Allison Illuminated
12/30/23
::
THE UNDERTOW
A Dramione Fanfiction
::
Draco had given up on convincing his wife to sleep with him.
Okay, fine, so maybe it was a stupid bollocked idea in the first place to ever hope or expect that his contractually-arranged, house-elf freeing, married-him-for-the-library, know-it-all, oblivious, infuriating, absolutely gorgeous and fiercely independent wife (Draco had to take a deep breath, much to his consternation) would want to sleep with him. Have sex – yes, Blaise, he did know the meaning of the word – with an ex-Death Eater. A former terrorist. The foolish boy who had watched his aunt carve that horrid slur into her arm, the cursed scar that Hermione was trying so hard to remove. For a couple that spent nearly all their time together, they were astonishingly bad at communication.
"Wait, wait." Blaise held up a hand to stop him, snickering with barely contained amusement. "You can't just gloss over a detail like that, Draco. What do you mean, spend all your time together? You and Granger, getting all buddy-buddy? And you're telling me the woman won't sleep with you?"
Draco and Blaise sat together by the crackling fire, partaking in one of the Manor's fine brandy selections as they shared a refined chat with each other in a manner only appropriate for two young lords of their stature. Draco huffed, annoyed at the interruption; he was an excellent ranter when it came to things that had personally inconvenienced him, and no person or thing in his life had ever been a greater inconvenience that Hermione bloody Granger, with her stupid perfect curls and snobbish swotty tendencies, and her tits, dear Merlin-
"Oi, Malfoy," Blaise whined. "Stop fantasizing about your wife and pay attention to me!"
"I was not fantasizing-"
"You were so fantasizing. I lived with you for seven years, you think I don't know what your Hermione Granger face looks like?"
"My what?" Draco demanded, aghast.
Blaise rolled his eyes. "Whenever you spend too much time thinking about Granger, you get all broody, and then you start preening like you're at some sort of fashion show and you're trying to pose for a photo shoot. Don't pretend like you don't readjust your hairline whenever you're ready to pull some petty rubbish on your wife."
"Malfoy."
"Pardon."
Draco scowled irritably. "Her name is Malfoy, Zabini. Use it."
There was a long pause while Blaise stared at Draco, his incredulity as thick as his skull. It was so obvious what he was thinking: why would Hermione Granger ever want anything to do with the Malfoy name? Well, Draco wasn't going to be the one to break the news that Hermione was the one who'd demanded it.
"…Okaaaaay. Malfoy, then." Blaise took an over-exaggerated sip of his tea – dramatic git – rolled his eyes, then asked again. "Explain to me why I should be surprised that Malfoy won't touch you with a ten-foot-pole? And, more important, how the hell did you even get her to let you into the same room as her?"
"Look," Draco snapped. "I'm on house arrest. She's a shut-in. It's a match made in heaven. We're like if Slytherin and Gryffindor were hot and also married to each other, but Gryffindor was a woman and Slytherin was pathetically horny at the sight of her all the time. I'm founding the fucking Hogwarts School of Getting My Wife to Fuck Me, and she's pissed at me because I didn't want to let the Muggleborns in – but only the hot ones! I don't know, Blaise!"
"No, tell me more," Blaise said. "I'm intrigued."
Draco did not, in fact, tell him more, and the conversation ended when he lobbed a crumpet at Blaise's head, which dissolved into a food fight more befitting of twelve-year-olds than two full-grown men.
So his friends were a bunch of arseholes on their best day. That was fine. Draco had accepted that truth at some point during his Dark Lord phase – he really had looked rather fetching in black, though the whole 'utter misery and despair' thing had put a real damper on the fashion possibilities.
What was he thinking about again?
His friends. Right.
Well, Crabbe was dead, and Goyle just about wished that Draco was too; Blaise was a prick and Theo was a wanker; Pansy hadn't talked to him since the day he'd received his marriage contract from Hermione in the mail, and she'd convinced all the other Slytherin girls his age that he'd become a Mudblood lover or blood traitor or some other sort of blood supremacist shite that Draco didn't believe in anymore, which Draco supposed proved Pansy's point.
Who did that leave him with?
Hermione.
And his mother too, but Draco wasn't that pathetic.
Hermione Malfoy had become Draco's entire world. He was helplessly, hopelessly, pathetically in love with her, to a painful extent. It actually physically pained him to think about it, mostly because it required Draco to utter the words "love" and "with Hermione" in his mind in conjunction with each other, which was a level of psychic damage that must have constituted cruel and unusual punishment under some clause of international law, a Muggle concept that Hermione had spent over an hour ranting to him about after Draco had asked why the Muggles didn't just kill all of their prisoners during wartime like Voldemort did. (Apparently rendering your enemies defenseless made them less killable in the eyes of the Muggle world. Draco couldn't make heads or tails of it. Muggles, right?)
Anyway. That was all Draco could think about these days. How his alleged 'wife' Hermione was somehow his best friend when she didn't even seem to be aware of the fact that she enjoyed his company.
It was true, though – Draco had taken to spending his time in the library.
Over the last month, Hermione had gotten sucked deeper and deeper into the black hole of her research, to the point where if Draco, Narcissa, or one of their few remaining elves didn't nudge her into taking care of herself, she just… wouldn't. She wouldn't eat, she wouldn't drink, she wouldn't sleep. And though Draco and Narcissa hadn't discussed it, because that would require them to have an actual conversation with each other, the anxiety hung between them at every family breakfast and dinner. Draco had had to carry his sleeping wife from the library to her bedroom several times in the last few weeks.
That was the closest he ever got to her. Cradling her to his chest while she slept against his shoulder, restless even while unconscious.
Today, Draco had had enough.
"Hermione."
"…"
"Hermione Malfoy."
"…"
"Oh, bloody hell, woman, would you look at me already?"
With bleary eyes, Hermione tore her eyes away from her endless scrolls of parchment to blink uncomprehendingly at her husband. She looked, well- She looked rather like a feral vampire, if Draco were being honest with himself. Her bushy hair was even more tangled than usual, her face was splattered with ink like bloodstains, and there were bags under her eyes deep enough to suggest a deficit of blood in her face. She had a certain pallor too, the sickliness of a woman who refused to attend to her own needs, and Draco wished nothing more than to wipe it away. Though the idea of Hermione biting him wasn't too objectionable, Draco would really prefer not to envision one of those nasty bloodsuckers while he jacked off alone in what was supposed to be his marriage bed.
"Oh, it's you," Hermione mumbled, yawning in her cute little way. "What are you doing here, Draco?"
Draco decided to ask his wife how she was feeling.
"You look like absolute shit," Draco said, then immediately cursed himself internally. Fuck!
It was a testament to how dreadfully Hermione was doing that she didn't so much as snap at him; no fight was provoked, and Draco felt a terrible ineffable sensation of loss at the lack of response, as though he had failed in his sole duty as a husband. Come on, Draco thought, gritting his teeth. React, fight back, do something. This was a catastrophe! Unacceptable!
"Personally," Draco announced in his snottiest tone, putting one hand on his hip and flaring out the other, "I think that we should invest all of our money in crude oil and nucleus wars, and then sell the polios to the Muggles whenever they buy their tellyvisions,"
Hermione sighed, leaning on a glum fist and delving right back into her latest book. "That's nice, dear."
Draco spluttered in utter disbelief.
As a matter of fact, Draco had been in the library for the entire day, from when he had brought Hermione a cup of coffee at nine in the morning and kissed her on the head ("Hmmm?" Hermione had mumbled), to lunchtime when he'd brought her a hearty sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup ("Thank you, Villy," Hermione had yawned, and a part of Draco's soul had left his body.). Was he invisible? Maybe, for all the good his presence did her! Draco had made certain to set up his 'work,' namely a very large stack of mystery novels that he had been meaning to read for years, at a table directly in Hermione's line of sight, but Hermione was so hyperfixated on her work that she never even noticed him!
Enough was enough.
Before he'd plotted out a smart course of action, Draco had slammed his hands down on the table, making the inkwells rattle and Hermione flinch like he'd shot a Stupefy at her. Hermione jerked away from her desk, her hand flying over her heart as she stared at him with fearful eyes. Hands clenching to fists, Draco hung his head in self-loathing – he hadn't meant to scare her – before he looked up at her with smoldering eyes.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Draco demanded. Hermione withdrew into herself, worrying her hands together. "You're walking yourself to death's doorstep. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't frogmarch you out of this library and take you on a very long and assuredly boring tour of the Malfoy grounds."
Hermione swallowed, looking nearly ready to cry. "Must you yell?"
Draco scoffed. "I've been trying to ask you normally for days, and it's like I'm talking to a brick wall. Must you constantly ignore me? No, forget me, I'm entirely irrelevant." Draco shook his head, drawing to his full height and crossing his arms over his chest. "Must you ignore yourself?"
"Yes, actually."
"Oh, and pray tell, what could possibly justify this self-destruction?You're wasting away, and you expect me to just stand by?"
"Oh, please, like you care," Hermione spat.
"I do," Draco said. "I'm worried about you."
For a moment, his earnest concern seemed to jolt her out of whatever depression spiral she was in. She stared at him with wide eyes, and Draco was vividly reminded of his wife at twelve, the younger Hermione who used to watch magic demonstrations with an open mouth and an eager wand – before the war, before the hatred, before the world had come crashing down upon their shoulders. She was there for a moment; then gone again. He watched her shut-down in real time; how her eyes lost their sparkle, and her shoulders slumped, then withdrew, any hope or awe or Merlin-forbidden love dissolving into a jaded anger and disbelief.
Hermione was so beautiful when she was unguarded. Draco hated the way her cold walls marred that picture of her that he had cherished for far longer than he was willing to admit.
"Yeah, right," Hermione murmured, shaking her head.
Draco narrowed his eyes. "I am, Hermione, whether you believe me or not."
"What are you plotting this time, Malfoy?"
That one stung. A lot.
Was that really what she thought of him? Draco opened his mouth, then closed it, knowing that on some level he deserved her vitriol. He should have been infuriated. But instead, he felt little more than a sorrowful loneliness, as though he'd been left stranded on a moor while the woman who was supposed to be his wife had given up on finding safe harbor leagues back.
This wasn't what his marriage was supposed to be. His father had an extraordinary number of faults, but being a poor husband hadn't been one of them, at least at first. Lucius had been devoted to Narcissa. He'd just devoted himself even more to Tom Marvolo Riddle. And in the end, his greater love had taken precedence, and he'd paid the price for it with his life.
History couldn't repeat itself again.
Draco wouldn't let it.
So, even though every ounce of his pride demanded that he dig in his heels and fight to make himself known, Draco swallowed his tongue and forced himself to make a better decision – one for Hermione's sake, not his own.
"Oh, ha ha," Draco said, forcing snark behind his wooden words. "Looks like you caught me. I'm here to force you to come eat a well-rounded dinner with Mother and I, and then I'm going to trick you, cunning bloke I am, into going to sleep at a reasonable hour. How dastardly of me. I hardly know how you shall recover."
"But I have to finish taking my notes on this chapter; it's essential that I-"
Losing his temper, Draco stepped in and carefully took Hermione's chin in hand, forcing her gaze up to meet his. Hermione stared at him with wide eyes, parted lips, rosy cheeks. Exhaustion could go bugger itself – she was still beautiful. Draco couldn't stop himself from running a gentle thumb over her lips, entranced by the way Hermione darted her tongue out as though to taste him; just the slightest touch of rough warmth to his fingerpad, marked by a little burst of wet heat, but it was electrifying. Merlin, Draco thought, trying to keep himself under control. She licked me.
Draco was not going to bend Hermione over a desk and fuck her in the middle of the library.
He was not going to bend her over a desk, he was not going to bend her over a desk-
Not the time, Malfoy Jr.
Desperate for any semblance of control, Draco slipped into his familiar pattern of bossing people around. He might not be able to fuck her, but he could still play the disciplinarian.
"Hermione Jean Malfoy," Draco said, letting a low gravel enter his voice. "If you don't leave this library to go take care of yourself, then I will track down that horrible cat of yours and force it to wear a tutu."
Hermione gasped.
"For a month."
"No! Not Crookshanks!"
"It'll be one of those horrid muggle things. Like the one from that Goose Lake tripe you made me watch. I'll make sure it has ribbons."
They smiled at each other for a moment before Hermione remembered who she was talking to and shut down again. She gave a jerky little nod, but wouldn't meet his eyes. Fallow curls hung before her face. It was painful for Draco to watch the beleaguered way she stood up, so sleep deprived that she swayed in place. He couldn't help himself from rushing to her side, steadying her, but Hermione ripped her arm away in disgust.
"Don't touch me," Hermione snarled, her mood turning vicious again on a dime.
"But-"
There was dark fire in her brown eyes. Sneering, Hermione grabbed her wand and cast a quick spell, revealing the true culprit of her fury: the jagged, purpled scar that Bellatrix had given her, spelling out MUDBLOOD in obnoxiously aggressive letters.
Draco swallowed, but Hermione shoved her arm in his face.
"Don't go touching the pretty little mudblood now, Draco. We wouldn't want you to sully your perfect pure blood – oh, wait." Hermione smirked in amusement. "You already have."
He wasn't going to tell her what an accurate rendition of Bellatrix she was doing right now. Draco stood his ground, stepping past the scar on her arm back into her space. It was so obvious: the tremble of her arm, the pliance of her anger, the quaver of her lip, the naked fear in her eyes. Draco forced her to meet his eyes.
"I don't care," Draco whispered.
Hermione laughed with an aristocratic haughtiness that she had clearly picked up from Narcissa, then turned up her lip in scorn. "I do."
Then she was sweeping past him, out of the library and off to Merlin-knows-where, leaving Draco behind in the center of the stacks. Draco stood there and tried to gather up the utterly ruined remnants of his libido, overtaken by the gut-wrenching sensation that there was something he had lost.
::
It was traditional for Lord Malfoy and Lady Malfoy to have separate rooms – a perfectly sensible relic of an arranged marriage culture, but one that two generations of Malfoys had bucked, as Abraxas and Lucius Malfoy had both married for love. Draco was deeply resentful that his marriage was a miserable return to form. Hermione didn't just have her own room, she had her own wing of the Manor, as physically far away from his room as one could possibly be without sleeping in the guest house. They lived separate overlapping lives; they were one, they were two; and though Draco rarely went a day without spending a significant amount of time with Hermione, his presence in her life was altogether transient, as though she were the true Lady of the Manor and Draco were nothing but a ghost.
Draco had mastered the art of haunting, though. He drifted through the halls of his childhood home, and saw the lingering afterimages of the dead bodies of Voldemort's victims, corpses mangled by werewolves, corpses bloated and half-eaten for Nagini's enjoyment, lifeless bodies staring at the ceiling with sightless eyes. There was blood in the carpets and screaming in the walls; the memories of the Dark Lord were stamped on this place like an indictment, and Hermione had brought a lone spot of light into the bleakness of his home, but he was little better than a moth to her flame, a supplicant who reached out for the holy succor of Lady Magic, but could never become one with the lifeforce itself. They were no more fae than fetid, no more dead than alive.
In his wanderings, Draco often found that his feet took him into Hermione's wing, a privilege that was once denied to him, but had since been granted once their marriage bond had settled in. Their family magic knew that Draco would never hurt Hermione. He would wander the halls, which had been left blessedly vacant for most of Voldemort's bleak reign, and drink in that tiny sliver of what Malfoy Manor had once been to him: a place of refuge, a seat of power, a memory of warmth. It was all for Hermione now. And though her suite laid at the furthest end of the wing, a room only befitting of the Lady of the Manor, Draco would take his time before he inevitably came to her door, wishing to let himself inside, but trapped at the threshold, forced to contend with the faintest trace of her magic within. She called out to him, though she didn't know it. Hermione had been so quick to accept the mundane nature of the bond, but Draco was the one who knew what it really meant. What it entailed for them. For him. For her. It wasn't just a magical compulsion. It couldn't produce what wasn't already there. That wasn't how it worked. There had been abusive Malfoys, terrible husbands who hadn't respected the sanctity of their marriage bonds. It wasn't a protection, it was a promise, a reduplication, an affirmation, an entwinement, a source; and Draco knew what was at the source of her, at the source of himself, and it was love that had driven them together, however foolish, misguided, or buried: he loved her. And it was love that brought him to Hermione's door.
Today, though, the door had been left ajar.
Low voices came from within. Draco crept to the doorway and peered inside.
Sitting together at the edge of her bed, carrying on a conversation, Hermione stared off into the distance while Narcissa played with her hair. Both women were unguarded, and Draco caught his breath at the look of soft adoration on his mother's face. Narcissa ran her hands through Hermione's curls so gently; Hermione must have showered, because her hair was wet, and she wore nothing but a delicate blue teddy which hung lightly off her thin form, dampened by her lion's mane. With the care of a woman who had always wanted a daughter, Narcissa picked up a hairbrush and began to work it through her hair. Hermione melted under the touch, and her eyes slid shut, leaning back into her mother-in-law ever so.
"You have beautiful hair," Narcissa murmured, tucking a stray ringlet behind her ear.
Hermione let out a wistful sigh, murmuring in appreciation at the careful way Narcissa handled her hair. "Draco doesn't think so."
"Draco pulls on your curls." Narcissa laughed and eased a tangle out into perfect waves. "He's never meant it, darling. You know how prickly he gets when it comes to admitting he likes something."
To Draco's shock, Hermione chuckled. "He does, doesn't he?"
"He always has. Ever since he was a little boy…"
When Narcissa began telling an embarrassing story, Draco zoned out. He was too entranced by the way Hermione's defenses unfolded at the touch of a hairbrush to care about whatever asinine anecdote from his childhood had stuck in his mother's brain. Hermione closed her eyes, sinking deep into her zen, and let her face relax at last, her premature age lines smoothing back out into the smooth simplicity of youth. Her chest rose and fell, her dusky nipples just visible through the thin satin of her teddy, and Draco swallowed at the sight of her plunging neckline and the tantalizing glimpse of the cleavage beneath. He wanted to make her feel that way. Was it really as easy as picking up a hairbrush?
Maybe Hermione would let Draco brush her hair.
"I can't…"
Hermione trailed off, fidgeting with her fingers. "Can't what, dearest?" Narcissa probed in a gentle tone, running a calming hand over Hermione's bare shoulder. Draco winced in sympathy at the way the thoughtlessly maternal touch – undoubtedly a novelty – sent a full body shiver running down Hermione's spine.
"I can't brush my own hair," Hermione whispered shamefully. "I use charms. But they never fully detangle it."
"Why ever not?"
"Because," Hermione said in a tiny voice, "my Mum always used to do it for me. I never learned how. And when I went to Hogwarts, I would let Lavender and Pavarti, my dorm mates, play with it sometimes, but they rather hated me, and sometimes Ginny would help me. But I was always too scared to do it myself, and once- once I learned the charm, there was never a reason. But here, there's- I don't have-"
Narcissa looked as though she'd been gutted. "Hermione."
"I didn't want to bother you. And now that- that my M-Mum is go-" Breaking off, Hermione kneaded her hands together in agitation, tears springing to her eyes. "Now that sh- she's gone-"
The hairbrush fell to the bedspread. Narcissa pulled Hermione into a tight, protective hug, and Hermione collapsed into her arms, a sob muffling into her shoulder. Draco swallowed, feeling as though he were intruding on a private moment – but he couldn't look away.
"I will brush your hair," Narcissa said fiercely, fingers working through Hermione's curls. "Ma petite, I swear it to you. Every day, I will come here and brush your hair. I'll never let you have another tangle."
"Cissa," Hermione choked out.
Draco had seen enough. He crept away from the threshold and departed from the Lady's suite. The last thing he heard, as clear as any reassurance his mother had ever given him, was Narcissa's insistence, making promises he knew she had every intention to keep.
::
"Draco! Don't put that there!"
"Then where would you prefer I put it, princess? Here?"
"No!"
"Here?"
"God, that's even worse."
"It's literally an open space!"
Hermione hissed at him.
Another day, another petty fight in the library. Hermione had sprawled herself across her work station, glaring up at Draco like a particularly peeved kneazle and using her arms to cover her hoard of books. Draco, of course, was playing the task rabbit and trying to find a place to put five new books down – he would have simply handed them to her, but that would have given her an excuse to ignore him, so putting them down in her obliquely organized space it was! It was simply one of his husbandly duties: get the books, annoy the wife, capture her full and undivided attention for approximately three point two five seconds of her day, before Hermione inevitably bored of him and went back to her research.
"Are you sure you're not an animagus?" Draco asked.
"Give them to me!" Hermione cried, making grabby hands at her books, but Draco danced out of her reach, holding them up above his head. Letting out a wordless cry of frustration, Hermione jumped out of her seat and tried to grab for them. She was too short, of course.
Draco laughed at the sight of his wife jumping for her books. "What's the magic word?" he asked.
"Ooh, you asshole."
"I'm waiting!"
"Please?"
"Merlin, no. Ew. What kind of sop do you take me for?"
"Shazam?"
"Is that a venereal disease?"
"I'll turn you into a venereal disease if you don't give them to me," Hermione growled.
"Oh no," Draco said in a monotone, one that barely concealed the snicker in his tone. "I'm so scared, Hermione. However shall I recover?"
"I could punch you again."
She sounded entirely too gleeful at the prospect, so he hurried along to the point. He wasn't that masochistic. "Or – fanciful concept, can't wait for you to get a hold of this one – you could use your wand." Hermione blinked. Draco rolled his eyes. "Accio? Ever heard of it?"
Hermione stared at Draco.
Draco stared at Hermione.
"Accio books."
The books flew to her arms, and they both paused for a moment, struck silent by the anticlimax of it all. What was supposed to happen now? They didn't know how to talk to each other when they weren't fighting. Draco flailed about for a moment while he concocted the most surefire way to ruffle her feathers.
"Atta girl."
"I hate you."
"I love you too," Draco said, relieved at his success, and planted a quick kiss on Hermione's cheek before he flounced away.
Maybe if Draco had been paying more attention to his own actions, he would have realized that was the first time he had ever kissed his wife anywhere but atop her head, or in a less than platonic manner. Maybe if he had bothered to look back after he'd claimed his petty victory, he would have seen Hermione's look of shock, or the way her hand drifted to her cheek, staring at the place where Draco had been just moments before, as though she saw some afterimage of him in the library even after he was gone.
::
The Malfoy family dining room made the grandiose feel cozy; it brought paintings and gilded fixtures into unison with periwinkle walls, and when the aromas of dinner filled the air, the worries of the world could be for a brief time forgotten. It wasn't the formal dining room – that had been Voldemort's habitual lair. No, this was the dining room squirreled away near Draco and Narcissa's quarters, far from the malignancy of the Blood War. It was a safe haven for Draco, and he dearly hoped that bringing it into his wife's routine would make it a safe haven for her too.
Hermione sat at her place across from Draco next to Narcissa, poking at her food with a glum fork as she drifted off into her thoughts. Draco met his mother's eyes, observing the worry lines beneath them, and pursed his lips. Narcissa swallowed and shook her head.
"I can feel you both staring at me," Hermione muttered, carving what looked suspiciously like a rune matrix into her mashed potatoes. "I'm fine."
"Of course you are, dearest," Narcissa soothed.
"Is that Fiendfyre?!"
"So what if it is?"
"Are you bloody crazy?"
"Oh, please," Hermione said, rolling her eyes as she finished the rune from the obliteration of matter. "It's hardly like I intend to burn the Manor down; besides, Fiendfyre is rather tame compared to some of the things I'm working on. It's like a big, dumb brute of a spell. Like, oh, I don't know – Crabbe and Goyle."
Draco went rigid, the blood draining from his face. Narcissa pursed her lips.
Hermione twirled a bouncy curl around her finger, which had taken on a certain pampered elegance under Narcissa's care, and chewed idly on her fork. Lost in her own thoughts as always, she was oblivious to the effect her words had on the other Malfoys. One would have to search now to find signs of her Muggleborn upbringing; she looked every bit the part of the pampered Pureblood heiress. And she probably didn't even know it.
"Now, Bellatrix's magic," Hermione said, almost wistful. "That's true complexity. Her work was simply genius – utterly deranged, of course, and a nasty piece of work, but I simply can't have worked on the same spell almost every day for years and not respect her craftsmanship. It's elegant. Dark magic is… It's hardly like Dumbledore's spells. Seductive, yes, but it's an elementary force, a counterbalance to light magic. Power simply seduces, light or dark. But dark magic is dark because our bodies are made of light magic, of matter, and so are our souls. It corrodes the very essence of our being, but by the same token, we wouldn't be able to be if the elementary forces didn't hold our bodies and souls in can't exist without the other. It's like antimatter-"
Narcissa shared an alarmed look with Draco. "Antimatter?"
"Muggles call it dark matter too," Hermione said casually, as though that weren't the most fucking disturbing thing she'd said about the Muggles since she'd explained climate change and nuclear war. "They think the two are different, but really they're just two sides of the composite that make up dark magic. It's a basic principle of physics. Equal and opposite force. Matter meets antimatter, it explodes. Utterly annihilates. That's all that magic is, you know. Controlled expulsions of fundamental force. Dark matter simply harnesses antimatter, rather than manipulating pure matter. When Voldemort-" Narcissa and Draco both flinched. Hermione rolled her eyes. "You-Know-Who. When he split his soul, he wasn't creating literal soul shards. It's impossible to have less or more than a full soul, it's just a soul. What a Horcrux is is a partition of one soul into two souls, where the missing halves of each soul are filled with antimatter rather than matter, which in turn increases the power of dark magic, because you have a more direct reserve of power to draw from. But it also makes you less human, because humanity lies in matter, not antimatter. That's also the reason that Avada Kedavra is the darkest curse, because it literally annihilates the soul. Matter meets antimatter, life goes poof." Hermione blew out a little breath and stabbed her fork into her rune matrix. "Don't ask me how the afterlife works, I haven't the foggiest. Maybe it's the fae. Harry probably understands it better than me. Maybe he could ask death. But… yeah. Fiendfyre and Avada Kedavra are the darkest spells because they are literally blunt force applications of dark magic. Avada Kedavra couldn't kill a Horcrux because it only attacks light magic, and Horcruxes are shielded by the antimatter of their souls, but Fiendfyre could because it… siphons out the dark magic, the antimatter, then obliterates whatever remains. Bellatrix's magic is much more subtle, it's not light or dark, it's just evil. Honestly…" Hermione sighed, rolling her eyes. "Avada Kedavra is so boring. It only corrodes because whoever created it couldn't be half-arsed to keep it from backlashing on the user. It's poorly optimized. A half-decent spellmaster could probably rewrite the rune matrix so that-"
"Hermione."
Hermione blinked. "Yes?"
"Please stop," Draco said queasily.
The room fell silent. They had all stopped eating. As it stretched deeper, filling up the mansion hollows, the cavernous ceiling, the deep shadows at the edges of the magical lights, Hermione's face fell as the subject of her rambling dawned upon her. She looked up at Draco with horrified eyes. Draco gave her a thin smile.
"Oh," Hermione said. "Oh, Draco, I- I- I forgot."
"It's okay."
"I'm so sorry."
No, you're not, Draco wanted to say, but he managed to hold his tongue for once in his life. Something told him that it wasn't what she needed to hear. "It's okay," he managed to force out again, the words bitter. "Crabbe was… a cruel bully. A useless lug. He was stupidly, pitifully enthusiastic about being a Death Eater."
Her lip wobbled.
"But he was seventeen," Draco said in a shakier voice than he'd intended. "And he was my friend."
"Was he a good friend?"
"Not really. I liked Zabini and Nott better. Father paid Crabbe Sr. to have Crabbe be my lapdog, and whatever you might think of me, I hardly enjoyed that part of Hogwarts. But-"
"He was still your friend."
"Yeah."
"Ron was-" Hermione had to stop and take a shuddering breath, covering her face with both hands. She rocked there for a second, but jerked away when Narcissa tried to touch her. She set her jaw like a wild thing. Draco caught his breath. "That was Ronald. For me. Obviously my family didn't pay him to like me, but he was… an arse. All the time. But he was all I had."
A lifetime of good manners and the looming presence of his mother warred with the existential need to needle his wife. As usual, Hermione won out over his sensibility. "Is that why you fucked him?"
"Draco!" Narcissa squawked in horror, but Hermione snickered. The look she shot Draco had a little bit of sparkle to it, and Draco preened.
"Yeah," Hermione said. "That was why I fucked him. And let me tell you, Ronald Weasley was a godawful lay."
Draco barked a triumphant laugh, and Hermione hid a small smile behind her hand.
"I could have told you that."
"Oh, I think you did, husband."
"Tell me, did he get red all over while he-"
Hermione snorted at the vulgar gesture Draco made. "Oh yes."
"Brilliant," Draco breathed in glee.
Were they talking about sex? Good Merlin, they were talking about sex! Pixies would swim! Hermione gave Draco a flushed smile, the first real one he'd seen from her all week, and Draco couldn't help but laugh again, loud and triumphant, and reach across the table to lay his hand on her arm. Blushing, Hermione leaned into him everso. Her smile slowly vanished – but the sparkle remained.
Narcissa let out a disgusted noise and swanned her way to her feet. "Young people these days," she huffed as she left the room. "Must you be so vulgar over dinner? First dark magic, then sex…"
"Love you, Cissa!" Hermione called after her.
Pausing by the door, Narcissa offered a brief look, her snobbish disdain melting into softness that Draco had only ever seen reserved for him and his father. Hermione's cheeks pinked. Then the Malfoy matriarch swept out of the room, and Hermione and Draco were alone together again.
Hermione stared longingly at the place where his mother had been.
"I'll have you know," Draco said snootily, "that I am nothing but porcelain all the way down."
He then ducked to avoid a glob of mashed potatoes.
::
Azkaban was not an experience that Draco liked to revisit. Even without the Dementors there to sap his soul, his two-week stay at the penitentiary between the Battle of Hogwarts and his trial was dark and miserable, lightened only because he wasn't chained down and shared his cell with his mother. Draco had stayed sane by pacing from one length of the cell to the other, a habit that had driven Narcissa insane. Twenty seven steps longwise, fourteen shortwise. Nothing but the pathetic moanings of the losing side through one side of their bars, and the relentless pounding of the North Sea through the other.
While he might not have stayed at the notorious wizarding prison, Malfoy Manor had become once again a prison. Walls once his palace were now the outer bounds of his life. So Draco kept pacing – through the halls, around the grounds, anywhere but the places that his mother had claimed for herself. Practically the only thing that kept him still was Hermione.
Hermione grounded him.
So was it any wonder that Draco's nightly pacing routine now took him through her wing, past her room not once but twice? Was it any wonder that when he couldn't sleep, he would wander to her door and stand there, wishing he could go inside and make sure she wasn't having a nightmare under the noxious safety of her silencing charms? He wanted to sleep beside her, he wanted to guard her, to touch her, to feel her; he wanted her to weigh him down, like a weighted blanket around his shoulders, like a young heir's ring around his finger; he wanted to wear her like silk, he wanted to be inside of her, he didn't want to possess her, but oh, how very deeply did he want her. She was the deep blue tapestries that hung outside her doorway, she was the memories of parchment that remained on her desk in the library in the wee hours of the morning, when Draco sank into her desk chair and took in the faded scent of her, and tried to breathe.
"Draco?" Her voice was soft, tentative. It felt like a whisper of a dream – but no, he was there, standing outside her door again, and she had heard the tightness of his anxiety, or perhaps the press of his clenched fist as he leaned against the wall. "Are you out there?"
"Yeah," Draco managed, ruined.
"Can you come in?"
Could he?
Could he?
Draco Malfoy would later confess to his peacocks, who really were rather better than those rubbish muggle cyclopes that Hermione kept trying to persuade him to talk to, that he had never moved faster to follow a request in his entire life.
On the bed, a vision. Hermione laid on her back on her satin bedspread, her head to the door, curls tumbling off the bed like a brunette waterfall, hands splayed, fingers curled, the hem of her nightgown taut against her tantalizingly bare legs. She stared at him upside down, and Draco had to swallow back his arousal at the glistening in her eyes. Oh, Merlin, she was crying. Why did the bloody woman have to be crying?
"Stop that," Draco said as an errant tear trickled down her cheekbone.
Hermione sniffled, staring at him with such a doeish expression that he could almost believe that she'd never seen a day of war in her life. "Draco…"
Draco stalked over to the bed and sat down beside her. When Hermione reached out a weak hand for him, he took it, absently running circles over the back of her palm. "What's the matter with you now?"
"Are you real?" Hermione whispered.
He blinked.
"Are you out of your mind?"
Giggling, Hermione let her hand fall back to her idle breast, looking back at the painted ceiling. "I just can't shake the feeling that I've gone and died," she said in a vapid way, "Like all of this is just… some grand old dream, and I'll wake up again in my four-poster at Hogwarts ready to go to Second-Year Transfiguration again, and I- I-" Another tear trickled down her cheek. Hermione tried to laugh again, but it was a harsh sound. "And I forgot to do my homework, silly me, and Minerva's going to be so terribly disappointed in me again."
Draco reached out to brush a curl behind her ear. "I don't think McGonagall's been disappointed with you for a day in your life."
Hermione's eyes welled. "You don't know how often I got in trouble in school."
"Still."
"And I just- just-" Hermione let out a little sob, then collapsed in on herself, rolling away to put her back to him. Draco scooted closer. "It has to be a fantasy, Draco, it has to. This is all just some- some stupid fancy that I've concocted, like all of those stupid things I used to imagine before you- you said that awful word to me for the first time, because I try not to remember that it was different-" Draco felt a pit yawn open in his stomach. "But it's nice to believe in it, isn't it? For once. Not just because I'm nothing but a scared, lonely, stupid girl-"
"No sane person would ever consider you stupid, Malfoy," Draco said sharply, curling his lip over the offending word.
"-jilling off to a fantasy of fucking my bully in the middle of the fucking woods while I'm on the run from an evil genocidal maniac who, oh, right, he supported-"
"Pardon?"
Hermione rolled back over and glowered at Draco. "You know what you did."
"No, actually, I'm a little confused – are we still in Second-Year, or can we go back to you masturbating in the same tent as Potter-"
"Ew. Oh, ew, shove off, Malfoy-"
"Not saying that he's not attractive, but-"
"You think Harry's attractive?"
Malfoy blinked. "I said no such thing."
"You definitely did," Hermione snickered, which came out more as a wet honk that was really rather unattractive. Draco wished his wife would stop crying so she would sound less like a dying hippopotamus. "Oh, and I do not sound like a hippopotamus, thank you very much."
Had he said that out loud?
"Yes, dear."
"Oh, for Merlin's sake," Draco groaned.
Hermione laughed, which abruptly turned into another sob. "So I had a secret. Big fat deal now. Oh, look, the idiot mudblood chit had a little crush on the perfect pureblood prince when she was twelve. Look how well that turned out. Look at what the prince ever did for her."
It was, in fact, a big fat deal.
Some might even go so far to suggest that it was mindblowing.
Draco, for one, found that the only appropriate response was to sit in perfectly stunned silence.
"And now look where I am. Practically thirty, a spinstress, a shut-in, alone-"
"Married."
"Yes, that too, and I've got this horrid scar on my arm, and I practically haven't seen a friend in, gosh, it must have been six months-"
"Do I need to drag Potter over to see you?"
"Hush, you're interrupting my recriminations. And this house is so bloody big and I hardly ever see you, and half the time I do, I just, I don't even know, it's like I look at you and you just make-" Draco caught his breath in anticipation. "You make my skin boil, or something. Like I'm covered with ants. Maybe I'm allergic to you."
"Can we circle back around to being married? Or maybe the masturbation?"
Huffing, Hermione curled around him, nesting her head against the side of his legs. "You're rotten at this whole comfort thing."
His fingers found their way into her hair. "And yet you're married to me."
"I suppose."
"Your Second-Year crush."
"Nominally. Did you know that the human body replaces almost all of its cells once every seven-"
Draco looked up at the ceiling, and wondered how far his amicable graces could extend for the infuriating little woman at his side. "If you finish that sentence, I'm leaving."
Hermione fell silent.
They'd had a fight once, a silly petty fight where neither of them had walked away satisfied, but it had gone something like this: Hermione had absolutely insisted that Wizarding homes were too quiet, and Draco had demanded what the hell she was on about this time. The answer was something about eccentricities and carts, of course, and Draco hadn't even bothered trying to understand what she was saying. Muggle homes buzzed? And it wasn't some kind of curse? Hermione had given a very predictably Hermione answer, something like, "Well, actually, everything vibrates," to which Draco had had enough and demanded if she'd never heard magic before, and then Hermione had scoffed that one doesn't simply hear magic, that's preposterous, to which Draco had demanded if she'd never heard of clairvoyance- Anyway. Point being, Draco knew that sometimes his wife heard electricity and he heard the family magic in the walls, and that maybe, that could possibly suggest that they were both right – terrifying concept – and that really there had never been any reason to fight in the first place, but wouldn't that invalidate, well, everything? Wouldn't that just bring the whole house of cards crashing down? If they'd never had a reason to go to war? If they had never been on separate pages about each other?
It was unthinkable. Preposterous. Completely and utterly soul-crushing.
Draco was glad that Hermione was on the same page as him that they were absolutely not going to acknowledge that they had spent the entire fight agreeing with each other in slightly different ways, as most of their fights tended to go.
The alternative was too terrifying to imagine.
"It was just a stupid fantasy," Hermione concluded, though she sounded far less certain than she had when she'd begun.
"That you'd be married to me?"
Hermione sniffled and shook her head, curling up tighter around him. "That you would love me like I was back then," she whispered. "That you'd love me like you were. That you'd treat me like I was your princess. That you'd- you'd notice me."
He had noticed her.
He'd noticed her every single day that the both of them were at Hogwarts.
"We're not them anymore."
"I know."
"You want me to treat you like you're my princess?" Draco asked softly.
"It's stupid. And childish."
"It's not."
"It doesn't matter anymore," Hermione said, her bitterness muffled by the side of his trousers.
He could feel her energy falling. In a split-second, he had made the impulsive and possibly quite foolish decision to rise to his feet, work his arms beneath his wife, and scoop her up into his arms. Hermione screamed in surprise, her arms flying around his neck for balance, but Draco just rolled his eyes and carried her around the best to her pillows.
"Draco Malfoy!" Hermione shrieked. "Put me down this instant!"
He deposited her next to her nightstand and deftly tucked her beneath the covers. "As you command, milady," he said in a dry tone.
Hermione glowered at him, her eyes already drooping at contact with her pillow.
"Fuck you."
"By all means."
"No- I-" Her face was deliciously red. Draco wished very badly to kiss her. "Oooh, you bastard."
"Didn't you know that all good princesses need to follow their bedtime routines?" Draco smirked, kneeling down at her bedside and pressing a cheeky kiss to her temples. "Or did they leave out the part of your… dream where laying upside down in bed until arse o'clock in the morning doesn't actually count as rest?"
"What are you supposed to be, my father?"
"No," Draco said in a serious tone. "Your husband, actually."
Hermione blinked at him.
It was late, wasn't it? Far past time that he should have been getting back to his own room. Draco stepped away from the bed, a strange pride glowing in his chest, and offered Hermione an uncharacteristically genuine smile, which only seemed to confuse her more. Hell, he was confusing himself. Whatever. He'd done an excellent day's work. His performance had been more than satisfactory. Curtains. Lights.
"Where are you going?" Hermione asked.
Draco tilted his head, and said, "I think it's time for bed, don't you? Unless you'd prefer me to stay."
Hermione worked her lips, then settled for the slightest shake of her head.
"Well, that's that, then."
"Yeah."
"I'll be going."
"You do that," Hermione said dazedly.
Draco smirked. "Goodnight, princess."
It was a titanic struggle not to prance back over to her side and shag her senseless.
But as Draco closed the door behind him, he was left with the small but growing hope that maybe, just maybe, Hermione Malfoy would be the one coming on to him instead.
::
[A/N] And that's a wrap on the fourth oneshot in this little Dramione series of mine! Managed to squeeze in a second chapter this year right under the wire, but hey, that's just how much y'all seem to love this story. It's my pleasure to keep it coming. I love writing these idiots.
Thank you so much for all of your overwhelmingly positive support on the last chapter! My Hand for a Library is my first fic on AO3 to 1000 kudos, which is just an incredible milestone to hit. Thank you so much to Sparkly15, Dainty Wilder, Emily, StoryLover209, Serennos, basicpjofan, Stahlop, Scoruspio, ArabbitOnTheMoon, Anna, Sunday_Darling, asongstress1422, sparrow_hawk13, CarrieMaxwell, confessionsofthisfangirl, AcornElf, Ladybird260, Kalikk, Makani1964, Samanthalouise854, Smays1091, UmbrellasintheRain, mildexpectations, Ilyoil, PotatoCats (YAdds), LumpySP, Jennee77, ChiefDoctor, trinama, String_Of_Silka, TrillbySkinner, and a guest for reviewing! And as always, much thanks to my amazing beta team NobleHeroine and Sevillana (en_passant) for giving this chapter a solid once-over. Y'all are the best.
I hope that you all have a wonderful New Year's, and hopefully I'll be back for more in 2024!
Love, Allie
