love this chapter. I love this chapter because it shows Hermione's friends (especially Pansy. I stan my version of Pansy in this fic) which we haven't seen much of yet.

(P.S. I just had to take an intermission from writing this Author's Note because there was a GIANT spider on my bed, which I lost momentarily, so I had to find it and dispose of it. Just in case you were wondering.)

MOVING ON. I love this chapter, lol. I also love that we finally got to hear a bit about how Draco and Hermione got together to begin with. I know that eight chapters in is kind of late to learn that background information, but I think it fit in this chapter well.

I hope y'all enjoyed this chapter! (:

Please review if you feel so inclined. It would make me smile. (: