Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

In a development that surprised absolutely no one, Hermione was working late. There was nothing shocking, alarming, or even remotely worth remarking upon about that. Work was over when she said it was over, and she very much had not said so.

It might have been nice to go home and relax — she did have to wake up early the next day, after all — but rest was for people with better luck. And sometimes she suspected hers had been quietly spent during the war.

She had most definitively used up all her luck during the war.

Work, however, was endless. Especially when you were a healer. Especially when you knew you could push a little further if it meant your patient would be fine. And most certainly when your best friend was lying on a bed, bruised in enough places to reasonably qualify as a single, sprawling haematoma, and you happened to be heading home — but not quite yet, because you were needed.

She glanced down at her watch, then at Harry’s half-purple face — miraculously still attached to his rather patched-up body — and then back at the door.

“I’ll take a look at him, Parvati,” she said, regarding her colleague with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for announcements about the end of the world — possibly involving giant lizards in Tokyo.

Parvati gave her a sympathetic nod and left, because Hermione mending whatever Harry or Ron had managed to break during a mission had become something of a professional inevitability.

“You can leave as well,” she said, not looking at him. There was no need; she could feel his gaze boring straight through her skull. “Thank you for bringing Harry back alive.”

Hermione heard a quiet sigh — the kind that suggested he didn’t actually need to work for a living and still wasn’t paid nearly enough to put up with any of this.

She heard footsteps until she didn’t, which was the only indication she had that Draco Malfoy had just left.

The first time it had happened, it was the other way round, some years ago. Hermione was still adjusting to the fact that her duty as a healer no longer involved an active war, being an outlaw, being only theoretically an adult, and operating under an alarming deficit of supplies and wands.

Peace, as it turned out, was disconcertingly loud.

No wards humming under siege. No distant detonations. No need to catalogue exit routes upon entering a room — though she still did, automatically, every single time, because habits acquired in wartime were dreadfully difficult to return for store credit.

She was walking down a St Mungo’s corridor, checking items off her mental list (such as, but not limited to, “patient in Room One, Bed D needs a restock of Dreamless Sleep Potion” and “Hermione also needs a restock of Dreamless Sleep Potion”) when she saw a flash of red hair. And no matter which Weasley was attached to that head, she did not want them anywhere near a hospital.

She checked her watch and let out a breath. Her body reacted before her mind caught up.

Pulse up. Shoulders squared. Mental inventory of available spells. It was faintly embarrassing, really. This was a hospital, not a battlefield. The most dangerous projectile in the vicinity was likely a bedpan, and even that required commitment.

Still.

She rushed forward, already hearing her own voice chastising her for running in a bloody hospital while being the healer. Her mother used to say that healthcare professionals and stewardesses should never run. It frightened people.

Hermione suspected she frightened people perfectly well at a brisk walk.

She reached the end of the corridor and found Ron’s concerned face waiting for her. Concerned, upright, and — excellent — not actively bleeding.

She tried to grab him anyway.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, forgetting several more protocols in the process, because she had once learned, quite thoroughly, that assuming a Weasley was fine was an advanced form of optimism.

He shook his head, brow still furrowed.

She ignored him entirely and performed a brisk, thorough inspection anyway. Hands steady. Movements efficient. Wand already mapping fractures, internal bleeding, cranial trauma. Her magic flowed cleanly, precisely — no wasted motion, no wasted thought.

If she was going to panic, she would at least do it professionally.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

She caught fragments — “stupid git” and “took the hit” — and stopped, tilting her head.

She felt her hands shaking a little. The thought of Harry or Ron hurt had been one of her chief anxieties since age eleven — which was frankly exhausting, considering neither of them had shown the slightest intention of living quietly. Taking Ron’s wrist and checking that his pulse was steady did more to calm her than any Calming Draught ever had. Blood pumping normally meant all the blood was where it ought to be. Every thud of his heart steadied hers. He was fine. They were fine. Statistically speaking.

Then she replayed his words.

Her mind, so recently preparing to triage a Weasley-shaped catastrophe, snagged on the phrasing.

“What?”

“I said,” he repeated, sounding only marginally calmer than Hermione, “that Malfoy is a stupid git and got between a bloody collapsing wall and me. He took most of the hit.”

For a moment, everything in her went very still.

Not the productive stillness of focus.

The other kind.

The kind that strongly suspected the universe had just made a clerical error.

She looked around, as if clarification might be shelved somewhere nearby. Also, possibly, the aforementioned stupid git.

“And where is he?”

“A healer just took him,” Ron said, running a hand through his hair. “He’s not in good shape.”

“Blood loss?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Hit his head?”

“Hit his everything, is my guess.”

They shared a look. Neither of them was particularly fond of injuries, regardless of whether the injured party was a posh prat with an apparent attraction to structurally unsound architecture.

She squeezed his hand quickly. Professional reassurance. Efficient. Brisk. Entirely not trembling.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” she told him.

And then she turned.

She did not run.

She absolutely did not run.

She walked very quickly, robes snapping at her ankles, already summoning up patient charts in her mind. Male, early-twenties. Likely multiple blunt-force traumas. Possible internal bleeding. Possible concussion. Idiot.

A Healer she recognised hurried past with a levitating tray of blood-replenishing potion. Hermione adjusted course without thinking.

“Collapsed structure, Auror team?” she asked.

“Yes — third floor intake,” the Healer replied, not slowing.

Of course.

Hermione took the corner sharply, ignoring the mild tut of a portrait who objected to briskness in corridors. The sign for Spell Damage flashed past. Then Trauma. Then Emergency Intake.

With each step, her thoughts became cleaner. Narrower. Organised.

Collapsing wall. Interposed body. Blunt impact. Blood loss.

Stupid, reckless, infuriating—

She stopped outside a closed door, hand already raised.

The name on the chart flickered into view as the parchment updated itself.

Draco Malfoy.

Hermione inhaled once. Steady. Professional. Entirely unaffected.

Then she pushed the door open.

There were at least five healers in the room, all attending to a collection of broken somethings that, upon closer inspection, formed Draco Malfoy.

His head was covered by a French colleague who had arrived in England during the war to specialise in cranial trauma. Her bedside manner was almost as bad as her taste in coffee, but she was an artist with a wand. If a skull insisted on cracking, she insisted harder.

His arms and torso were being examined by an American healer who had previously worked with the army and was therefore entirely unbothered by the persistent tendency of insides to become outsides. Nothing ever seemed to faze him, which was deeply reassuring and faintly unsettling in equal measure.

Diagnostic spells were being performed by a Japanese healer who liked to experiment on himself and, approximately half the time, ended up as his own patient — which made him alarmingly competent at determining precisely what had gone wrong in other people.

Two English colleagues were stationed at the foot of the bed, moving with brisk coordination to stop the bleeding, issuing clipped instructions in accents so calm one might assume they were discussing the weather rather than catastrophic organ failure.

And Malfoy.

Pale as a literal ghost. One leg undeniably broken at an angle legs were not designed to favour. Clothes still soaked in blood. Completely unconscious.

Hermione suddenly forgot that she had marched in there with the very clear intention of informing Draco Malfoy that how dare he save Ron’s life, as that particular responsibility was strictly reserved for former members of the DA, the Order, the Weasley clan, and whatever ambiguous category Percy currently occupied.

But seeing him so thoroughly wrecked — objectively, impressively wrecked — redirected all available energy into competent action.

Her bravado dissolved into steady hands assisting with the blood transfusion, because things were sufficiently dire that they had, with visible reluctance, gone Muggle. The joke of losing his pure blood would have to wait until death stopped being an option.

Skull? Cracked.

Leg? Fractured.

Ribs? Broken, with at least one having punctured a lung, because apparently subtlety was not a structural option.

Blood pressure? Questionable.

Hermione? Calm. Efficient. Quietly relocating every future scolding to a later, far less life-threatening date.

She adjusted the flow of blood with precise movements, voice level as she reported vitals. There would be time — later — to inform him that playing human shield for Weasleys was not, in fact, a sustainable hobby.

For now, however, Draco Malfoy was inconveniently on the brink of dying.

And she had no intention of letting that stand.

They placed him in a magically induced coma because his brain was bruised — a personal achievement not even Harry had managed so far.

Day after day, Hermione went to the hospital half expecting to hear something definitive. His recovery. His death. His waking up with no memory whatsoever and deciding he must therefore be a Muggle.

The phrase no news is good news had never worked particularly well for her.

Harry and Ron asked about him on a couple of occasions, and not knowing irritated her more than she quite understood. Perhaps she was simply tired of watching people she knew nearly die. Perhaps the fact that Malfoy had saved Ron refused to settle neatly into any of the categories her brain preferred.

Either way, the uncertainty lingered.

The first day she went to his room, it was only meant to be a quick and clinical review: determine whether he was still alive. Get in, get it done, and get gone.

“You really outdid yourself this time,” was what came out of her mouth the moment she saw his unconscious face and the chart at the end of his bed.

Several bones had been broken again so they would heal properly. His hair had been shaved into a rough buzz cut because they’d had to stitch his literal skull back together. And there were some rather nasty wounds that were almost certainly going to leave scars on his hands.

She lingered longer than she meant to, reading through the notes.

“Honestly,” she muttered after a moment, glancing between the parchment and the patient. “This is excessive.”

The chart offered no defence.

She checked the pulse charm hovering faintly above his wrist. Steady. A little slow, but steady. His breathing rose and fell beneath the bandages wrapped tightly around his ribs.

“Well,” she said after a moment, quieter now. “At least you’re alive.”

She adjusted the edge of a bandage that had begun to loosen.

“Which is more than can be said for several walls in London, apparently.”

The machines continued their calm, repetitive rhythm.

Hermione straightened, suddenly aware that she had been standing there for longer than the clinical review strictly required.

She sighed and turned around, deciding not to commit the sight to memory any longer than necessary.

The second time she passed by, she was heading home and simply happened to walk past that particular room entirely on purpose.

She paused outside the door before stepping in.

He looked slightly less dead.

Not alive enough, perhaps, but the general direction was encouraging.

Hermione stepped closer to the bed and glanced at the diagnostic charm again, watching the thin threads of magic weave gently over the injuries.

“You still look better than you did in sixth year,” she told him. “At least this time you don’t have bags under your eyes. Well, it’s hard to tell with all the bruising. I’ll let you know in a few days.”

She folded her arms.

“Though I suppose throwing yourself in front of collapsing architecture does explain the dramatic haircut.”

Her gaze lingered briefly on the uneven buzz cut where the healers had needed access to the skull fracture.

“I imagine you’ll be thrilled with it.”

Hermione shifted slightly, glancing again at the chart.

“Ron feels so guilty about it, by the way,” she added after a moment.

She tapped the parchment lightly with one finger.

“He says you ‘took the hit like a champ’.” A pause. “I’m not sure he understands how that sounds.”

Silence.

She looked at him again, studying the bruises that had begun to yellow faintly at the edges.

“Well,” she said eventually, more to the room than to him, “you do have a talent for doing the unexpected.”

Hermione checked that his feet were properly covered by the blanket — for no reason whatsoever — and then left.

The third visit happened five days later.

Hermione told herself it was because she had forgotten her lunch in the healer’s lounge.

Unfortunately, she was currently holding it.

She stepped into the room anyway.

“You’re becoming something of a routine,” she informed the unconscious patient.

She sat in the chair beside the bed and unwrapped her food.

“Which is inconvenient,” she continued, glancing at the chart again. “Because we are not friends.”

The wrap was perfectly respectable.

Hermione took a bite, chewing slowly while scanning the diagnostic readings.

“You’ve stabilised,” she said after a moment. “Which is good.”

She reached over and adjusted the potion line with careful precision.

“Please remain stabilised,” she added.

Another bite.

“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “if you were awake, this would probably be the point where you said something insufferable.”

She glanced at him.

“Which, in fairness, would at least make the conversation more balanced.”

The machines continued their quiet rhythm.

Hermione leaned back slightly in the chair.

“I did mean it, though.” Her voice was quieter now. “About Ron.”

She looked down at her hands for a moment before quickly brushing a crumb from her robes.

“That was… unexpected.” A sight. “Well done.”

She stood, brushing the rest of the crumbs away.

“Don’t make a habit of it.”

When he woke up, she happened to be in his room.

For professional reasons.

Healer-related circumstances.

Strictly speaking.

It was also true that she had taken her lunch there several times that week. An unconscious Malfoy was excellent company. He did not interrupt, he did not comment, and he did not speak. For someone who had spent seven years making unhelpful remarks across classrooms, it was a notable improvement.

Unfortunately, timing is rarely charitable.

She had just taken a bite of her sandwich — a perfectly respectable sandwich — when she heard movement from the bed.

A faint breath. A shift of sheets.

Hermione paused mid-bite.

Then she let out the smallest, most involuntary little sound and looked up just in time to see Draco Malfoy’s eyes open.

His face was still marked by cuts and bruises, but his gaze was unmistakably alert. And, she thought, faintly disapproving.

“Don’t stop on my account.”

It was the first thing he said after waking from a medically impressive brush with death.

Unfortunately, Hermione was still chewing.

Which meant her response consisted mostly of attempting to swallow with some degree of dignity while pretending that eating lunch beside his bed was an entirely standard professional practice.

She briefly considered several options.

One: pretend he had not actually woken up.

Two: pretend she had not been there.

Three: Obliviate him and allow him to wake again in a few hours, ideally without any memory of sandwiches.

She dismissed the third option.

Reluctantly.

“You almost died,” she countered, holding her sandwich with as much dignity as the situation allowed. It wasn’t much.

His brows furrowed.

“And you thought having a picnic at my deathbed was the appropriate response?”

She huffed.

“Well, you decided saving Ron from a collapsing building was an appropriate response,” she pointed out with her free hand. “I was merely cordial enough to see it through.”

The sound he made resembled a pained chuckle.

“Was it Weasley who stood between me and being a hero?” he asked, with no malice in his tone. He might even have sounded amused, if not for the rust in his voice and the fact that speaking appeared to hurt.

She nodded, taking another bite of her sandwich.

“That, and years of poor decision-making,” she offered.

He made a noncommittal sound.

“Mustn’t forget that,” he said, nodding faintly. Then he frowned. “Why are you here?”

“I work here.”

Hermione would have bet that if he were in less pain, the eye roll would have been considerably more dramatic.

“I know that, Granger,” he retorted, still sounding entirely unbothered. “Why are you here everyday?”

She felt her stomach drop and her eyes widen.

He was looking at her the way one watches a potion reach its boiling point. Expectant. Alert. Possibly amused.

She looked down at her robes, then at his hospital gown, then at the softly beeping machines behind him, and sighed.

“You almost died saving Ron,” she said. “It would have been a shame for you to die alone.”

That earned the first real reaction from him — there and gone in a blink. He processed the information and gave a small nod. It was difficult to tell whether he was surprised that no one else had been there.

“You couldn’t have visitors,” she added. “You’re an Auror injured on duty.”

He hummed softly.

“Yes, of course,” he said after a moment, his tone turning oddly subdued.

The entire situation was bizarre.

Her attempt to lighten it did not improve matters.

“Next time you almost die,” she said, standing and brushing crumbs from her robes, “I’ll make sure to send an owl.”

And with that, she left the room.

It did not, unfortunately, end there.

Draco Malfoy developed a rather irritating habit of returning to St Mungo’s.

Not dramatically. Not catastrophically.

Just often enough to become statistically noticeable.

The first time after the collapsing building incident, Hermione saw his name on an intake chart six months later.

Minor curse damage.

She stared at the parchment for a moment longer than strictly necessary before reminding herself that Aurors were injured on duty with alarming regularity and that Malfoy, unfortunately, counted as an Auror now.

By then, the sight of his name no longer produced alarm. Not exactly. It produced something worse: anticipation. The quick internal bracing of a person who had spent too long learning that familiar names on hospital charts rarely led anywhere pleasant.

When she entered the examination room, he was sitting on the bed with his sleeve rolled up, examining a thin line of darkened skin creeping up his forearm.

“Curse residue,” he said conversationally, before she had even opened her mouth. “Apparently the building objected to being searched.”

She approached, wand already raised.

“You should try searching buildings that object less,” she replied.

He hummed.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Hermione said nothing else while she worked. She rarely did. Her attention moved from the residue to the edges of the curse pattern, then to the pulse beneath his wrist, then back again. The mark had the sulky, lingering quality of poor defensive magic — the sort cast by someone with enthusiasm but no discipline. Annoying. Containable. Unnecessary.

“Hold still,” she said, when he shifted very slightly.

“Am I impeding greatness?”

“Yes.”

That earned a faint exhale that might have been amusement. She did not look up to confirm it.

The curse had been poorly cast and easy to neutralise. Five minutes later the darkened skin faded and she stepped back.

He flexed his fingers once.

“Efficient as always, Granger.”

She nodded, already writing on the chart.

“If it starts burning, come back.”

“That reassuring?”

“Only if you prefer permanent nerve damage.”

He slid off the bed, but did not immediately reach for his coat. “Will it scar?” he asked.

Hermione finally looked at him. “No.”

“Pity.”

“Why?”

He glanced at the place where the mark had been. “It would have made the paperwork look earned.”

She returned to the chart before he could see the brief, unwilling twitch at the corner of her mouth.

He left.

Months later he returned with a dislocated shoulder.

Hermione discovered this because she walked into the treatment room and found him attempting — and failing — to relocated it himself.

“That’s not how joints work,” she said.

“I suspected as much.”

He was paler than usual, though she doubted anyone else  would have noticed. Hermione did. She also noticed the stiffness in the way he was holding himself — too controlled, which generally meant pain substantial enough to require suppression.

“Sit back,” she said.

“Bossy.”

“Busy.”

She fixed it with a sharp twist and a short spell.

The bone slid back into place with a sound that made the nearby intern blanch.

Malfoy merely rolled his shoulder experimentally.

“Much better.”

“You could have waited,” she said.

“I could have,” he agreed. “You should know Potter is next door with a broken arm and what may well be a fatal hero complex.”

Hermione checked her watch.

One of its hands was already pointing at hospital, which rather settled the matter. A switch on her brain flicked.

There were days she suspected the watch existed solely to ensure she never knew peace again. Not because she needed reassurance that her friends were all right, but because she needed to know they were not dead.

She capped the potion bottle on the tray and pushed it toward him.

“Take that before the joint swells.”

He looked at the bottle, then at her.

“That sounded almost caring.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Potter says, frequently, that you tell him the same thing.”

“Harry says many things while concussed,” she replied. “Most of them are useless.”

She could feel him watching her, though she did not turn.

She went into Harry’s room, dismissed the healer examining him with a brief apology, and fixed his arm in silence, because what she truly wanted to do was scream at him, and that was generally discouraged in medical settings.

Harry remained quiet, apart from the small, involuntary sounds he made whenever Hermione adjusted his arm.

“How much does it hurt?” she asked at last, already aware the answer would be unpleasant.

Harry’s eyes were notably free of tears.

“Not that much,” he said. “I’ve had worse.”

Hermione pulled at his arm slightly, just because she could.

Harry clenched his other fist and opened his eyes wide enough to suggest he was negotiating privately with several higher powers.

“That’s because you’ve died,” she said dryly. “How much does it hurt?”

“Enough,” he admitted, unclenching his fist and reaching vaguely for her hand. “It’s not fair that you get upset every time we’re injured. It’s not like we enjoy it.”

If looks could kill, Harry Potter would have graduated instantly from The Boy Who Lived to The Man Who Didn’t.

“I don’t get upset, Harry,” she said briskly. “I get terrified that I’ll have to mend your wounds again.”

“It’s not like—”

“That I’ll have your blood dripping down my hands?” she interrupted quietly. “That I’ll see your corpse again?”

The sound that left her throat was dangerously close to a sob.

“I close my eyes and remember you dead.”

“Hermione, come on, I’m here,” Harry said quickly. “It’s just a fracture. It hurt more when you fixed it than when I broke it.”

She stepped back from the bed as if he had raised his voice.

“That’s the problem, Harry,” she said, looking away. “Go home.”

She left the room before he could respond and headed for the bathroom, intending to lock herself in a cubicle and allow herself precisely five minutes to cry.

She had nearly reached the door when a voice behind her spoke.

“How bad is Potter’s arm?”

The question stopped her for a moment. Not because it was intimate — it wasn’t — but because it was unexpected.

She glanced back over her shoulder.

“Broken,” she said. “Not fatal. His character remains annoying.”

This time the sound Draco made was unmistakably a laugh — brief, low, and gone almost at once.

Hermione continued down the corridor without looking back, the familiar weight of impending anxiety settling around her shoulders as she made her way toward her preferred cubicle for crying.

That should have been the end of it. It would have been simpler if it had. Instead, over the following year, his name acquired the peculiar ability to snag at her attention no matter what else she was doing. Not enough to alter her day. Not enough to make her hurry. Certainly not enough to admit. Just enough that she always knew, with a kind of immediate private annoyance, when he was in the building.

One time he arrived with a gash across his palm that had bled quite impressively across the intake desk.

Hermione found him sitting calmly while a trainee attempted to clean the wound with the sort of nervous concentration usually reserved for defusing explosives.

She stepped in.

“What happened?”

“Door.”

She paused.

“A door.”

“Yes.”

She examined the wound.

“That door appears to have been armed.”

He shrugged faintly.

The trainee retreated so fast she was almost impressed. Hermione took over without comment, lifting his hand and turning it toward the light. The cut was ugly enough to be theatrical but mercifully shallow in the places that mattered. She checked tendon response, then sensation, then blood flow. All intact. Good.

“Dominant hand?” she asked.

“No.”

“That was almost prudent of you.”

“I do try to pace myself.”

She stitched it with efficient, careful magic, drawing the skin together in neat silver lines.

He watched her work with quiet interest.

“You look concerned,” he said after a moment.

“I am not concerned,” she replied.

“You keep checking my pulse.”

“That is standard procedure.”

“Twice?”

She tied the final stitch.

“Let me do my bloody work, Malfoy,” she said, briefly noting the irony of having his blood on her hands while saying it.

He went quiet at that. Not pointedly. Simply quiet. The room settled around the sound of cloth, glass, and distant footsteps in the corridor. Hermione cleaned the last of the blood from his wrist and reached for the bandage.

“You’ll keep that dry for twenty-four hours,” she said. “Then change the dressing. Don’t pull at the stitches, don’t reopen it, and if it starts throbbing, come back.”

“You make it sound as though you expect me to ignore all of that.”

Hermione wrapped the bandage neatly around his palm. “Experience has made me realistic.”

He considered her face for a moment, then the set of her hands. “You don’t say much unless someone is actively injured,” he said.

She secured the end of the bandage. “That’s because I have work to do.”

“And now?”

“Now you’re less actively injured.”

Again he did not move to stand. His hand remained in hers a second longer than the bandage required, and then she released it first.

He did not comment on that.

Or on anything else.

He simply left.

The next time Hermione saw him after that, it was not in a treatment room but across the corridor outside Spell Damage, very late, his coat over one shoulder and a fresh scrape along his knuckles. He inclined his head in a nod. She was carrying three charts and an impossible amount of exhaustion.

“Not coming in?” she asked before she could stop herself.

His eyes flicked to her face, mildly surprised, as if she had violated some private rule of her own. “Not this time,” he said.

Hermione looked at the knuckles. “You should have that cleaned.”

“I was on my way.”

She shifted the charts higher in her arms. “Liar.”

A pause. Then, with that infuriating composure of his, “Probably.”

She stared at him for a beat, then jerked her head toward the empty side room nearest them. “Five minutes.”

He followed without comment. She cleaned the scrape standing up, brisk and silent, while he leaned against the counter and watched her the way one watched weather one had no intention of interfering with.

“You really ought to develop better instincts,” she said at last.

“I had some,” he replied. “I can’t recall were I left them”

That was not, Hermione thought, the sort of line one replied to carelessly. So she finished the charm, dropped the used gauze into the bin, and stepped away.

“There,” she said.

He looked down at his hand. “You do that very quickly.”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever slow down?”

“No.”

The answer also came too quickly. Malfoy’s gaze lifted, calm and unreadable. Hermione picked up her charts again.

“Goodnight, Malfoy.”

“Goodnight, Granger.”

She thought about that brief, unnecessary conversation far longer than she had any right to.

Several months passed without incident, which Hermione considered suspicious.

Then he appeared again.

This time he walked into the ward under his own power, though with a bruise spreading quite spectacularly across the side of his jaw.

She looked at it.

Then at him.

Then back at the bruise.

“You were punched,” she said.

“Yes.”

“By whom?”

“A suspect.”

“You’re an Auror.”

“Yes.”

“You have a wand.”

“Yes.”

She examined the bruise.

“You allowed someone to punch you.”

“Technically speaking,” he said thoughtfully, “I allowed them to attempt it.”

The bruise darkened slightly as she worked the healing charm.

She finished the spell and lowered her wand.

“You should consider avoiding injuries,” she said.

“I’ll add it to the list of thing to keep in mind while in danger.”

By then, enough time had passed that the silences between them no longer felt accidental. They were simply there, oddly serviceable, as if something in both of them had stopped expecting to fill every gap. Hermione put the salve aside. Draco remained where he was.

He stood, testing his jaw.

Then he paused.

“You always seem mildly disappointed when I’m not dying.”

“I am not disappointed.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I sound like that all the time.”

He studied her for a moment. Then nodded once.

“You didn’t sound like that when you visited me,” he said, holding the sort of eye contact Hermione privately believed ought to be regulated.

She refused to look away.

He tilted his head a millimetre, giving nothing away.

“You were in a coma,” she said, somewhat weakly. “I was talking to myself.”

Another millimetre.

“But you weren’t,” he said calmly. “You even chastised me.”

“I did not.”

The smallest fraction of an inch lifted at the corner of his mouth — the closest thing to a smile she had seen on his face since they were teenagers.

“You did,” he said with a faint shrug. “It sounded rather like concern.”

“Of course I was concerned,” she said quickly. “You could have died.”

It was fortunate they were not in a public ward, because her tone had risen enough to attract several eyebrows.

“This is a hospital,” he replied evenly. “Anyone could die at any minute.”

That should have ended it. It very nearly did. Hermione reached for the chart. Draco reached for his coat. The room hovered on the edge of conclusion. Then, instead of leaving, he said, in the same mild tone he used for everything,

“Do you still bring your lunch to work in paper wrappers?”

Her head came up. “What?”

“Your sandwiches,” he said. “You used to wrap them in parchment at school. It made a terrible noise.”

For one deeply irritating second, Hermione had no idea what to say. The question was so absurdly specific that it landed somewhere beneath defence and above confusion.

“That,” she said at last, “is a very strange thing to remember.”

“I remember many strange things.”

“You do?”

He slipped one arm into his coat. “Don’t you?”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed.

Hermione stared at him, suddenly aware that the conversation had wandered into territory for which she had absolutely no prepared set of tools. Hospitals she could manage. Injuries she could mend. Men asking odd, private questions in otherwise ordinary rooms were another matter entirely.

“Yes,” she said, because it was the shortest possible route out of the moment. “I still do.”

Something eased in his face — not satisfaction, not quite amusement, just a small settling, as if some curiosity had been quietly put to rest.

She was preparing a perfectly reasonable exit when something nudged gently at her wrist.

Hermione glanced down at her watch. Ron’s hand was pointing firmly at lost.

Which meant he had either misplaced himself, his partner, or several laws.

Malfoy followed her gaze for a moment, then nodded once in quiet understanding.

With a small sigh, he left again.

Hermione stood there for several seconds before realising she was still holding his chart.

And, somewhat inconveniently, her breath.

A few hours later Ron arrived at the Burrow missing an eyebrow and carrying an extremely elaborate story involving a smuggler ring.

Hermione appeared on the doorstep shortly afterwards, fully prepared to murder him for making her worry.

But things took an unexpected turn one rainy afternoon when Hermione was, against all odds and predictions, having a pleasant day.

The paper contained no particular disasters, she had eaten lunch sitting with her colleagues instead of walking between wards, and Harry and Ron had been on desk duty for an entire week.

She felt almost relaxed.

Which, in retrospect, should have been warning enough.

She felt the familiar nudge against her wrist, subtle but unmistakable. When she glanced down at the watch, however, both hands — Harry marking the hours and Ron the minutes — were pointing calmly at work.

Not hospital.

Not mortal peril.

Not even prison.

She frowned at the watch.

Had the thing broken?

Had she imagined it?

She was not even particularly sleep-deprived, which rather ruled out hallucination.

Still.

Her feet betrayed her before she could think better of it, carrying her down the corridor toward the front desk.

That was when she understood.

At the far end of the hallway stood Draco Malfoy.

Tall, pale, and unmistakable.

He was dressed for work, coat still on, hair damp at the temples from the rain. Nothing about him suggested immediate injury. No blood. No limp. No visible burns. And yet he was standing very still, in the peculiar manner of someone concentrating on a task most people managed unconsciously. Remaining upright, perhaps. Or keeping the room from moving.

Before she quite realised how it had happened, she had crossed the corridor and stepped into the examination room, following him and ending up almost directly in front of him.

Hermione looked him over from head to toe.

Nothing obvious appeared broken.

Nothing appeared missing.

Nothing appeared particularly damaged.

Something, however, was wrong.

Not medically.

Just… theoretically.

His expression was fractionally too slow. His focus fractionally too narrow. He looked at her as if she had arrived in stages and he was still trying to catch up to the fact of her.

She frowned.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, already summoning his chart. It was heavy enough to be concerning.

“Granger,” he said, his voice perfectly neutral. “It’s been a while.”

She did not have time for pleasantries — real or otherwise.

Hermione flipped through the chart, scanning the pages with increasing irritation.

“Malfoy,” she said without looking up, “what happened to you?”

She heard him breathe out slowly before sitting back on the edge of the bed.

“Does everyone have to be bleeding to justify being here?” he asked mildly.

“You are not bleeding,” she replied. “And yet here you are.”

“Perhaps my bleeding is internal.”

“If you would like,” she said quietly, still searching the chart, “I can arrange that.”

There was nothing written in the intake report.

Nothing.

No incident description. No referral. No spell residue noted by intake. Whoever had processed him had either been interrupted or had found him coherent enough not to push. That, Hermione thought irritably, was precisely why one pushed.

“I’ll take you up on that another time, Granger,” he said, sounding faintly amused. “I’m rather occupied with the task of staying awake at the moment.

That got her attention. Not the words — the effort behind them. He seemed to place each one carefully, as if selecting them from a shelf that kept shifting out of reach.

“Tell me what happened to you,” she said, raising her voice slightly above what could reasonably be considered professional.

He blinked once, slowly. His gaze slid past her shoulder to the wall, then back to her face with visible concentration, as though he had nearly lost the thread and had to drag it into place again.

She looked up.

And stopped.

Malfoy was staring at her.

His pupils were blown wide, swallowing the grey of his eyes almost entirely.

For one brief, disorienting moment, Hermione wondered if he had taken Muggle drugs.

The fun kind.

Then it struck her.

His hands.

He had them curled hard against his palms, tendons taut, as if the effort of keeping them still required active thought. His jaw was set too tightly. Not careless, then. Not merely impaired. He was trying — with the last scraps of discipline he possessed — to hold himself together long enough to remain intelligible.

“Malfoy,” she said sharply, stepping forward. “Open your mouth.”

The first genuine smile she had seen from him in a very long time appeared slowly across his face.

“Bossy Granger,” he murmured. “Busy Granger. Always so very busy.”

But the smile looked wrong on him — not because he was incapable of smiling, but because it arrived with no proper relation to the rest of his face, as if whatever governed inhibition, expression, and judgment had been knocked loose from its fittings.

She stepped closer, choosing not to draw her wand just yet.

“Open. Your. Mouth.”

He grinned.

Under different circumstances it might have been called cheeky.

Under these circumstances it was simply alarming.

“Make me,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

The phrase landed with all the careless provocation of an ordinary exchange, but there was strain under it now, something frayed and unstable. He swayed very slightly where he sat, corrected for it a fraction too late, and frowned as if his own balance had briefly surprised him.

Hermione did not hesitate.

Magic moved before conscious thought had time to intervene.

His wrists snapped neatly together under a binding charm and his feet locked against the floor.

Malfoy let out a low whistle.

“Well,” he said lazily, glancing down at his restrained hands, “that was unexpected.”

For a second his expression cleared. Not entirely, but enough that she saw it: the flash of relief beneath the disorientation. As if some part of him had been waiting for another will to take over because his own was slipping.

Hermione closed the remaining distance between them and grabbed his face, tilting it toward the light.

His pupils were enormous.

The grey of his irises had almost disappeared.

She pressed her fingers against his jaw until he opened his mouth.

He offered no real resistance.

The smell hit her immediately.

Sickly sweet.

Sharp enough to make her eyes water.

“Did you drink anything?” she asked.

He managed a scoff despite being restrained.

It was almost impressive.

“I am not an amateur,” he said, his breath warm against her face.

His words were slurred only at the edges, but his body was telling on him now. Skin cold. Pulse fast. Breathing shallow, then suddenly deeper, then shallow again. She had seen poisoning present less dramatically than this and still end badly.

Hermione decided firmly that she would unpack the implications of that later.

“What happened to you, Draco?” she asked quietly.

They were standing inches apart now, and his attention — unfocused though it was — seemed fixed entirely on her.

Something brief and fragile flickered across his expression.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

This time she believed him at once. Not because he sounded frightened — he didn’t, not quite — but because there was the faintest note of offence in it, as though the failure of his own memory had become a personal inconvenience he had not consented to.

He looked at her like a man trying very hard to remain where he was. In the room. In his body. In the conversation. As if he had aimed himself at St Mungo’s, found her, and was now reaching the end of whatever force had brought him there.

“Do you know what you took?” she asked, already hearing the urgency sharpen in her own voice.

His eyes drifted out of focus, then dragged themselves back to her. “Not took,” he said, with visible effort. “Had.”

“Had what?”

His throat worked. “Something.” A small, irritated breath. “I was working. Then not.”

That was all he managed, but it was enough to chill her. Not recreational, then. Not deliberate. Not him turning up at hospital on some incomprehensible whim. He had come because he knew enough to know he was losing control — and because, somehow, in whatever state he was in, he had still chosen correctly.

Then his eyes rolled back.

His weight collapsed forward in her hands as if someone had abruptly cut the strings holding him upright.

A second later his body began to convulse violently.

Not tremors.

Not spasms.

Convulsions.

Hermione’s mind moved instantly.

This was not a simple potion reaction.

Seizure onset. Rapid neurological event. Unknown intoxicant or toxin. Possible mixed ingestion. Possible delayed cascade. The binding charm became useless at once; she released it, shifted her grip, and braced his shoulders to stop him striking his head against the bedframe.

She fired blue sparks toward the corridor with one hand while gripping him with the other, bracing his weight to keep him from crashing onto the floor.

Footsteps thundered toward the room.

“He’s crashing,” she said sharply as the door burst open.

Within seconds the room filled with healers.

Hands moved quickly, efficiently — spells flashing, potions uncorked, instructions exchanged in clipped, controlled voices.

Hermione stepped back only when someone else took his weight, her mind already cataloguing what she had seen.

“Low body temperature,” she said immediately. “Elevated heart rate. Severe pupil dilation. Disorientation. Inhibition loss.”

She paused briefly.

“Rapid neurological decline.”

“Any smell on the breath?” asked one of the senior healers.

“Sweet,” Hermione said. “Chemical. Not just alcohol.”

“Time to collapse?”

“Under two minutes from assessment.”

“Ingestion?”

“Unknown.” A beat. “He said he didn’t remember.”

For a moment — right until he had collapsed — she might have believed he had taken something recreational.

But that wasn’t Draco Malfoy.

That much she knew.

Not because she imagined she knew him especially well. She didn’t. But because she knew control when she saw it, and she knew what it looked like when someone was fighting to keep hold of it. Whatever had happened to him, he had not been enjoying it. He had been enduring it, forcing himself through corridor after corridor until he reached a room and a healer and the end of his own capacity to manage either.

They stabilised him quickly.

Spells layered over spells, potions administered in rapid succession.

Hermione stood at the edge of the bed and answered questions as they came, each one yanking details back into order. What had he said? How alert had he been? Had there been visible residue? Needle marks? Spell burns? She answered all of them. No. No. No. Only pupils. Disorientation. The smell. The effort it had taken him to stay awake. The fact that he had recognised her immediately, and then less so by degrees.

Several hours later the laboratory results arrived.

The list raised more questions than answers.

Whisky.

A variant of Calming Draught.

A bizarre transmutation somewhere between Felix Felicis and Veritaserum.

And, inexplicably, lysergic acid diethylamide.

The room fell quiet as the parchment passed between the healers.

It was… unusual.

Scientific curiosity bloomed immediately.

Was it an accident?

An experimental mixture gone wrong?

Poison?

Someone muttered that no one with sense would mix half of that intentionally. Someone else pointed out that sense had never been a reliable ingredient in poisoning. Hermione said nothing. She was looking at the line listing the Veritaserum derivative and thinking, with cold clarity, that if someone had wanted him uninhibited, suggestible, and confused, they had succeeded rather thoroughly.

Because there was no logical reason — none whatsoever — for an Auror to have consumed alcohol, multiple potions, and LSD at the same time.

When Malfoy woke up, he looked particularly miserable.

Not the sort of misery that came with physical pain — there had been plenty of that earlier — but the quieter, more complicated kind that followed the slow reconstruction of memory and consciousness.

His body, by all accounts, was fine.

Hermione had reviewed the charts twice to be certain. No neurological damage. No lingering toxins. No permanent harm.

Which meant the damage, she suspected, was largely emotional.

She had not been present when he woke. A trainee had notified her instead — somewhat nervously — as though unsure whether she was meant to be informed about Draco Malfoy’s consciousness.

Hermione had simply nodded, put down what she was doing, and walked directly to his room.

When she entered, he was lying flat on the bed, hands folded loosely across his abdomen, staring at the ceiling with the solemn concentration of someone contemplating existence and finding it deeply inconvenient.

He did not move when she stepped inside.

Only when the door clicked softly shut did he turn his head slightly toward it.

His eyes landed on her in the doorway.

He exhaled slowly.

Then he returned his gaze to the ceiling.

“I was rather hoping,” he said to no one in particular, “that we might skip this particular exchange.”

Hermione lingered in the doorway for a moment.

There was something almost pitiful about the scene. Not dramatic. Not tragic. Just a man who had very clearly decided that consciousness had been a mistake.

She stepped inside.

“Malfoy.”

He closed his eyes briefly, as if lamenting the circumstances of his continued existence.

“Granger,” he muttered, the word containing no real malice — only the faint fatigue of inevitability.

She approached the bed, stopping a few feet away.

“How are you feeling?”

He considered the ceiling for another few seconds.

“I have been worse,” he said eventually. “Though I have certainly been better. I simply can’t remember when.”

“That’s encouraging.”

A pause stretched between them.

Then he spoke again.

“What happened?”

Hermione folded her arms lightly.

“We don’t know yet.”

He frowned faintly.

“That’s comforting.”

“We know what was in your system,” she said. “Or most of it. We just don’t know why yet.”

His fingers shifted slightly against the hospital blanket.

“I don’t remember any of it,” he said quietly.

Another pause.

Draco’s gaze drifted slowly from one corner of the ceiling to the other.

“I remember being at the office,” he said at last. “Working.”

His brow creased, the effort clearly unwelcome.

“And then…”

He hesitated.

Hermione waited.

“And then I remember your face.”

He stopped.

The silence that followed was abrupt enough to feel almost tangible.

Draco realised what he had said at exactly the same moment Hermione did.

His mouth pressed into a thin line, as if the words might somehow be retracted through sheer irritation.

Hermione, wisely, did not comment.

“Do you remember coming here?” she asked instead.

His eyes closed briefly again.

“No.”

A beat.

“But I remember needing to.”

Hermione tilted her head slightly.

“Why?”

He did not answer immediately.

For a moment he looked faintly irritated with the question — not with her, precisely, but with the fact that he had been forced to examine something he would very much have preferred to leave unexamined.

Then he turned his head just enough to look at her.

Only briefly.

“I didn’t know what was happening,” he said.

The admission was quiet. Matter-of-fact. Almost clinical.

“My thoughts weren’t…” He exhaled slowly. “Cooperating.”

Hermione said nothing.

“I knew something was wrong,” he continued. “Badly wrong.”

His gaze shifted back to the ceiling.

“And I knew I had to get somewhere before I stopped being able to make decisions at all.”

Hermione felt something in her chest tighten slightly, though she wasn’t entirely sure why.

“I don’t remember how I got here,” he said. “Or what I did to get through the door.”

A small pause.

“But I remember deciding.”

Hermione’s voice was careful when she spoke again.

“Deciding what?”

This time, when he turned his head, he looked directly at her.

Not long.

Just long enough.

“That if I reached you,” he said quietly, “it would be handled.”

The words were simple. Almost blunt.

But there was no irony in them. No humour. Just certainty.

And that, Hermione realised, was the unsettling part.

“You were poisoned,” she said, after a moment. “Your judgement may not have been entirely reliable.”

“That’s possible,” he replied.

He looked back at the ceiling.

“But it seems I was correct.”

Hermione had no immediate response to that.

So she did what she always did when confronted with something inconveniently sincere.

She reached for the chart at the end of the bed.

“You’re stable,” she said briskly.

Malfoy watched the ceiling.

Another pause settled in the room.

Then, almost absently, he said,

“Thank you.”

Hermione froze for a fraction of a second.

Not because of the words themselves.

Because Draco Malfoy did not sound like someone performing politeness.

He sounded like someone stating a fact.

She closed the chart.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

Neither of them looked at the other again.

But the silence that followed was no longer quite the same one they had started with.

“It would be best if you leave,” he said after a while.

The tone was not rude. Not aggressive. If anything, it bordered on sincere.

Hermione took a small step back, suddenly feeling awkward and oddly out of place. She had come to see whether he was well enough to be left alone, not to… whatever this was.He must have noticed the shift in her posture, because he shook his head and dragged a hand slowly down his face before speaking again.

“It’s not—” he began, then stopped, clearly dissatisfied with whatever he had been about to say. “I am grateful,” he tried instead.

“Okay?” she replied, uncertain how exactly one was meant to respond to Draco Malfoy attempting gratitude.

Malfoy appeared to possess about as much enthusiasm for remaining alive as he did vocabulary for expressing himself.

“I’ll remove my name as your attending healer,” Hermione said after a moment, defaulting to the safety of professional procedure. “It’s perfectly fine.”

He shook his head immediately, more forcefully than the situation seemed to warrant, and stared at the ceiling for a long moment.

Then he pushed himself upright and looked directly at her.

“Granger, I don’t remember anything before arriving here,” he said, looking faintly dishevelled in a way she had never quite seen on him before.

“That’s all right,” she replied evenly. “You were heavily intoxicated and—”

“But I remember being here,” he interrupted quietly. “I remember looking at you and knowing that I would be fine.”

He struggled to maintain eye contact as he said it.

Hermione remained silent for a moment.

“I think you may still be under the influence of whatever was in your system, Malfoy,” she said at last.

He let out a short, humourless laugh and returned his attention to the ceiling tiles, as if they were suddenly of deep philosophical importance.

“Do I need to be actively bleeding for you to listen to what I say?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.

“Of course not,” she said quickly.

He nodded once and closed his eyes briefly.

“Could you let a man die with a little dignity, Granger?” he asked, still not looking at her.

“You are not dying,” she countered.

“Because you refuse to let me,” he replied, the smallest, most self-deprecating smile flickering across his face. “I keep trying, but you seem determined to prevent it.”

Hermione huffed softly.

“Then stop coming here,” she said, crossing her arms.

Malfoy looked at her then, his expression unreadable.

“Believe me, Granger,” he said quietly, “I’ve tried.”

And that was the last time they spoke for over a year.

Chapter Text

Being honest, it was not as though Hermione had decided to stop speaking to someone over a simple request such as please leave my hospital room.

She was not childish.

And it had not, she assured herself, affected her in the slightest.

It was, therefore, a coincidence — a remarkably well-timed one, some might have called it kismet — that she received an invitation to join the American programme for trauma healers a few days later.

The fact that she accepted immediately was not, in any way, connected to Draco Malfoy.

Her friends, of course, took the news with varying degrees of composure.

“I promise I won’t get hurt again,” said Harry, adjusting his glasses with a hand that trembled only slightly.

Hermione gave him a look that conveyed, with admirable clarity, that this was not a compelling argument.

“It’s just three years,” she said, folding a jumper with more precision than strictly necessary. “And I’m only a Floo call away.”

“Which is reassuring,” Ron said, “provided we survive long enough to use it.”

“You will,” she said.

Harry did not look convinced.

“People don’t generally improve their survival rate by removing their healer,” he said

“People also don’t generally improve their survival rate by setting themselves on fire during routine fieldwork,” Hermione replied.

“That happened once.”

“It happened twice.”

Ron made a thoughtful noise.

“In fairness, the second time was more of a continuation.”

Hermione ignored that.

They did not need to know that she intended to keep her watch on at all times, nor that she would, without hesitation, attempt to Apparate across an ocean if required.

It had not been done.

That had rarely proved a lasting obstacle.

“And what if I promise to hurt Harry every time he gets hurt on duty?” Ron suggested, removing a jumper from her suitcase at precisely the same moment she placed one inside.

She paused, considering.

“Tempting,” she admitted. “But no. You’ll have to manage without me.”

The boys — which they were not, not anymore — exchanged a look.

“The last time that happened, I nearly died in the Chamber of Secrets,” Harry said.

“But you didn’t.”

“Because you left a cryptic note I had to work out referred to a basilisk.”

Hermione threw a pair of socks in his direction. He dodged them with irritating ease.

“I apologise for the inconvenience caused by my being petrified in second year!”

“Took you long enough,” Ron said, narrowly avoiding the shoe she threw at him. “We accept.”

Harry caught the shoe mid-air and placed it back in the suitcase.

“That’s not how packing works,” he said.

“It is when you are not helping,” Hermione replied.

They did not say much after that.

There was very little to say.

Three years, after all, was survivable.

When she first arrived, the cultural shock hit her just as hard as the jet lag.

Driving on the other side of the road felt wrong, but they drove everywhere.

The food was not great, but there was so much variety that she had to develop a sense of culinary survival she had never needed in England.

At the hospital, the healers she was supposed to learn from had their own reservations about her.

“And you have been a war veteran for more than ten years?” one had asked.

“It’s more complicated than that,” she had said, with no intention of getting into details.

They did not ask again.

They did, however, watch.

The programme began before sunrise and ended when the last patient stabilised, which meant it did not, strictly speaking, end at all.

The first week was observation.

The second week was participation.

By the third, hesitation was treated as a liability.

She learned their systems quickly. Their spells were familiar, but the sequencing was not. Diagnostics ran alongside intervention. Blood flow was controlled before identification was complete. Decisions were made before certainty was achieved.

She had thought, with the sort of confidence that tends to collapse under examination, that she had seen enough.

That she had treated enough.

That there would be very little left to surprise her.

That turned out not to be true.

“Patient with a gunshot wound to the upper body, possible pneumothorax, active blood loss,” a colleague said somewhere to her left.

She paused.

Not for long. Long enough.

“Granger,” her instructor said. “What’s next?”

She felt her voice falter before she spoke.

“I— I haven’t—”

“You haven’t what?” he asked. “Treated a collapsed lung?”

“There are no guns in England,” she said. “I haven’t seen this kind of injury.”

There was no time to respond to that.

There was no time for anything.

With a brief, tired exhale, the attending healer stepped in, already controlling the bleeding.

“War veteran, yes?” he said, not looking at her.

Hermione moved. A fraction too late.

The procedure continued without her.

That night, she returned to her flat and went to bed without turning on the lights.

Sleep did not come easily.

Some days were worse than others.

“You’re waiting for confirmation,” one healer told her, not unkindly.

“I am assessing,” Hermione replied.

“You’re waiting,” he repeated. “Here, that’s the same thing.”

It was not, she thought.

It became so anyway.

Sadly, such things as privacy were not a luxury her training programme included.

She shared a flat — an apartment, as they insisted — with an Italian colleague who was a shameless flirt and had very little concern for strutting around with little clothing.

She should not have been scandalised. She had lived with boys for years. In a tent. And then in Grimmauld Place.

She still was, occasionally, scandalised.

“Do you mind covering yourself in common areas?” she had asked him one night, as she was getting ready for the night shift and he was arriving, leaving a trail of scrubs behind him.

He had given her a lopsided smile.

“I’ve seen you staring,” he said.

It wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t an answer.

“I am observing,” she said.

“You are staring,” he replied.

“I am assessing,” she repeated.

He considered that.

“Same thing,” he said.

They agreed on a minimum of two pieces of clothing in common spaces

The programme was almost like being in school again.

A lot of work, a lot to learn, and a persistent understanding that getting it wrong had consequences.

The dummies did not complain.

The patients did

“You hesitate,” one older healer had pointed out during a practice where they had to control blood flow while casting diagnostic spells on an actively bleeding dummy.

Hermione huffed at her.

“I do not,” she said, glancing at the flat line representing the vitals of her very dead dummy.

“Yes, you do,” the healer said. “And that’s how the patient dies.”

Hermione stared into the woman’s eyes, took a breath, and recalibrated.

“Show me,” she said after a moment. “Show me where I hesitate.”

The healer showed her.

Hermione swallowed her pride and tried again.

The dummy survived.

The next one did not.

She did not huff that time.

She missed her life in England, her friends, and the weather.

She could not, for the life of her, persuade any of them to acquire a mobile.

So she adjusted her Floo calls to the time difference. Or, occasionally, she was too tired to remember and called at what turned out to be a deeply inconvenient hour.

For them.

“Bloody hell, Hermione, it’s past midnight!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just come back from the hospital. We’re heading out to dinner — a few of my colleagues and I. I’m trying sushi.”

“That’s lovely,” Ron replied, in a tone that suggested it was anything but. “Do tell me all about how you ate raw fish at this hour of the morning.”

Harry’s voice came faintly from somewhere in the background.

“Is she eating raw fish?”

“She’s thriving,” Ron said.

“I am not thriving,” Hermione said. “I am adapting.”

“That sounds worse,” Ron called.

“No, wait — I need to tell Harry that all my mail is being sent to his.”

A laugh sounded on the other side.

“Believe me, he knows,” Ron said. “He’s been receiving your love letters since you bolted.”

“I didn’t bolt. It is an excellent opportunity to learn and— wait, love letters?”

“I’ll let Harry tell you about it,” he added after a moment. “Now please let me sleep.”

Hermione was not proud to admit that she had not, in fact, tried sushi, but had instead ended up in a bar — not a pub — playing a drinking game that involved taking a shot every time one of them mentioned work.

They had all ended up drunk.

She had still made it to her shift.

That had not been optional.

When she called Harry and Ron at what could reasonably be described as a civilised hour — for them — the next day, she made a deliberate effort not to mention that she was hungover.

She had no proof that they knew.

She had no doubt that they did.

“Ron, have you got an earring?” she asked, in a whisper that carried rather more force than intended.

Ron shrugged, already wearing the expression of a man about to justify something poorly considered.

“Lost a bet with George,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment, then turned to Harry, checking, with some suspicion, for additional jewellery.

There was none.

“Harry, could you send me my post?” she asked. “I don’t want anyone to know where I am just yet.”

Harry’s smile was immediate and, unfortunately, telling.

“Who is, exactly, anyone?” he asked.

“Nobody.”

“And what if nobody is asking?” Ron said.

“Then there’s nothing to tell.”

“And what if nobody insists?” Harry asked.

Hermione closed her eyes briefly and pressed her fingers to her temples.

“Could you send me my post?”

Harry and Ron exchanged a look she did not have the energy to interpret.

“Of course,” Harry said.

Some lessons were learned the hard way, which appeared to be the only way that side of the Atlantic had to offer.

Sometimes she wasn’t quick enough.

Sometimes her patients didn’t make it.

Sometimes she found herself, in the middle of a procedure, remembering the war.

The difference was that no one paused for it.

There were no quiet corridors. No measured urgency. No assumption of control.

Injuries arrived violently and were treated accordingly. There was no room for careful consideration when something needed doing now. No time to look at her watch and see where her friends were.

She adapted. Quickly. There was no alternative.

“You think too much,” the Italian told her.

“I don’t.”

“You do. You just do it fast enough to pretend you don’t.”

“I assess.”

“You delay.”

“I don’t—”

“Again.”

This time she did not argue.

She moved faster.

The patient stabilised.

“Better,” he said.

“That was luck,” she replied.

“That was timing,” he said.

She did not correct him.

That day, they shared a beer when they returned home and spoke about growing up Muggle in Europe.

He told her he did not, in fact, like pasta that much.

She admitted, in return, that if she had to eat another piece of toast with tinned beans, she might not survive it.

He looked at her, briefly serious.

“You miss it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’ll go back?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When the programme ends,” she said.

“That’s a long time.”

“No,” she replied. “It isn’t.”

It had been six months. She could survive three years.

When she finally received her post — which Harry had, annoyingly, sent the Muggle way — she was fairly certain she was hallucinating.

Lack of sleep. Too many instant noodles. Possibly the television they had acquired to binge through all the Muggle series she had never had time to watch.

Because in the stack of letters addressed to her, among care packages from the Weasleys, a collection of New Year cards, and a magazine on Muggle medicine, there were letters from Draco Malfoy.

Several. More than several.

She looked around, briefly, to determine whether this was some elaborate joke. It had the faint shape of something George might find amusing.

There was no one.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” her flatmate said, his accent doing very little to soften the observation.

She let out a small, incredulous laugh.

“Something like that.”

She gathered the letters with deliberate care, as though they might otherwise rearrange themselves into something easier to ignore, and went to her room.

The door shut with a soft click.

She stood there for a moment.

Then she read the first envelope again before opening it.

Yes.

Addressed to her.

Dated a few days after she had left England.

Granger,

Considering the last time we spoke, I was not in the best condition to say anything of use. I must apologise for the manner in which I spoke to you. Over the years, you have been nothing but professional, if not occasionally scary.

I would prefer to offer this apology in person. Do let me know when it would be convenient for you to meet.

 

Best,

D. Malfoy

Hermione held the letter, now read in its entirety three times, and thought about their last interaction.

He had told her to leave.

She had done so.

There had been no shouting. No insults. No scene.

Just a clean, efficient departure.

And he had apologised. And she had not known. Which meant she had not replied.

Which meant — she pressed the letter flat against her palm — that, from his perspective, she had simply ignored it.

Hermione closed her eyes briefly.

That was unfortunate.

She placed the letter carefully on the desk.

Then, after a moment, picked it up again.

There was something faintly ridiculous about the situation.

Not the apology itself — that, on reflection, was not particularly surprising.

Malfoy had always possessed a certain… awareness, when it suited him.

No.

The ridiculous part was that it had reached her at all.

That it had been written.

That it had been followed.

There were three more letters.

Hermione was not entirely certain she was prepared to read them.

She read them anyway.

In order.

It seemed, under the circumstances, appropriate.

Harry Potter, she decided, was an absolute arse for not warning her.

Love letters, they had said.

Wankers.

The second letter was dated a fortnight after the first.

Granger,

I understand that we are not friends. You said as much while visiting my hospital room, at a time when I was, by all accounts, enjoying the best sleep I have had in years. I remember the way you said it. It seemed to amuse you. I remember everything you said.

The absence of a response is, while mildly frustrating, understandable. You owe me nothing.

I did not see you yesterday at St Mungo’s — do not concern yourself, it was only a broken finger, which I could have repaired myself, as I remain capable of casting with my right hand. I did not ask for you. I understand that you may not wish to see me.

Rest assured, I will respect your space.

 

Best,

D. Malfoy

 

Well, fuck.

It was inconvenient, in a very specific way, that she had not been there to look at him and inform him that he was being unnecessarily dramatic.

Which would have been hypocritical.

She was, at present, feeling somewhat dramatic herself.

She was also entirely capable of appearing otherwise.

She set the second letter down more slowly than the first.

He had not asked for her.

That, for reasons she did not particularly care to examine, was the part that lingered.

Not the apology.

Not the acknowledgement.

That.

She exhaled, quietly, and leaned back against the door.

From the other side of the flat came the low murmur of Italian — her flatmate on the phone again, voice softened by familiarity.

Family.

It produced a small, unwelcome pressure somewhere in her chest.

She missed home. Her family. Her friends.

Even Harry, who had very deliberately failed to warn her and would, she decided, be receiving a Howler at an unkind hour.

At least everyone spoke English, even if they insisted on using words that meant something slightly different to what they ought to.

She looked at the third letter.

Turned it over once.

Twice.

Decided, briefly, that it would be sensible to leave it unopened and go to sleep.

Then considered the fact that she had never, in her life, been particularly good at leaving things alone.

Sleep was unlikely either way. She opened it. Checked the date. Two months ago.

The handwriting was less precise than in the previous letters. There were ink stains along the margins.

Granger,

It seems you have vanished from the face of the Earth. It is a remarkable task to accomplish, considering everyone knows your name. When I came to the conclusion that you had been taken hostage, Weasley said that it was true. Potter didn’t say anything, which suggests he has finally managed the remarkable task of keeping quiet. I am truly impressed.

They didn’t seem worried about you. I am not certain what to make of that.

Are you all right?

Are we playing hide and seek, and you neglected to inform me? I find myself looking for your bushy hair every time I go to the hospital, even though I already know you are not there. It is, I realise, a pointless habit. I have not yet managed to stop.

The owl returns without my letters. I assume you are reading them. Feeding them to the fire. Having a laugh at my expense. I would, I think, laugh with you if you decided to respond.

It seems that self-respect is something I forgot to exercise approximately two whiskies ago.

Hermione read that one more slowly.

Then again.

The phrasing was the same — measured, deliberate, controlled.

The content was not.

It had shifted.

Not dramatically. Not obviously. Just enough. Enough to notice.

Enough that she found herself reading certain lines twice, as though the meaning might rearrange itself into something less… pointed. It did not.

She set the letter down and did not immediately reach for the next one.

Her flatmate laughed, somewhere beyond the wall.

She stared at the ink stains along the margin.

There was something almost methodical about them.

As though he had paused.

As though he had reconsidered.

As though he had continued anyway.

The last letter, if it could be called one, had no date and no header.

Just a single line.

Please just let me know you are all right.

Hermione looked at it for a moment longer than necessary.

It was, objectively, a simple request.

One she could have answered.

One she did not answer.

She did not know what to say.

She was not, by any reasonable definition, all right.

But she was alive. She folded the letter once. Carefully. Then unfolded it again. Set it on the desk with the others.

Aligned the edges.

Adjusted them.

Sat down.

Stood up again.

There was, she realised, a very small part of her that had expected something else.

Not from the letters. From herself.

A response. A decision. Something.

Instead, there was this.

A quiet room.

Four letters.

And the distinct, irritating awareness that she now owed him an answer.

Hermione stared at the final line again.

Please just let me know you are all right.

She reached for a piece of parchment.

Paused. Set it back down.

That, she decided, was a problem for another day.

The first year passed quickly.

Hermione had just learned to tolerate the pumpkin spice latte.

The leaves were changing colours, and the weather had begun to resemble London.

And that was when she had to make a decision.

“I am being offered a job here,” she told Harry and Ron over a Floo call.

There was a pause.

A long one.

“Well,” Ron said eventually, “that sounds suspiciously like good news.”

“It is,” she said.

“And?” Harry asked.

She looked at her wrist.

Both hands of the watch pointed at Home.

She looked around at the small, disordered space she had lived in for a year.

At the notes pinned to the wall.

At the books stacked in uneven piles.

At the coat she had never quite learned where to hang.

“I am coming home in a few days,” she said.

Neither of them spoke immediately.

Then Ron nodded.

“Good,” he said.

Harry smiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “Good.”

Hermione did not let her voice tremble.

She ended the call before it had the opportunity to.

When she returned to England, everything felt the same and different at once.

The traffic no longer unsettled her. The tea was, reliably, good. She had her friends, the reliably bad weather, and food that did not require interpretation.

“Oh, so you don’t want cookies?” Ron asked, in a teasing tone, sitting across from her during her first breakfast back home.

“Look at her, she’s even wearing their sweater,” Harry murmured, glancing from his tea to her patched-up pyjamas, which consisted of a stolen hoodie and flannel trousers.

She rolled her eyes and extended her hand.

“Stop being ridiculous and give me the biscuit.”

“At least she sounds British,” Harry said to Ron, a faint, mischievous smile forming. “Though I think there’s still something in there. Say ‘water’.”

Hermione gave him a look.

“Fuck off.”

Ron nodded.

“British enough,” he said, handing her the biscuit.

“Our codependency should be studied,” Hermione said, looking over at her friends, who had arrived at her flat far too early on her first morning back.

Harry feigned surprise and clutched at imaginary pearls.

“We survived, didn’t we?” he asked Ron.

“Don’t we always?” Ron replied.

Both of them looked at her.

“We’re just glad you’re back.”

“Harry doesn’t like Parvati’s bedside manner,” Ron added.

Harry shook his head rather quickly.

“She’s become a little scary,” he said. “I haven’t seen her smile once in years.”

“Maybe she hasn’t forgiven you for the Yule Ball,” Ron suggested.

Harry rolled his eyes.

“You would think that if you die for someone, they might be slightly more gentle when you break your arm.”

“You are not Jesus Christ, Harry,” Hermione said.

“I think Parvati is Hindu,” Ron offered.

Hermione squinted at him.

“That changes absolutely nothing.”

She had only intended to spend a week in England.

Long enough for the essentials.

Proper tea. Her Gryffindor scarf. Time with her friends that did not involve Floo calls at unreasonable hours.

And, if she was being honest — which she was not inclined to be — a walk through Diagon Alley.

A few books.

A scone.

Shops that did not insist on playing the same Muggle music on a loop.

She told herself it was practical.

She told herself it had nothing to do with anything else.

She was, in fact, doing precisely that.

Walking through familiar streets, past familiar shop windows, noting with quiet satisfaction that her preferred ice cream flavour had not been tampered with, that the books in Flourish and Blotts remained in an order that made sense, and that some things, at least, had the decency to stay where she had left them.

She was just about to turn towards Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes when she heard her name.

From behind her.

She did not turn.

She stopped.

“Granger?”

She closed her eyes, briefly.

Then turned.

Slowly.

As though that might alter the outcome.

It did not.

The sun was in her eyes, which meant she could not see his expression clearly.

That did not prevent her from knowing exactly what it was.

She aimed for nonchalance.

Missed it entirely.

“Oh, Malfoy,” she said, her voice steady in a way her hands were not. “Hi.”

Chapter Text

When she finally had the guts to look at him, he was shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand, which only enhanced the already incredulous expression on his face.
The distance between them closed with every step he took towards her, leaving his friends behind without so much as a glance.

Hermione noticed, with immediate curiosity, the amused look Blaise Zabini and Theodore Nott exchanged as they stayed exactly where they were, in the middle of the street, like two kids who had just been handed front-row seats to a show they had no intention of missing.

She looked back at Malfoy.

He stopped a step away, still half-covering his eyes, studying her with a mix of disbelief, annoyance, and something she had very deliberately stopped trying to name at some point over the last year.

“Hi?” he echoed, lowering his hand slowly to his side, fingers curling into a fist. “I… I thought you were dead, Granger. And then you appear out of nowhere, having a lovely little stroll through Diagon Alley, and all you have to say is ‘hi’?”

His tone wasn’t loud.

Which, frankly, made it worse.

Hermione blinked up at him, her brain—usually so efficient—offering absolutely nothing in return.

Behind him, Zabini and Nott had not moved. If anything, they looked more comfortable. Invested. One of them—she refused to check which—was definitely enjoying this.

Fantastic.

She looked back at Malfoy.

There was colour high on his cheekbones now, his eyes narrowed, jaw tight in a way that suggested he was holding himself together out of sheer stubbornness.

How long had she been standing there? Too long. Long enough that disappearing would now be noticeable. Possibly humiliating. Definitely satisfying for the audience she was pretending did not exist.

“Well?” he prompted, the word edged now with clear impatience.

Hermione opened her mouth. Nothing. Closed it. Tried again.

“I—” she started, and stopped, because the truth was the only thing available to her and it sounded, even to her, incredibly stupid. “I was abroad,” she said.

Brilliant.

The look he gave her made it abundantly clear that geographical distance was not, in fact, an acceptable answer.

“What am I supposed to do with all the flowers I sent to your grave, hm?” he asked, stepping—if possible—even closer.

“You didn’t actually send flowers to—”

“How would you know?” he cut in, his voice dropping into something tight and fuming, bordering on a hiss.

Zabini took a step forward.

Nott stopped him with a hand to the arm and a small, decisive shake of his head.

Hermione’s hesitation must have shown, because Malfoy followed her gaze over his shoulder.

“I’ll meet you two there,” he said, not softening his tone in the slightest.

Apparently, he was furious with everyone.

Nott nodded once. Malfoy returned it. Zabini glanced at Hermione with what might have been an apology—or interest, which was significantly less helpful.

Then the two of them walked past, leaving Hermione and Malfoy standing in the middle of the street like something deeply unfortunate had just been scheduled.

Malfoy watched them go for a moment.

Then he turned back to her.

They were close enough now that she could feel the breath he let out when he looked at her—sharp, controlled, not nearly as calm as he was pretending to be.

Malfoy noticed the moment Hermione took a step back.

Mostly because angry men, much like angry dogs, had a tendency to bite when provoked.

And she had no intention whatsoever of becoming collateral damage for whatever the hell was going on inside Draco Malfoy’s head.

He pinched the bridge of his nose for a long second before letting go, his brows no longer drawn quite so tightly together.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

His voice was still clipped, but there was something underneath it now—tired, worn down in a way that didn’t sit comfortably on him.

She remembered his letters.

She remembered sitting on the floor of her room, reading the first one. Then the second. Then the third, slower. Then the last, far too many times for something so short.

She remembered the shift in them. The way the tone changed. The way it sharpened, then slipped, then settled somewhere dangerously close to concern.

The same sort of concern she felt when Harry or Ron didn’t check in.

She exhaled.

“I am,” she said, making no move to step closer or further away. Holding the distance exactly where it was. Physical. Practical. Necessary.

His shoulders relaxed—just slightly. Enough for her to notice.

His face didn’t follow.

He took a step forward. Stopped. Thought better of it.

Both hands curled into fists, then loosened again, like he was physically working through something he refused to say out loud.

“Did you receive my letters?” he asked, looking directly at her.

The sun was no longer in her eyes. His body blocked it completely.

All she could see was him.

Tall. Pale. Dressed in black. Something that might have passed for aristocratic if he weren’t so obviously dishevelled. A new scar along his jaw she didn’t remember. His mouth set in a tight, controlled line.

“I got them, yes,” she said, nodding once. “Harry sent them to me about six months ago.”

He tilted his head slightly, his hair shifting with the movement.

“And after that?” he asked.

She frowned.

“I got four letters,” she said. “Did you send more?”

He nodded, mouthing four like that clarified something.

It didn’t.

He didn’t elaborate. Just stood there for a moment, looking past her—then back at her, sharper this time.

He straightened slightly, shoulders squaring, a small, telling tic in his jaw.

When he spoke again, his tone was calm.

Too calm.

“I apologise for the way I spoke to you the last time we saw each other,” he said, without preamble. “I was not…entirely myself.”

Hermione blinked.

“You apologise.”

“Yes.”

“You already did,” she said, because she remembered that too. The first letter. The careful wording. The distance.

He shook his head once.

People were staring now. She couldn’t blame them.

“I sent a letter that did not reach you in time,” he said.

“In time for what?”

“For you to leave knowing that—” he stopped. Just briefly. Enough to catch himself. Enough for her to notice. “That I am not a complete wanker,” he finished.

He attempted a smile.

It didn’t reach his eyes.

It was, however, a decent effort.

“The letters didn’t exactly argue that point,” she said, glancing down at her hands, at her watch, at the ground that stubbornly refused to open up and end this for her.

She could sense him rolling his eyes even if she wasn’t looking.

“It was implied.”

“You’ll have to work on your writing, then. It wasn’t.”

“Communication does appear to be our shared weakness,” he said, as though agreeing with a conclusion he had already reached.

Hermione looked back up at him.

One last time.

Before ending whatever this was.

“There’s no need to apologise, Malfoy,” she said, slipping her hands into her pockets so any shaking stayed firmly out of sight. “We’re not friends. There’s no need to—”

“You saved my life,” he interrupted.

His voice had changed again. Quieter. Almost gentle.

“And you’ve healed me. Repeatedly. Of course there’s a need.”

“That’s my job,” she said.

He tilted his head again, studying her with something unreadable.

“Is it?”

Was it?

Yes. Of course it was.

Fix things. Mend people. Heal what could be healed and stabilise what couldn’t. That was the job. That was the point. If she didn’t know how to handle a situation, what happened the next time someone needed help? The next time someone came in bleeding and broken and expecting her to know what to do? Fuck her—what happened the next time there was a war?

She was halfway down that particular spiral when Malfoy pulled her out of it.

He was, she noted with some suspicion, being remarkably talkative for someone who usually limited their interactions to listing his injuries and then congratulating her on doing her job.

“Do you have somewhere to be?” he asked.

She blinked at him.

Honestly, at this rate she was going to get whiplash from the conversational turns alone.

She let out a short laugh, mostly out of disbelief.

“Not really,” she admitted. “I was just having a lovely little stroll through Diagon Alley, as you so kindly pointed out.”

His lips pressed together, like he was considering a smile and choosing, for reasons entirely his own, not to commit to it.

“Perfect,” he said.

It sounded—absurdly—almost cheerful.

If cheerful wore a tailored suit and had the cheekbones of a Greek sculpture.

Hermione stared at him.

Where the hell had that come from?

“Let me welcome you back by inviting you to dinner,” he said, inspecting his nails as though this were a perfectly ordinary suggestion and not something that had just derailed her entire afternoon.

It did not seem wise to inform him that she was not, in fact, back.

That she was leaving again.

That this had been a temporary visit — a logistical stop, a brief return before committing to something larger and, on balance, more sensible than… whatever this was.

He hadn’t asked. So she wasn’t lying.

“Aren’t your friends waiting for you?” she said instead, carefully ignoring the part where Draco bloody Malfoy had just invited her to dinner.

He shrugged.

“Nah.”

It sounded almost natural.

Which was, if anything, more unsettling.

“I’m not really hungry,” she said, because that, at least, was true. “My schedule’s still across the pond.”

Also true.

Also, conveniently, useful.

He raised an eyebrow, nodding slightly as though filing that away for later consideration.

“What are you in the mood for, then?” he asked, not looking away from her for a second.

Hermione hesitated.

“I— I could have a drink,” she said.

Because that was true.

And because he looked as though he had already decided this was happening.

His smile, this time, was real.

“That makes two of us.”

The Leaky Cauldron was almost empty by the time they arrived. They had walked side by side, distance carefully maintained by Malfoy staying just a little behind her, pressing his hand to the small of her back on one occasion when she stopped abruptly because she felt her wrist warm up. She looked down at it and remembered she had left her watch at home. It was probably her mobile ringing in her purse.

They sat at a table at the very end, with no windows near, with the exit at Malfoy’s back, because eleven years after the war she still needed to be able to locate all possible exits from where she was seated. Never mind that the greater danger she might encounter was sitting right across from her, looking at the menu like it had something important to say.

It didn’t.

They ordered two pints and stayed there in silence.

But not the kind of silence they shared in the hospital, which was effective and productive.

No, this silence was charged with something. Expectant. Unsure.

“Where were you?” he asked, taking a sip of his drink, playing with a small ring on his right pinky.

She had never noticed that ring. Probably he didn’t wear it to work. Too flashy. Too pure-blood. He had elegant, long fingers. Nicely clipped nails. The veins in his hands were marked faintly.

Objectively, he had nice hands.

It was a medical opinion.

“Granger?” he asked.

She looked up at him and caught the slightest smirk on his mouth.

“In Massachusetts,” she answered, not giving away much.

There was no need.

“The place where they burn witches?” he asked, without inflection, just neutral.

“I think they haven’t done that in the last few centuries,” she indulged him. “Bad for tourism.”

“And you were there as a tourist?”

She laughed at the idea, at the contrast between her reality as a trainee in a hospital and the picture of someone enjoying the sights.

“Gods, no,” she said.

He looked at her, then at his drink, then back at her.

He seemed to decide something, because he sat straighter and took another sip of his beer.

“Would you like to tell me what you were doing in Massachusetts?” he asked, the picture of patience.

She considered the question. Decided that the truth was the only way to survive whatever this was.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, feeling some of her curls escape her updo. “Not really.”

He widened his eyes just a little, not really surprised but amused.

“Of course you don’t,” he conceded.

“There’s not much to tell, honestly,” she offered, as an olive branch. “Long days, short nights, cars on the other side of the road. I am learning Italian against my will, mostly out of survival.”

“You went to America to learn Italian?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

She laughed again.

“No, that is just an annoying side effect of cohabiting with someone who refuses to speak English before eight a.m.”

He tilted his head.

“I am really confused.”

She nodded and made the universal hand gesture of I told you so, not elaborating further.

He was about to reply when he did a double take at something off to the side. Zabini was sitting at the bar, drinking something elaborate that felt too early to be appropriate.

“Would you excuse me for a minute?” he asked, already standing, not waiting for an answer as he made his way over.

It happened quickly enough that she didn’t register from which direction Theodore Nott appeared.

He sat opposite her. Took a sip from Malfoy’s drink.

“Granger,” he said with a nod. “I didn’t know you were back. Under what rock were you hiding that he couldn’t find you?”

It was the first time she had spoken to him properly. She knew of him, of course. Enough to assume that at least half of what she’d heard was inaccurate.

He had long lashes that gave every look a different weight. His hair fell into a few disobedient curls that made him appear younger than he likely was. His smile suggested that something inappropriate was about to follow.

He was, visibly, an attractive man.

And, just as visibly, not to be trusted.

“I was in America,” she said, for what felt like the hundredth time that day.

He laughed, soft enough that it might have been mistaken for something harmless.

“Oh, I know that,” he said, leaning forward slightly, closing the distance between them. “Healer programme in Boston, sharing a flat with a colleague, drinks every other Friday with work friends. It sounds lovely.”

Something cold slid down her spine.

“Excuse me?” she said, the edge in her voice no longer entirely controlled as her hand moved towards her wand.

He dismissed the gesture with an elegant flick of his hand, as though she had commented on the weather.

“Oh, don’t,” he said, glancing at her hand — and somehow she knew he was fully aware of exactly where her wand was. “I only needed to make sure you were alive. Otherwise Draco would have been unbearable. More than usual.”

“And what does that have to do with me?” she asked.

He looked at her through hooded eyes and let out a long, patient sigh.

“As much as I would love to tell you,” he said, measured, “it isn’t my place.”

“That didn’t stop you from stalking me.”

“That was hardly stalking, darling. I asked the right people and they gave me the answers. It’s not as though you were being followed.”

Hermione wasn’t entirely convinced of that anymore.

The evening was becoming more bizarre with every passing moment. She turned to the bar, where Malfoy appeared to be engaged in what could only be described as hostile negotiations with Zabini.

“He’s just a decoy,” Nott said, his tone hushed.

Hermione’s brows lifted. She was no longer entirely sure whether to be irritated or alert.

“Why is he a decoy?”

Nott rolled his eyes before answering.

“I needed to talk to you, but you have too many guard dogs,” he said, as though that explained anything at all.

It did not.

“You needed to talk to me?” she repeated, to see if it improved with repetition.

It, also, did not.

“Yes, Granger, do keep up,” Nott said, in the tone of someone who had never once been in a hurry. “Are you going back?”

It seemed that anything she might say, he already knew. She could lie. She could pretend not to understand the question. It would be unnecessary.

“I think you already know that I am,” she said. “Even if that is none of your business.”

He let out a small, elegant scoff.

“Of course it’s my business,” he said, producing a cigarette and lighting it.

Hermione was fairly certain smoking was not permitted inside the Leaky. This did not appear to concern him.

“How is that your business?” she asked, lifting her chin slightly.

“Do you see that pretty little blond head there?” he asked, gesturing towards Malfoy with his cigarette. “He was going quite insane thinking you were harmed. He has a very good head of hair. It would be a shame if he lost it so young.”

Hermione found herself with more questions than answers.

She was also still pointing her wand at him. With a small flick, Nott’s cigarette went out. He stared at it as though personally offended.

She lowered her voice, just enough to keep it between them.

“I don’t owe answers to anyone, Theodore Nott,” she said. “You would do well to stay out of my business before it becomes a problem for you.”

He grinned, as though she had finally handed him something interesting to examine.

“Will you send your two hounds to hunt me?” he asked, finishing Malfoy’s drink in one long sip. He set the glass down and, inexplicably, barked at her. Twice.

“I can deal with you myself,” she said.

His smile shifted, something sharper beneath it.

“I can be your guard dog too, darling,” he said, glancing towards Malfoy, still arguing with Zabini. “We could be friends.”

She let out a short, incredulous laugh.

“Why would I ever want that?”

He tilted his head, studying her. Checked his pocket watch, because of course he had one. Looked over to the side.

“Do you remember what Draco was poisoned with last year?” he asked.

Her eyebrows almost touched because how confused she was. At this rate, her quiet afternoon had officially turned into something of a rollercoaster.

“I do,” she answered automatically. “Alcohol mixed with a lot of potions and Muggle drugs. Oh—was it you?” she asked, now properly alarmed.

He rested his head on the palm of his hand and then shook it.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Granger,” he said, with a short laugh. “He almost died.”

“I know. I was there.”

He nodded.

“Yes, that’s why I am here,” he said, as if her following along was proving more difficult than necessary. “Which potions did he have in his system?”

She pursed her lips, trying to recall exactly. Not to tell him—that was classified patient information that she would never reveal—but to remember.

Whisky and LSD, Muggle. Calming Draught, because being drunk and high apparently wasn’t enough. Veritaserum and Felix Felicis, no explanation for those two together.

It was no wonder he’d had an overdose, with all of that inside him.

Maybe it had been the liquid luck that led him to the hospital in time. Maybe it had been him, in spite of everything.

“Do you remember?” Nott asked, pulling her back to the present.

She nodded.

“Yes, but I cannot tell you.”

He grinned again, delighted.

“I know, darling, you took a vow,” he said. “I just need you to use that brilliant brain of yours—the one that won the war and kept those two dogs alive—and remember what he said to you that day.”

“He told me to fuck off,” she clarified, in case that detail had been omitted.

“Not to America,” he said, lowering his voice slightly, like they were sharing a dirty secret. “Not for three years.”

“Next time he’ll have to be more specific about the terms and conditions of his request, won’t he?” she said, matching his tone.

He considered her for a moment, then ran a hand through his hair, rearranging the curls. He stood, nodding as though this had been a perfectly civil interaction, and slid a card onto the table in front of her. His name, an address, a phone number.

“You can reach out any time, darling,” he said.

Then he crossed to the bar, clapped Malfoy lightly on the back, exchanged a few quiet words, and left with Zabini without looking back.

The entire exchange could not have lasted more than ten minutes.

It felt longer than that.

Malfoy returned to the table almost immediately. Sat in front of her. Stared at the empty glass.

“Nott drank it,” she offered, by way of explanation. He nodded, as though that accounted for everything.

“Will you be having another?” he asked, gesturing towards her half-empty glass.

“I don’t think so, no,” she said, considering that alcohol was unlikely to improve the situation.

Malfoy seemed to deflate, just slightly.

“Did Nott say or do something to make you uncomfortable?” he asked, looking directly at her.

She felt sufficiently confident in her abilities to lie.

“No,” she said, entirely convincing. “He just asked me what I had been up to for the last year.”

Malfoy let out a short laugh that sounded equally self-deprecating and amused.

“And did you tell him?” he asked, without much heat.

She shrugged.

“He already seemed to know, to be honest.”

That removed the smile from his face rather efficiently.

“Granger, I don’t know what he told you, but I am not—” he stopped, briefly, as though selecting the least problematic version of the sentence.

This appeared to involve spinning the ring on his finger and lifting an already empty glass, which he set back down with a quiet sigh.

“I will tell him to back off,” he said at last.

“There is no need,” she said calmly. “It’s not like we are—”

“Friends,” he interrupted. “Yes, I know. It is still not acceptable that he involves himself in your life. He has a problem with boundaries.”

She hummed.

“Boundaries?” she repeated.

“Yes. He doesn’t believe in them,” he said, sounding faintly tired.

The laugh that escaped her caught them both by surprise.

He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“Did I just say something you found amusing?” he asked, leaning forward slightly — just enough for her to catch the glint in his eyes.

She was still smiling when she answered.

“No. I just remembered an old joke,” she said.

He smiled, a fraction wider.

“We’ve never been particularly good at talking, have we?”

“I don’t enjoy small talk.”

“What do you enjoy, then?”

She thought about it for a moment. She enjoyed good food, good music, a good shag. Didn’t have the time or energy for any of them.

She noticed his elegant hands, his long fingers. She felt the heat rise to her cheeks, not examining too closely why.

“Sleep,” was the first thing she came up with. “These days I enjoy a good night of sleep.”

He clicked his tongue, still smiling.

“You are too young to say things like that,” he said.

“I am also very tired,” she countered, lifting her drink to her lips so her smile didn’t give anything further away. Drank the remaining beer in one sip.

“You shouldn’t work so much, then.”

“Who would tend to your wounds?”

“Healer Patil, obviously,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “She is so terrifying that I seem to have developed a sense of self-preservation.”

Her smile slipped through anyway.

“Parvati is not scary,” she said, even knowing it was a blatant lie.

“And I went to the hospital for the company,” he added with a shrug. “Let’s use this new communication skill of ours for something other than not telling the truth.”

She laughed, feeling just as nervous as she was excited.

And that was her cue to leave. Lack of sleep, an empty stomach, and a single drink — apparently enough for her mind to wander into possibilities that were neither helpful nor, strictly speaking, present.

It was all in her head.

Was Draco Malfoy, objectively speaking, an attractive man? Yes. A good specimen — balanced proportions, more than decent height, adequate muscle. Eyes too clear, hair too blond, skin too pale. It should not have worked. It did.

Could she blame herself for feeling slightly… unsettled under his attention? No. That would hardly be fair.

Was any of what she was considering a good idea?

Absolutely not.

She stood to leave, and the room shifted beneath her. Low blood pressure, perhaps. Or something adjacent to it.

She reached for the edge of the table and closed her eyes.

“Granger, are you all right?”

He was there immediately.

She felt his hand at her back — light, steady, as though prepared for the possibility that she might collapse and he would have to catch her.

“I stood up too fast. It happens,” she said, with a small laugh that did not quite convince even her.

“Since when?”

“Since always?” she replied, a little breathless. “Could you wait until the room stops spinning before questioning me?”

“Are you drunk?” he asked, incredulous.

“No,” she said. “I’m hypotensive.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he admitted, not removing his hand.

“It means,” she said, opening her eyes but not moving away, lowering her voice, “that I sometimes faint.”

“I thought that was Potter’s area of expertise,” he murmured.

She laughed again, softer this time, turning her face towards his.

They were too close.

He was the one who stepped back.

His eyes did not follow the movement.

“I need some water on my face,” she said, not entirely lying.

“I’ll settle the bill,” he said, though he did not move immediately, watching her instead as she walked away.

She reached the bathroom, intending to breathe, to think, to recover some measure of sense before going home — or something approximating it.

Instead, she gripped the edge of the sink.

Not because she was dizzy.

Because she did not want to leave.

Not really.

She didn’t know what she wanted.

Which was, in itself, a problem.

She was, quite thoroughly, confused.

Water, she thought, might help. Possibly a full immersion. Somewhere distant.

“Granger?”

She let out a quiet laugh, directed at the ceiling. Not one moment to think.

“I’m fine,” she called back.

She did not sound it.

“Do you need me to send for someone?”

“No!”

“Is it all right if I come in?”

“Also no!”

“I’m coming in anyway.”

The door opened.

She had not thought to lock it.

Footsteps approached.

“Then why do you even ask?” she said, turning towards him.

“It seemed polite to inform you,” he replied, from the doorway, with a small shrug. “What’s wrong?”

“I am fine, Malfoy. Go away,” she said, waving him off.

He did not move.

“Do you still lock yourself in cubicles to hyperventilate?” he asked.

Her eyes widened, the reaction immediate and unguarded. That had not been common knowledge.

“Not lately,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what?” he asked, stepping closer.

“Trying not to think about anything. Not the boys, not work…” she paused, then finished, “not you.”

“And has it worked?”

“Not in the slightest,” she admitted.

Something in his expression shifted — something that looked, briefly, like satisfaction. Or relief. Possibly both.

“It’s a shame you didn’t receive the letters,” he said, closing the distance between them.

“Tell me what they said,” she said. “Let’s stop pretending nothing is happening.”

They were standing directly in front of each other now.

A breath apart.

“You would not like them,” he said, leaning in slightly.

“Would I not?”

“No,” he said quietly. “You’d be terrified.”

She lifted her chin, the movement equal parts defiance and invitation.

“Try me.”

Her chest brushed his.

His gaze dropped — her mouth, the space between them, the point of contact — and returned, slower this time.

She raised her eyebrows, a question without words.

He held her gaze for a moment longer.

Then—

“Fuck it.”

And closed the distance.

The kiss was not gentle. Her back was pressed to the wall and he was biting her lips with hunger. He sucked and pulled and licked as he pleased, and she wondered for one instant if that was how he would kiss her everywhere. She knew right away that it would be. He moved his hands slowly but deliberately — one remained gentle on her nape, holding her face at the mercy of his mouth. The other hand was roaming possessively from her hips to her waist, up to her chest.

He dragged away from the kiss and looked at her directly, and she felt warm in enough places to forget about shame when she nodded to a question he didn’t ask aloud. He returned to kissing her with a grin and squeezed her breast hard — a rush of pleasure with a hint of pain, just enough to keep her grounded.

One of his legs was between hers, and that was, along with her arms tight around his neck, the only thing holding her up. After what could have been a minute or an hour, she noticed she was grinding against it and stopped. He let out a little laugh, raw and deep, that made her rethink her entire existence.

He let her down, kissing her neck, biting her there once — more gently than he had with her lips — and then looked at her.

“Do you want to stop?” he asked, not moving at all. Her body was pressed to his tightly enough to know he did not want to stop.

And honestly, she didn’t either.

She shook her head, words not forming.

He reached down towards her, his face at her side, and touched the zipper of her denims.

“Do you want me to touch you?” he asked, his fingers playing with the fabric, not pulling it.

She nodded again.

“I need words, Granger,” he said, his tone firm but teasing.

If she weren’t so aroused, she would have felt self-conscious.

“Y-yes,” she answered, trying her damn best not to turn her head to the side and kiss him.

“I thought so,” he said into her ear, then kissed her temple and undid her belt.

He kissed her then, just as intense as the beginning — hard enough to bruise her lips — as his hand got lost in her knickers. Which were, for all intents and purposes, ruined.

She felt his finger, cold and long, moving gently. She let out a little whimper that he took as a signal to keep going.

Just one finger, gently inside her, making her clench around him as he smiled wickedly. And then his thumb on her clit — not circling, not tapping, just there for pressure. It was exquisite. It was horrible. It was the best she had felt in a long time.

She could have come just from that — the intensity of it all, his kisses, his body pressing into her, him inside her. She tried to move her hips to gain the friction he was not giving her. He stilled her with his other hand.

“You’d let me fuck you in a bathroom stall, wouldn’t you?” he asked, almost gently, circling his thumb as he did so. She let out a sound that was half sob, half moan.

“Yes,” she told him, desperate for relief.

He kissed her temple again and pumped his finger inside and out like a reward for the truth.

“You want to come around my fingers so badly that you are actually communicating — I think that is progress,” he said, not stopping his hand from making her lose the last bit of control she had.

“Fuck off,” she said, just to say something, not really meaning it.

He laughed again, sounding delighted.

“I’m not going to fuck you,” he informed her, keeping his pace perfectly even. “Not here, not like this. I have imagined it so many times that doing it here would be a dishonour.”

He kissed her neck, hot and hard, and she realised she didn’t mind if he left a mark. She was far too busy on the verge of an orgasm to care about much.

“You have to be quiet — we are in a public place,” he reminded her, not sounding as though he cared at all if they were heard.

A little tear escaped her eye and she didn’t know if it was because she was feeling too much or feeling too good. He kissed it away and turned his hot breath to her ear.

“It’s all right,” he said, kissing her just below her earlobe. “I’ll fuck you properly as soon as we get out of here.”

If he would just touch her, or grab her — or perhaps spin her around and fuck her properly indeed.

She grabbed his hand in hers and placed it on her breast. He grabbed it again, hard, and when she moaned, he pinched her nipple through the fabric.

It was just a little pain, but it triggered all the right nerves in her — because the next moment she was coming, pressed against the wall, around his fingers. He didn’t stop moving his hand until she stopped shaking. And he didn’t stop kissing long after that.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“Let’s go back to yours,” he said in a hushed voice, playing with one of her curls.

“Can’t,” she said with a faint smile, aware that her legs were not entirely reliable just yet. “I’m staying at Harry’s.”

“Why on Earth are you staying with Potter?” he asked, in the same tone one might use to question a deeply impractical life choice.

“Because it made no sense to book a hotel room for just a week.”

That seemed to break whatever spell they had been operating under.

“You came for just a week?” he asked, stepping back, leaving her to stand on her own. “You’re leaving again?”

She closed her eyes, already aware of the misstep. There was little point in retreating now.

“I have two more years in my contract. I’m not back. This was just a visit.”

Malfoy frowned, deeply enough that it might have been amusing under different circumstances. He looked at her — properly looked — and then turned his face away.

“Then what was all of this?” he asked, gesturing between them.

“I—” she exhaled. “I don’t know.”

“And you weren’t planning to find out.”

“I didn’t plan any of this,” she said. A reminder, if not an explanation.

“Were you going to say goodbye this time?”

“I don’t know.”

He looked down, either at his shoes or at something significantly less forgiving, and pinched the bridge of his nose. A moment later, he reached for the sink, gripping it more tightly than necessary.

He looked paler than usual.

“This is not a good moment for this,” he said, low.

“I said I didn’t plan it, it’s not fair—”

He shook his head, slightly but unmistakably. His grip on the sink tightened.

“I was talking to myself, Granger,” he said, offering the smallest, least convincing smile. “It would be in everyone’s interest if you exited the bathroom.”

Hermione would, later, note with some satisfaction that she had not thrown anything at him.

“You can’t keep telling me to bugger off every time you feel like it,” she said.

He looked worse now. Paler, almost grey. When he lifted his eyes to hers, there was very little behind them.

Oh.

Oh no.

She recognised that look.

She knew what came next.

When Draco Malfoy collapsed, it did not entirely surprise her.

When she reached for her phone and dialled the number she had only just been given that day, that did.

“It’s Granger,” she said the moment the line connected. “Nott, I need your help.”

Chapter Text

Letters Hermione never received.

Granger,

It is a new form of torture — a subject I am, unfortunately, well acquainted with — to know nothing of you. I have strong reasons to believe your friends take a particular interest in my asking, which I do not do often, as I am already aware the answer will be silence.

From everything I have gathered — which is to say, nothing — I have absolutely no idea where you are. The only reason I know you are alive is because Potter and Weasley have not collapsed in any dramatic fashion, which I assume they would have done by now if you weren’t.

If this letter reaches you, a blank page in return would suffice to know you are all right.

D. M

Granger,

I had to go to St Mungo’s today because, apparently, I am not fireproof, and neither are my robes. A minor burn on my left arm, which will heal quickly, according to Healer Patil. I suspect Weasley is involved with her. Don’t ask me how I know, because I will not indulge in petty gossip. It does, however, make sense that his type would be frightening women. If you feel alluded to, it was entirely on purpose.

If you don’t know this, I wouldn’t know, because you haven’t replied to my letters. But if you didn’t, you may feign surprise when Weasley inevitably tells you.

From what little has been made public about the three of you, the reason for your split never emerged. At first, I thought nothing of it, as you were always photographed together. Though I have begun to wonder whether you were ever truly together, or whether that was simply another convenient narrative.

There have been so many things said about you that I find myself unsure which might be real. I know, for a fact, that everything said about you in school was true — I saw it. Except, perhaps, the part where you were involved with Potter in fourth year. If that is true, I would prefer not to know.

It is the war rumours that remain… persistent. Did you truly disappear and live in a tent? (For what it’s worth, there are days when living in a manor with the Dark Lord felt only marginally more civilised than camping.)

I know you infiltrated Gringotts. I was present when my aunt was informed.

Did you also infiltrate the Ministry? That one, I assume, is an exaggeration. You would have to be entirely out of your mind.

Which, admittedly, does not rule it out.

I may ask your friends tomorrow, if only to observe their reactions.

Best,

D. M

Granger,

It is Christmas. Are you celebrating it, wherever you are?

I am. I will have dinner with my friends and exchange gifts, which will consist primarily of expensive alcohol and, I suspect, entirely useless paraphernalia. Don’t ask — I can’t elaborate without damaging my own reputation, and I have very little control over what they choose to give me.

After that, I will see my mother, because if I don’t, she will come and retrieve me herself. I expect this will involve being dragged by the ear, regardless of my age. I do not believe I will ever cease to be her child. It is, I suppose, an occupational hazard of being an only child.

I never knew whether you had siblings until the war. They searched for your family rather thoroughly. I never asked what happened.

This seems as good a time as any, given that I have now accepted you have either vanished entirely or are choosing to ignore me. Both are, frankly, rude.

I know you are an only child, but I must assume your childhood was more… functional than mine, given the outcome. Possibly the lack of bigotry. Possibly the absence of a lunatic attempting to brand you like livestock. It’s difficult to say.

Wherever you are, I hope you receive books. And, ideally, a sense of humour.

Best,

D. M

Granger,

I think this is quite enough, don’t you? Will you ever answer?

D. M

Granger,

I hope the last letter got lost, to be frank. I am finding myself rather impatient, though that may not even be the right word. Patience would imply I am waiting for something, and in reality, I don’t really know if there is something. Is there something? Was there ever anything?

All those years you patched me up with a stern look and told me to be more careful — did those truly happen?

Was it you, the girl who sat beside me when I was sleeping, and told jokes and complained about being inconvenienced about my near death?

Sometimes, I must confess, I convince myself it was a dream, because you never spoke to me like that again.

Where the ever-living fuck are you? Are you alive? Is there anyone I can sit with and ask about you — how you were as a child, why you decided to become a healer, why you never learned to control your hair?

I wish I would have said more, in one of the times you were mending me. Tell you I was grateful for your company when I was alone in my head, tell you to work a little less and to try that bakery that just opened near the hospital, to ask you about your stupid watch that never tells the time.

Why have you decided to disappear in such a horrible way, Granger? Was it your decision?

There are things that, not even in letters you won’t read, I can quite bring myself to tell you.

If you come back, I’ll tell you all of them.

I’ll kidnap you if needed, make you eat a proper meal and ask you all the questions that run through my mind when I see you. Then I’ll tell you why, when I believed I was dying, I rushed to you. I’ll explain why your presence terrified me after that.

I’ll tell you everything, if I ever see you again.

D. M

“Did you kill Draco already?” was the first thing Nott said as he entered the bathroom like he owned the place, the liquor, and, presumably, the music as well.

As soon as Malfoy collapsed on the floor, she had taken his vitals and cast diagnostic spells that told her, quite clearly, that he wasn’t dead, wasn’t dying, and wasn’t particularly close to it.

He was, plainly speaking, passed out.

It was a little anticlimactic, to be honest. After what happened.

She would have time to revisit that later. Alone. Preferably with a clearer head and significantly less audience.

She then considered her options; she could Apparate to the hospital, she could call for help, she could leave the place entirely and pretend none of it — the drinks, the conversation, the slow and long overdue realisation that she might feel something other than curiosity for Draco Malfoy, the sex — had happened.

A tempting option, if nothing else.

She made what she considered the sensible decision. Let someone else know something was happening. Outsource the problem to someone with more time, more context, and, ideally, fewer professional consequences.

Of course, what she got instead was two judging, well-dressed prats with no medical experience and quite a lot to say.

“How long ago did it happen?” Zabini asked, moving Malfoy’s arm with his foot, like he was testing whether it might object.

“Ten minutes ago,” she answered, glaring at him.

“Was he upset?” he inquired.

“We were arguing,” she said with a shrug.

“In a bathroom,” Zabini said, not really asking.

Hermione only shrugged again, a little more emphatically this time, gesturing vaguely between herself and Malfoy as though that might clarify things.

It did, apparently.

Both of them nodded, finding the explanation entirely sufficient.

Nott stayed by the doorframe, eyeing Malfoy’s limp body — which Hermione had already turned carefully onto his side, in case he decided to make things worse by being sick. Professional courtesy extended even under questionable circumstances.

“Blaise,” he said, turning his gaze to his friend, “why don’t you take Draco home? We’ll be there in a minute.”

They exchanged a look Hermione had no way of interpreting, which was probably intentional and therefore deeply unhelpful.

“This is the last errand I run for you today, Theo,” Zabini said with a tired sort of elegance, hands still in his pockets. He sighed, then leaned down to take Malfoy by the arm.

He nodded at Hermione and Disapparated.

“I am not going anywhere with you lot,” she proclaimed, because it did seem important to establish that if she ended up somewhere else with them, it would very much not be by choice.

Nott pushed himself gracefully off the wall.

“You called me, Granger,” he reminded her.

“Because your friend had a seizure,” Hermione countered.

Nott dismissed her entirely valid clinical diagnosis with a small, absent flick of his hand, as though she had commented on the lighting rather than a man collapsing at her feet.

He walked up to her and tilted his head. She already knew that whatever came out of his mouth was going to be a bad idea and trouble in equal measure, likely with follow-up consequences.

“It makes everything easier, that you are here.”

“Does it?” Hermione asked, her regret at calling him already increasing at an impressive and entirely unnecessary rate.

“Yes, Granger. You’ll see,” he said, tone calm. “Draco has been having this little problem ever since he was poisoned.”

“He passes out every time he’s angry?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

Nott let out a laugh.

“No, but that would be funny. He would never be conscious these days.”

“I’m failing to see how that’s my problem.”

“You are a healer,” he said.

“One of many.”

“A mind healer.”

She paused.

More accurately, she froze.

That was something she had not expected him to know.

Then again, he appeared to have a rather impressive amount of knowledge about things he absolutely shouldn’t, which was rapidly becoming a pattern.

“Not anymore,” she said quietly. “I never practised it. I only studied it. Wasn’t that on your notes?”

His smile showed his teeth, but it was not a happy smile. It was a pleased one. The distinction, she thought, was not especially comforting.

“You did heal two patients using it, didn’t you?” he asked, not moving from his spot, a few steps away from her.

She would have reached for her wand if she thought he posed a physical threat. But no — she would have put money on the fact that her wandless repertoire, combined with a reasonable amount of irritation, would be more than sufficient if required.

She rolled her eyes.

“I’ll assume that you know everything about my life from now on,” she said, flicking a curl out of her face. “What do you need, and why do you need it from me?”

“I thought you would never ask,” he said, extending one elegant hand to her, as though about to whisk her away somewhere deeply questionable (it was, she noted, not even particularly late, which somehow made it worse).

“I am not going to Malfoy Manor,” she said with resolution.

He pursed his lips slightly.

“Why would we go there?” he asked, as though she had suggested a particularly poor plan involving bad food and even worse company.

“You told Zabini to take Malfoy home,” she said.

He shifted his hand slightly, reminding her that it was still waiting, patient and inconvenient.

“That’s not where home is.”

“I’m not going to your haunted manor either,” she clarified.

“Good call!” he nodded. “Nobody has been there in ages. Merlin knows what you might find.”

“Then where the bloody hell do you think we are going?”

“Where Draco lives,” he said patiently. “His home. Su casa.”

“And you expect me to take your hand and side-along with you to God knows where?”

“I am asking very nicely,” he said. “So yes.”

“Are you planning on explaining to me what the fuck is happening?” she asked, already regretting both the question and the person she had asked it to.

“The other way around, honestly,” he said, wiggling his fingers once more, still offering his hand as though this were a perfectly civil invitation. “I was hoping you could provide an assessment of Draco’s condition.”

“There are healers who—”

“He doesn’t trust, correct,” Nott cut in smoothly, as though he had heard the sentence several times before and found it unconvincing each time. “So we are very fortunate to have you back.”

She huffed.

“I’m not back. And whatever is happening to him needs to be analysed by—”

“The best in the field, two for two,” he said, indulging himself, his smile tipping into something faintly canine. “Which is why it’s really quite convenient that you are here.”

She rolled her eyes.

“If I were entirely certain you wouldn’t simply abduct me to speed things up, I would say no.”

“But you’ve always been so clever,” he interrupted lightly, as though this were a compliment rather than a warning, “so you do understand that would be a waste of everybody’s time.”

She rolled her eyes again, slower this time, as though hoping the gesture might communicate something more permanent. It did not.

“For fuck’s sake,” she muttered, and took his hand, already bracing for the distinctly unpleasant pull of side-along Apparition.

They appeared in a living room.

It seemed reasonable to call it that, on account of the sofas and the fireplace. It was not a drawing room, nor a library, nor one of those unnecessarily transitional spaces that existed purely to lead elsewhere. Just a living room. In what appeared to be a house.

A normal house.

It did not smell faintly of bigotry or inherited self-righteousness, which, she thought, was already an improvement.

Hermione looked to her side, where Nott was calmly rearranging his cufflinks, as though they had not just crossed space under questionable circumstances.

“Where are we?” she asked, her voice a touch too high to qualify as entirely composed.

He lifted his gaze from his hands to her face with measured patience.

“I’m not sure how many ways there are to say the same thing,” he said. “We are at Draco’s.”

He said it pointedly, as though that clarified anything at all.

She stared at him.

“I have no idea where that is,” she said, with equal care, allowing a brief pause in case comprehension might occur.

It did not.

Nott let out a small laugh.

“Oh. London,” he said, as though that were the missing piece, before stepping further into the room and raising his voice. “Blaise, where are you? I’ve got the healer.”

The tone was not unlike someone calling a child in from the garden.

Footsteps approached, followed by a sigh heavy enough to qualify as theatrical, if not entirely ungraceful.

Zabini appeared in the doorway, looking as though he had been personally inconvenienced by all of this.

“I am as much of a victim as you are, Granger,” he said, glaring at Theo.

“I doubt it,” she said, and meant it.

“You’ll see it for yourself,” Zabini replied. “Theo is an absolute pain in the arse, and Draco lives for the melodrama.”

She scoffed.

“Isn’t it the other way around?”

Both men exchanged a look that suggested, quite clearly, that the distinction was negligible.

“All right,” she said, her stare moving from one man to the other. “I am here in spite of my good judgement, so please tell me what you need so I can go home.”

Her beaded bag felt heavy on her shoulder — less because of what was inside and more because of what it represented. Knowledge. Exhaustion. A series of decisions that had, in rapid succession, become questionable.

She was here because she had made one. Then another. And then, for reasons that would not hold up in court, she had called Nott.

She should have stayed in America.

Made the boys — her boys — visit her.

Saved herself the trouble entirely.

Blaise spoke before the silence could turn pointed.

“Draco has not been the same since the poisoning incident last year,” he said carefully.

“Himself how?”

Blaise looked down at his hands, as though the answer might be there, then back at her.

“He has these episodes where he just—” he paused, “—as you saw, passes out.”

“It could be a vasovagal syncope due to stress,” Hermione said, tone clinical. “Like sheep.”

She almost smiled.

Nott laughed for her, entirely unhelpful.

“No,” Blaise said, shaking his head. “He’s not a damsel in distress—”

“He’s not?” Nott murmured.

“He’s an Auror,” Blaise went on, ignoring him. “A capable and competent professional.”

He glanced around the room, as though expecting supporting evidence to appear. It did not.

“Did you ever find out who poisoned him?”

They exchanged that look again. The one she could not read and was beginning to resent on principle.

Blaise tilted his head. Nott nodded.

Agreement, apparently reached.

“It wasn’t intended for him,” Blaise said at last. “Theo was the target.”

Her eyes widened.

“What exactly are you involved in that someone thought that was a reasonable approach?”

“That’s not the point, darling.”

“It’s not irrelevant either.”

“I’ll tell you over drinks when we cure Draco.”

She scoffed.

“A curious use of the plural for something I will be doing by myself.”

“It will be a joint effort,” Nott said, smiling like that meant something reassuring.

“Who is joining?”

“Draco, once he returns to the land of the living,” Blaise said. “Us two. Your friends, if you deem it necessary — though I would rather you didn’t.”

She shook her head, sharper now.

“You will keep Harry and Ron away from this,” she said.

“You take such good care of your pets,” Nott observed lightly.

“If you did the same,” she replied, just as lightly, “he wouldn’t faint at every minor inconvenience.”

Malfoy didn’t wake for several hours. In the meantime, Hermione bickered with Nott, attempted something resembling productive thought with Blaise, and then, inevitably, grew tired of both of them and wandered through the house until their hushed voices faded entirely.

It was a nice house, if a little cold. Not in temperature, but in the particular way large, expensive places often were when they were lived in by only one person. It was also unmistakably owned by someone with money. Every object seemed to have cost a small fortune, and to be quietly aware of it.

She opened a door and found a study, and had to drag herself away from the books with more effort than she cared to admit. Found the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water while attempting to understand how she had ended up in this situation, and reached the bottom of the glass without arriving at a conclusion. Then upstairs, eventually locating a bathroom, where she splashed water on her face and braided her hair, which had, by that point, committed fully to mutiny.

And then, finally, she found Malfoy’s bedroom.

He was lying in bed, looking asleep in the sort of way that suggested he had not intended to get there. It was something of a testament to the day that he still had his shoes on. Everything had clearly been rushed.

She removed them with her wand and set them on the floor.

The room was, like the rest of the house, unsurprisingly posh but restrained. No tapestry, no canopy, no four-poster. Just a large bed, a headboard, an armchair by the window, and a book on the nightstand with a title in Chinese.

Since when did he know Chinese?

She reached for his wrist, checking his pulse. Steady. No fever either — if anything, he felt a little cold. She was not tucking him in, under any circumstances, but she did Accio a blanket, which struck her unceremoniously in the face before she caught it and placed it over him with more care than she would have admitted.

Diagnostic spells followed. All normal.

She looked around the room. No immediate threats. Nothing out of place.

And, she reasoned — not entirely unreasonably — that if he had been inside her earlier that same day, she could allow herself twenty minutes of rest while he lay there playing Sleeping Beauty.

She took off her shoes, moved to the other side of the bed, and, without giving herself enough time to reconsider, lay down.

Just for a moment.

She closed her eyes without making a sound, as though the world might take advantage if it noticed. Fell asleep in under a minute.

And woke to Malfoy’s voice.

“And you fucking brought her here?” he asked from somewhere just outside the room, the door now very definitely closed. “Why didn’t you also put up a sign that says I’m in love with her while you were at it?”

That woke her rather more effectively than any spell.

Chapter Text

The door did not open immediately.

Hermione lay very still, staring at the ceiling, her heart doing something deeply embarrassing and alarmingly irregular inside her chest. Less like an organ and more like an overenthusiastic percussion section.

While you were at it.

She replayed the sentence three times in approximately four seconds, which, she thought, was probably a new personal record for catastrophic information processing.

From the other side of the door came the low, controlled sound of Nott saying something she couldn’t quite catch, followed by Malfoy’s voice again, quieter now, the words lost entirely.

Then footsteps. Then silence.

She considered her options.

She could pretend to be asleep. She was, objectively, quite good at feigning unconsciousness when required. She had done it once during the war and it had worked perfectly.

She could also get up, open the door, and address the situation like an adult. A trained healer. A woman who had survived considerably worse things than an inconvenient declaration in a corridor.

A moment passed, Hermione was still negotiating between the two when the door opened.

Malfoy stood in the frame for a moment.

He was still pale — paler than she’d like, clinically — but his eyes were sharp and entirely present. He had removed his jacket at some point. His shirt was untucked. His hair was a complete disaster.

He looked at her lying in his bed with her shoes off and his blanket pulled to her waist, and his expression did something complicated that he very nearly managed to hide.

“You’re awake,” he said.

“I am,” she agreed.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him with quiet, deliberate care.

She sat up and pulled her knees to her chest, watching him.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

He moved towards the armchair by the window rather than the bed, which told her something, though she wasn’t entirely sure what. He sat heavily, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at his hands.

“Fine,” he said. “Better.”

“You passed out.”

“I’m aware.”

“It’s the tenth time since the poisoning.”

He looked up at her.

“Theo told you.”

“Zabini, mostly. Nott implied.”

A short exhale. “Of course they did.”

She watched him press his thumb against the signet ring on his right hand, turning it once. She had noticed him doing that earlier, at the pub. A habit, she thought. Something unconscious.

“It must be neurological residue,” she said, keeping her voice measured. Clinical. Useful. “From the Veritaserum derivative, most likely combined with whatever the Felix Felicis did to your system. Liquid luck doesn’t just influence choices — it interacts with your neural pathways at the point of decision-making. If the compound bonded there during the overdose, it may have left a kind of echo. An instability.”

He stayed quiet.

“When you’re under significant emotional stress,” she continued, “your nervous system essentially short-circuits. The body makes a calculation and shuts down before you do something your brain has flagged as high-risk.”

“Something high-risk,” he repeated, without inflection.

“Honesty, probably,” she said. “If the Veritaserum component is involved.”

He looked at her then. A long look.

“That’s a very tidy diagnosis,” he said.

“It fits the presentation.”

“And the treatment?”

She had been thinking about that since Zabini told her, somewhere between the second and third room of this absurdly expensive and aggressively quiet house.

“It’s going to require sessions,” she said. “A few, maybe more. Mind healing combined with targeted charm work to coax the residue into dissolving rather than triggering. It’s slow. Not especially comfortable.”

He nodded as though she had described something entirely ordinary.

“And you can do that,” he said. Not a question.

“I studied it. I haven’t practised it, but I know someone who has.” She paused. “It also requires you to be honest with the healer. Intentionally. Not because your nervous system decides to force the issue.”

Something moved briefly across his face.

“That’s a very demanding prerequisite, Granger.”

“It’s not optional.”

The corner of his mouth shifted. Not quite a smile.

“No,” he agreed. “I imagine it isn’t.”

The room settled around them. Outside, she could hear nothing — no Nott, no Zabini, no movement at all. Whether they had left or were simply being unusually tactful, she couldn’t tell.

“You heard me,” Malfoy said after a while.

She didn’t pretend otherwise. “Yes.”

He looked back at his hands.

“Then I suppose,” he said slowly, “we can skip the part where I work up to it.”

“We don’t have to—”

“No.” He shook his head once. “I’ve written it in enough letters. I’ve had it weaponised against me by my own nervous system. I think I’ve earned the right to simply say it.”

She did not move. Did not speak.

He lifted his eyes to hers.

“I have been in love with you,” he said, “since I woke up in a hospital bed and found you eating a sandwich beside me. Possibly earlier. Maybe while I was unconscious and you were just… unapologetically yourself.”

The words were quiet. Direct. Entirely without performance.

“Which is, I should note, a deeply undignified way to fall in love. I’d like that formally acknowledged.”

Something in Hermione’s chest loosened slowly, like a knot giving way thread by thread.

“You never said anything,” she said.

He scoffed, sounding more amused than ironic.

“I repeatedly went to the hospital,” he pointed out, raising his eyebrows but looking at his hands.

“I thought you kept getting injured.”

His expression was briefly priceless.

“I’m an Auror,” he said. “Not an idiot.”

She laughed — short, disbelieving, tired around the edges.

“You could have just said something.”

“You weren’t exactly encouraging vulnerability,” he said, leaning back slightly. “Every time I thought there might be an opening, you handed me a chart and instructed me to keep my wounds dry and stop behaving like an idiot.”

“I am not especially good at reading social situations,” Hermione admitted.

This time his smile looked almost fond.

“And I am not especially good at expressing feelings.”

That, unfortunately, was fair.

“And then I got poisoned,” he continued, “and you were there, and I said something honest, and you left the country.”

“You asked me to leave,” she said, for what had to be approximately the hundredth time.

He gave her a sidelong look.

“The room,” he said patiently, like this distinction had always been obvious. “I asked you to leave the room because I could feel the words I burn, I pine, I perish preparing to leave my mouth at any second.”

“Is that Shakespeare?” she asked, genuinely startled.

The look he gave her made it abundantly clear this was not the relevant detail.

“That cannot possibly be your takeaway from everything I just said.”

It absolutely could be, but she was too tired to defend herself properly.

“I was going regardless,” she said quickly. “The opportunity was — is — too good.”

He hummed softly, giving a small nod.

“A trauma healing programme in Boston,” he said without emphasis.

Fucking Theodore Nott.

“I wasn’t running from you.”

He tilted his head, something careful moving behind his eyes.

“Were you not?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at her hands.

“I didn’t know what it was yet,” she admitted finally. “What I felt. It didn’t have a shape.”

“And now?”

She looked up at him.

“You fell asleep in my bed,” he said very gently, “and the world didn’t end.”

“I was tired.”

“Granger.”

“I was also,” she said more quietly, “not ready to go.”

Something in his face shifted then. Slow. Certain. Like light changing in a room.

“There it is,” he said, almost to himself.

Heat rose to her face immediately, which was ridiculous. She was a grown woman, a qualified healer, and earlier that same evening she had done considerably more compromising things than admit a feeling. None of that prevented the warmth from spreading.

“Earlier,” she began.

He shook his head.

“We don’t have to—”

“I want to,” she interrupted. “I want to say that earlier — the pub, the bathroom—” she pressed her lips together briefly, “—that wasn’t just the drink, or the strangeness of the day, or years of accumulated feelings I hadn’t named yet.”

He watched her the way he had in the hospital years ago. Still. Focused. Like she was the only thing in the room worth paying attention to.

“It was all of those things,” she said. “And I meant it anyway.”

Malfoy was quiet for a moment.

Then he stood.

He crossed the room slowly, without urgency, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked at her from considerably closer than before.

“You have two years left in your contract,” he said.

“Yes.”

“In America.”

“That’s where the programme is.”

He considered this with the kind of composure she had always found irritating and now found she rather wanted to crawl inside and live in permanently.

“That’s a long time,” he said.

“It’s not,” she countered. “You know it isn’t.”

He looked at her carefully. “What are you saying?”

She uncurlled her legs and turned properly towards him. Close enough now that she could see the faint scar along his jaw — new since she’d left, pale and thin against his skin.

“I’m saying I spent a year trying not to think about you and failed,” she said. “I’m saying I read your letters too many times. I’m saying I laid down in your bed tonight and felt—” she exhaled softly, “—like I didn’t need to leave immediately.”

He reached out and tucked a loose curl behind her ear, the gesture so quiet and matter-of-fact that she almost missed the way his fingers lingered, briefly, against her jaw.

“That’s a very modest declaration,” he said. “Considering the circumstances.”

“I’m working up to it.”

“Take your time,” he said, the faintest thread of amusement in his voice. “I’ve waited this long.”

Something in her chest gave way with alarming ease.

“I have feelings for you,” she said. “Big ones. Uncomfortable ones. I haven’t entirely worked them out yet.”

He stared at her.

For a man who had recently been unconscious on a bathroom floor, he recovered remarkably quickly. She watched him process it, place it somewhere internally, decide what to do with it.

Then he said, with complete composure, “Come back sooner.”

She blinked.

“What?”

“The two years,” he said. “Come back sooner. Visit. Let me come there. I have leave I haven’t used in three years and an Auror’s stipend I’ve done nothing useful with.” He paused. “Let it become something with a shape.”

She felt something dangerously close to a smile pulling at her mouth.

“You want to visit Massachusetts.”

“I want to visit you,” he corrected. “Massachusetts is incidental.”

“It’s really not that exciting,” she said, staring down at her slightly trembling hands. “Not much to do. A great deal of aggressively divisive food. Questionable roommates.”

“You’re there,” he said simply. “I find that changes the calculus considerably.”

She looked at him for a long moment — this precise, infuriating, quietly devoted man who had written letters she never received, repeatedly gone to a hospital he absolutely did not need to be in, and apparently fallen in love with her over a sandwich.

She reached out and took his hand.

He looked down at it, then back up at her face, and the expression he wore was not one she had seen on him before. Unguarded. Entirely unperformed. Something carefully locked away for a very long time and only now being trusted outside containment.

“You’re going to have to let my colleague treat you,” she said. “The episodes won’t stop on their own.”

“I figured,” he muttered.

“It requires you to tell them things.”

“I gathered.”

“Inconvenient things,” she clarified. “Things you would rather avoid.”

“Granger,” he said, his thumb moving slowly across her knuckles, “I have been rehearsing honesty in letters you never read for over a year. I think I can manage.”

“It’s different in person.”

“I’m aware.” A beat. “I passed out last time.”

She laughed, and he smiled at the sound of it, something immediate and entirely real.

“We’ll work on that,” she said.

“Will we?”

“I’m very good at what I do.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve been on the receiving end.”

He turned her hand over in his and studied her palm for a moment as though it contained something worth serious consideration before looking back up at her.

“What happens now?”

“Now,” she said, “you let Nott and Zabini know they can go home.”

“They left a while ago,” he said. “Nott said — and I quote — ‘I’ve done my part. The rest is up to fate and your complete inability to be normal.’”

She closed her eyes briefly. “He’s exhausting.”

“He’s effective,” Malfoy said, with what sounded suspiciously like reluctant affection. “Unfortunately.”

She stood, reaching for her shoes where she had left them on the floor. He watched her from the bed, leaning back on one hand.

“You’re not leaving,” he said. Not quite a question. Something more careful than that.

She looked at him.

“I have to go back to Harry’s,” she said. “I leave in two days.”

He absorbed this without visible reaction.

“But,” she continued, “I’ll be back for Christmas. If you’d like.”

“If I’d like,” he repeated, as though the phrasing itself were faintly absurd.

“Would you?”

He looked at her steadily.

“I have wanted you to come back,” he said, “every single day since you left. More so when I didn’t know where you were.”

She sat back down.

Not because she had consciously decided to stay — she hadn’t, exactly — but because she set her shoes aside and reached up to place both hands against his face, and he went very still in that particular way he had, like he was trying not to frighten something away.

She studied him carefully. Handsome features. Clear eyes. Hair beautifully ruined. She could have kissed him immediately. Wanted to, quite badly, actually. Instead she stared harder, which was apparently the mature option available to her.

He stared back without seeming remotely troubled by the complete collapse of personal space.

She moved closer still, until their breaths mingled warm between them.

Then she kissed him gently. Just a brush of her mouth against his. Nothing like the bathroom — not desperate, not overwhelmed. Just this. Quiet. Certain. Present.

He kissed her back with extraordinary care, as though paying attention to something delicate.

When she pulled away, his eyes remained closed for a brief moment, and when he finally opened them the expression on his face looked like something very few people had ever been permitted to see.

“Christmas,” he said.

“Christmas,” she confirmed.

“And between now and then?”

“Letters,” she said. “Floo calls. You learning to use a mobile.”

He grimaced immediately.

“I will not—”

“But you will,” she interrupted, standing properly this time. “If you want to contact me at three in the morning because you can’t sleep, you will absolutely learn how to use a mobile.”

He looked up at her, the grimace shifting into something reluctant and fond.

“That’s a deeply specific scenario.”

“Is it inaccurate?”

A pause.

“No,” he admitted.

She retrieved her shoes and sat at the edge of the bed to put them on. Without comment, he moved to sit beside her, close enough that his shoulder rested warmly against hers.

“Two years,” he said after a moment.

“Less,” she corrected. “A year and eleven months now. And I’ll be back for Christmas, and Easter if you behave, and I am fairly certain Nott has already placed some kind of tracking charm on me, so really—”

“I will deal with Theo,” he said in exactly the tone a man might use to announce he intended to put down an injured horse himself.

“You say that with remarkable authority.”

He laughed.

“I mean it with remarkable authority.”

She stood and turned towards him, only to find him already looking at her with that same careful attention she had first noticed years ago in an examination room and then spent an absurd amount of time pretending not to notice afterwards.

“Walk me to the door,” she asked.

He did. Unhurriedly.

He walked her downstairs, through the quiet and offensively expensive hallway, to the front door, which opened onto a narrow London side street where the night air felt cool and sharp after the warmth of the house.

She stopped on the step.

Turned back.

He was leaning against the doorframe, arms loosely crossed, watching her with an expression she now had a name for.

“I’ll Floo when I land,” she said.

“When you land,” he repeated, brows furrowing.

“I’m taking a flight to America.”

For the first time during the entire evening, he looked genuinely horrified.

“I once heard you refuse to get on a broom under any circumstances,” he said.

She opened her mouth to object on principle, but he was already shaking his head.

“But you will willingly board an aeroplane,” he continued, “which remains in the air through principles somehow even more alarming than magic.”

“Physics,” she offered, being completely ignored.

He was far too occupied with disapproval to acknowledge it.

“You’ll Floo?”

“Owl is difficult with the time difference.”

“Floo is fine,” he said distractedly, still appearing deeply unsettled by the existence of aviation.

“Don’t get injured while I’m gone.”

“I make no promises about that,” he said, though his mouth curved slightly.

“Try anyway.”

She stepped onto the pavement, then stopped again because there was, she realised, one final thing.

“The letters,” she said. “The ones I didn’t receive.”

He said nothing, waiting.

“I want to read them.”

Something moved briefly across his face — surprise first, then something quieter and more careful.

“They’re embarrassing,” he said, without much conviction.

“I’m hoping so,” she replied.

A pause.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll ask Potter to send them back to me. I’ll give them to you at Christmas.”

She smiled then.

A real one. The sort she reserved for people she loved.

And he seemed to absorb it slowly, deliberately, like something worth keeping safe for later.

Then she Apparated away.

She owled him from the airport.

He replied before she boarded, which she noted and very deliberately did not comment on.

She Flooed him on the third day, fully intending to keep the conversation brief. They spoke for two hours.

Malfoy asked about her experience with mind healing. She stayed quiet for slightly too long, and he correctly interpreted that it was not a subject she particularly wanted to discuss.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he said.

She scoffed softly.

“I am fairly certain Nott would tell you if I don’t,” she replied.

“Theo has been dealt with,” he informed her, sounding entirely serious.

Her eyebrows lifted before she could stop herself.

“Did you finally kill him?” she asked hopefully.

A dry laugh came through the Floo.

“Not even the devil wants him back, no,” Malfoy said. “He simply understands where the boundaries are at present.”

“I thought he didn’t believe in them.”

“I have made a believer out of him.”

A moment passed. Then another.

She knew it would be easier to talk about if she didn’t have to see his face while he learned what she had done.

She let out a sigh.

“My parents,” she said at last.

“I beg your pardon?”

She pressed two fingers against her temple.

“I Obliviated my parents at the beginning of the war,” she said. The silence from the other side of the Floo went completely still. “When it ended, I went looking for them. Tried to reverse it. Couldn’t. Too much time had passed.”

Malfoy cleared his throat softly, presumably searching for the correct thing to say, which was unfortunate because there really wasn’t one.

“I consulted specialists. Considered every option available. Nobody had ever attempted to reverse an Obliviation built around something so specific as removing one person from memory.”

“You only erased the memories involving you?” he asked, sounding genuinely incredulous.

She nodded once, wanting very badly to get through the explanation before she lost the nerve to continue.

“Yes,” she admitted. “Nobody would help me. I got tired of hearing it couldn’t be done, so I decided to study Healing and do it myself. Eventually I reversed it. They remembered me. They were furious with me.” She paused. “And then I was left with all this knowledge I rather wished I didn’t have. So I stayed in Healing and left the mind work to people who hadn’t already tampered with it.”

Information overload, apparently, was not a condition Draco Malfoy suffered from.

He remained quiet for approximately five seconds before saying, with complete certainty, “You are extraordinary.”

She smiled before she could stop herself, warmth spreading slowly through her chest at the affection threaded so naturally through his voice.

They did not speak about it again.

By the time she finally said goodnight, it was two in the morning her time, and she was sitting on the floor of her flat in Boston with her back against the sofa. Her flatmate — who had spent the better part of an hour tactfully pretending not to listen from the kitchen — finally emerged and announced, in Italian, that she looked like a woman who had made a decision.

Hermione thought that, if she was being honest, she had probably made several.

She decided this was as good an opportunity as any to inform him that he would be the new Healer for Draco Malfoy.

He claimed it meant nothing whatsoever, then shrugged while a distinctly cheeky smile formed at the corner of his mouth.

Malfoy sent letters. Long ones sometimes, brief ones at others — a single line, once, that read: I found the bakery I told you about and thought of you immediately, which continues to be your fault.

She had that one pinned above her desk, which she acknowledged to absolutely no one.

She sent letters back. Longer than she expected them to be. She discovered, with some surprise, that she had things to say she hadn’t realised she’d been saving up. Things she had been carrying quietly for so long they had simply become part of her. Writing them down and knowing he would read them made the carrying easier rather than harder.

He sent the unsent letters in early November. No warning, no preamble — simply a packet sealed with the Malfoy ring, accompanied by a short note.

You asked for these at Christmas. You’re getting them now because I have apparently lost all sense of self-preservation. Don’t be smug about it.

She read them in order.

Slowly.

When she finished, she sat quietly in her room for a long while afterwards.

Then she picked up her pen and wrote back a single request.

Come to Boston.

He refused, on principle, to get on a plane. Which made organising an international Portkey significantly more tedious than it strictly needed to be. It also made them both painfully aware that there was, in fact, something happening between them. No name yet. No labels. Just a pull, a thread, several deeply inconvenient feelings and a truly offensive time difference.

Hermione felt the entire flat shift faintly around her before hearing the unmistakable sound of someone appearing out of nowhere.

The next thing she heard was swearing in Italian.

Then something hushed in English.

Then considerably louder swearing in English.

“I must apologise,” Malfoy was saying. “The Department of International Transportation has clearly miscalculated. I was supposed to arrive in Hermione Granger’s flat.”

Hermione was in her room, freshly out of the shower and in absolutely no state to receive guests, considering she was wearing little more than a towel and mounting panic. According to her calculations — which had now revealed themselves to be catastrophically wrong — she still had thirty minutes before Malfoy’s Portkey activated.

“Hermione Granger?”

She had even planned her outfit for today and now couldn’t seem to locate half of it through the combined interference of nerves and surprise.

“Merlin, you must be a Muggle,” Malfoy sighed dramatically from the other room. “It is only my luck that I now have to Obliviate you, and the paperwork alone will—”

More Italian swearing followed.

Hermione finally found her jumper.

“Don’t you raise your wand at me,” he hissed, perfectly audible through the door. Then, louder: “Hermione! Fabio arrived early!”

She managed to zip her trousers and open the bedroom door just in time to see Malfoy staring at her flatmate with visible suspicion while mouthing Fabio? to himself like a man trying to solve a crime.

Her grand entrance was, regrettably, rather anticlimactic.

Both men turned towards her. Her wet hair was dripping onto her shoulders. Her socks were mismatched. Her flatmate was pointing at Malfoy with a piece of clothing. He was also shirtless.

“Hi,” Hermione mumbled.

She crossed the living room in three quick steps and positioned herself firmly between them.

“I see you’ve met,” she said.

They both spoke at once.

“He threatened to hex me!”

“There is a half-naked man in your flat, Granger.”

Hermione sighed.

“Andrea,” she said, gently lowering the hand currently wielding a shirt like a cotton-based weapon, “meet Draco Malfoy.”

She looked at Malfoy with quiet desperation while hearing a muttered stronzo somewhere to her right.

“Draco,” she continued, “this is Andrea. My colleague and roommate.”

“Why is your colleague half naked?”

“Why is your Fabio blond?”

Hermione closed her eyes briefly.

The answer to both questions was, in fairness, entirely reasonable. Andrea had just come off a night shift and had not yet made it to his bedroom. Malfoy had clearly spent time getting ready for today, which she was not going to acknowledge out loud until she was in a considerably better position to do so. Namely, one in which her hair was not dripping and her flatmate was not brandishing laundry like a revolutionary flag.

“Andrea,” she said, with enormous patience, “please go to bed.”

He looked between them. Then at Malfoy. Then at her. Then back at Malfoy, who maintained eye contact with such composed neutrality that it constituted, she thought, a minor act of aggression.

“Mm,” Andrea said, in a tone containing a truly unreasonable amount of information, and disappeared into his room.

The door clicked shut.

Silence settled over the flat.

Hermione turned to face Malfoy properly. He was standing in the middle of their small living room looking exactly like himself — pale, neat, and fractionally too tall for the space — except his coat was still on and he had the slightly disoriented air of someone who had recently been shipped internationally by magic.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

Her hair was still dripping.

“You’re early,” she said.

“The Portkey was early,” he replied. “There is a distinction.”

“Is there?”

“I was entirely prepared to arrive at the correct time. The Department of International Transportation has a great deal to answer for.”

She folded her arms, thoroughly underprepared and still wearing mismatched socks.

“You were going to be thirty minutes late.”

“I was going to be precisely on time,” he said with great dignity.

“Your note said eight.”

“I said around eight.”

“That’s late, Malfoy.”

“Around eight was aspirational,” he replied, which was not, she thought, especially persuasive.

He looked around the flat without seeming to mean to, taking things in with the quiet attentiveness he gave most things. The books stacked against the wall. The photographs on the shelf. The Italian coffee maker Andrea had imported personally because, according to Andrea, American coffee machines were an insult to civilisation.

“This is where you live,” he said.

“Temporarily,” she replied. “For another twenty-two months.”

“Twenty-one,” he corrected automatically. Something in his expression looked very carefully arranged.

She looked at him for a moment longer.

Then she went to dry her hair.

They walked to the water because she insisted, and he did not argue, which she quietly filed away as either goodwill or the magical equivalent of jet lag. She suspected the latter was real even if no one officially acknowledged it.

It was a grey November morning. Cold in the dry, purposeful way Boston did cold, the sky flat and white above the harbour. She had handed him one of Andrea’s coats, which he accepted without comment despite the sleeves ending several centimetres too early.

“It looks fine,” she told him.

“It does not,” he replied pleasantly, and continued wearing it anyway.

The waterfront was mostly empty at this hour. A few runners. A man with a dog who looked as though he regretted every life choice that had brought him outdoors before noon. Malfoy walked beside her with his hands shoved into pockets clearly not designed for them, observing everything with the calm concentration of someone cataloguing information for future use.

“It’s not much,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the harbour.

“It’s nice,” he said. Which, from him, she had learned to translate properly.

“I’ve gotten used to it.” She glanced sideways at him. “It took a while.”

“I imagine.”

“I kept driving on the wrong side of the road the first month.”

“You drive?”

“I had to. Everything is absurdly far apart here and they look at you like you’ve escaped captivity if you suggest walking anywhere.”

He considered this. “That explains a great deal about the country.”

She laughed, short and warm. He looked quietly pleased with himself afterwards.

They walked for a while without speaking, which was one of the things she had missed most without properly noticing it. Silence with him was never strained. It simply existed. Useful. Comfortable. Entirely free of obligation.

“Your friend,” he said eventually. “Andrea.”

“Mm.”

“He treats patients.”

“He does.”

“He’s the one you want to see me.”

Not a question. Which meant he had already worked it out and was merely confirming the details. Hermione stopped walking and turned towards him.

“He’s very good,” she said. “Genuinely. He doesn’t know who you are, so you won’t have to manage anyone’s history or politics. He’ll treat you like a patient instead of a national crisis.”

Malfoy looked out over the harbour for a moment. His jaw had settled into the expression she now recognised as decision-making rather than disagreement.

“I’ll consider it,” he said.

“That’s all I’m asking.”

He glanced sideways at her. “You’re not demanding an answer immediately?”

“You’ve had approximately four seconds and just crossed the Atlantic inside a magical parcel,” she said. “Even I can allow for an adjustment period.”

That surprised a laugh out of him — low and immediate, the kind that escaped before he had time to moderate it. She had been collecting those sounds quietly for years, she realised. Like evidence.

“Come on,” she said. “I’m going to show you a very mediocre breakfast and you’re going to pretend it’s acceptable.”

“I will do no such thing,” he replied, falling into step beside her.

“You absolutely will.”

The café was small and overheated and served coffee in cups approximately the size of small cauldrons, which Malfoy regarded with visible distrust. He ordered tea, received a look from the barista that appeared faintly judgemental, and corrected himself to coffee under mild social pressure.

Now he sat across from Hermione holding a bucket-sized cup and looking like a man reconsidering several recent decisions.

“You could have kept the tea,” she said.

“I refuse to become the sort of person who orders tea in America.”

“You’re English.”

“Exactly,” he said gravely. “I have standards to uphold.”

She wrapped both hands around her own cup. He watched the movement with that familiar, steady attention that still unsettled her slightly whenever she caught it directly.

“The letters,” she said.

He nodded once.

“I read them the night they arrived. All of them.”

“I know,” he replied. “Theo informed me you cried.”

Heat climbed immediately into her face. “I did not cry.”

“Of course not.”

“How does Nott even know that?”

“He said,” Malfoy replied, entirely calm, “‘she sounded like a woman who had recently been doing something other than sleeping’ when she asked Andrea if Andrea could kindly take over my neurological disaster.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Frankly, I found the logistics of Theo’s interference more impressive than the invasion of privacy.”

“I was tired,” Hermione said with dignity.

“Naturally.”

“Malfoy.”

“Granger.”

She glared at him. He looked back with perfect composure and the unmistakable expression of a man enjoying himself enormously.

“I was moved,” she clarified eventually. “There is a distinction.”

Something in his expression softened slightly at that. He turned the cup once in his hands — the same absent movement she had noticed with the signet ring, something unconscious when he was thinking too carefully about something.

“I meant all of it,” he said quietly. “Every word.”

“I know.”

“Even the embarrassing parts?”

“You mean the parts about my hair?”

He had the decency to look briefly regretful.

“I was expressing affection.”

“You said it defied several known laws of magic.”

“That was affectionate.”

“Was it?”

“I find it…” He exhaled. “Distinctive.”

She stared at him. He maintained eye contact with admirable commitment.

Then she laughed, and after a moment he did too, and the café was warm around them and the coffee was genuinely terrible and she found herself thinking, not for the first time, that she had spent an extraordinary amount of time trying not to want this.

He navigated the afternoon with considerably more grace than she had expected, which was to say he accepted the Freedom Trail with the detached curiosity of a man conducting a private academic investigation, stopped in front of every historical marker to read it in full, and said at one point, with complete sincerity, “The colonists were remarkably bad at negotiation.”

“Says the man from the country that caused the problem,” Hermione replied.

He conceded this with a small, dignified nod and continued reading the plaque.

By the time they reached the harbour again, the light had flattened into the amber-grey of late afternoon and the cold had developed actual intent behind it. Hermione bought them both coffee from a cart that Malfoy regarded with profound suspicion before accepting his cup and drinking it anyway, which she felt deserved some recognition.

“My parents,” she said eventually, because the afternoon had reached the sort of quiet where things escaped before you could properly evaluate them.

He glanced at her. Didn’t interrupt. Simply waited, which she had come to realise was one of the ways he showed care most consistently.

“They’ve spoken to me four times since I reversed the Obliviation,” she said. “Brief calls. Careful ones. Like talking to somebody you used to know rather than your daughter.” She looked out across the water. “I think they’ll come back. I just don’t know how long that takes.”

Malfoy was quiet for a moment.

“My mother,” he said eventually, “didn’t speak to my father for almost two years after the war.” A pause. “Not because of one specific thing. More because they survived something he led them into and neither of them really knew what to do with that afterwards.” His voice stayed even. “They’re… all right now. Whatever all right means after something like that.”

Hermione looked at him.

“You’ve never told me that before.”

“I’ve never been in Boston before,” he replied.

She wasn’t entirely certain what that meant. Only that it felt significant somehow. Like the city had become a place where things could exist that perhaps didn’t fit anywhere else yet.

“I want them back,” she said quietly.

“I know,” he replied. “They’ll come.”

There was no false reassurance in it. No careful sympathy or soft, meaningless comfort from people who didn’t know what to do with grief once it stopped looking dramatic. Just certainty. Calm and uncomplicated. Somehow that made her believe him more.

She leaned sideways until her shoulder rested against his arm. He didn’t react beyond shifting slightly to make it easier for her.

They stayed there until the cold became persuasive enough to force movement.

Her flat, when they returned, was blessedly empty.

Andrea had sent a message in Italian that translated roughly to I have gone to be appreciated elsewhere, do not wait up, I have taken the neighbour’s dog for emotional support — there was no dog.

Hermione made tea because she was English and the coffee had been genuinely appalling, while Malfoy sat on the sofa examining the books on her shelves with the concentration of a man cataloguing evidence for later use.

“You brought all of these from London?” he asked.

“Half. The other half I acquired here.” She handed him a cup. “The academic bookshops are dangerously good.”

He accepted the tea, looked at it briefly as though confirming it met expectations, then reached for one of the books instead.

Hermione sat beside him and watched him turn it over in his hands — a dense text on neurological trauma responses she had bought in September and annotated aggressively in the margins.

He opened it at random and studied her handwriting for a moment.

“You argue with books,” he observed.

“I annotate.”

“This says wrong, obviously, consider the counterevidence you absolute—” He glanced up at her. “Then there’s a word I can’t decipher.”

“I was frustrated that day.”

“I can tell.” He sounded faintly fond about it, which was irritating. He set the book down carefully — the way one handled something considered valuable — and turned slightly towards her. The flat was warm. The lamp beside the sofa cast soft light across the room. Outside, Boston continued doing whatever miserable atmospheric thing Boston insisted on doing in November.

“I don’t want to go back to London,” she said.

The words surprised her immediately afterwards.

He looked at her carefully.

“I mean—” she exhaled. “I will. Obviously. I want to. I just…” She frowned slightly. “Coming back here used to feel temporary. Like waiting. It doesn’t anymore.”

“What does it feel like?”

She considered it properly before answering.

“Like something I chose,” she said at last. “Instead of something I happened to end up in.”

He turned the signet ring once around his finger, the metal catching briefly in the light. She had begun noticing every time he did that. Which was probably unhealthy.

“When you come back,” he said, “what do you want?”

The question settled between them with quiet weight. Not casual. Not entirely practical either.

Hermione looked at him.

“I want to finish the programme,” she said slowly. “I want Harry and Ron to stop injuring themselves, though realistically that may require divine intervention. I want my parents to come over for dinner eventually.” She paused. “I want—”

The sentence stalled.

He waited without pushing.

She turned properly towards him. The distance between them on the sofa had become almost nonexistent at some point during the day, though neither of them had acknowledged it directly. That seemed to happen with Draco often — things shifting gradually until suddenly they were simply true.

“I want what’s already happening,” she admitted quietly. “I just want it in the same city.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“That,” he said eventually, “seems entirely achievable.”

“Does it?”

“Yes.” He shifted slightly closer, deliberate enough that she noticed it immediately. “Particularly considering I intend to become extraordinarily persistent about this once you return.”

“About what specifically?”

“About you,” he said, as though that were a perfectly complete sentence. Which, for him, it probably was.

She moved first.

She had learned, somewhere in the last several months of letters and late Floo calls and a Saturday afternoon in Boston that had restructured several of her previously held opinions about herself, that the feeling just before she reached for him had its own distinct quality. Not urgency, exactly. More like relief. Like finally moving in a direction she had been aware of for much longer than was comfortable to admit.

She kissed him and he kissed her back and his hands found her immediately — one at her jaw, careful and deliberate, one at her waist pulling her in — and this was different from the bathroom, which had been overwhelming and breathless and wonderful in a chaotic, sideways-falling sort of way. This was slower. More considered. The difference between doing something because you can’t stop yourself and doing it because you’ve decided to, and the deciding is the point.

She shifted closer and he made a low sound against her mouth that she felt in her sternum.

“Stay,” she said.

“Obviously,” he replied, which was the least romantic possible phrasing and she liked him enormously for it.

She pulled back just enough to see his face. His expression was what she was beginning to recognise as his unguarded face — the one that arrived when he had stopped making decisions about what to show and was simply showing it. It looked like someone who had been waiting for a long time and had stopped being surprised that the waiting was over.

She stood and took his hand. He stood. The lamp was still on, warm against the dark outside.

“The bedroom,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

She led him, and he followed, and the door closed behind them with a sound that felt, she thought, like something settling into place.

He was not in a hurry.

That was the first thing she noticed, and it undid her more thoroughly than urgency ever could have.

She had expected intensity — the focused, precise quality he brought to everything else. He did bring that. But he brought it slowly, the same way he had moved through the whole day, as though he had already decided there was nowhere else he needed to be and intended to make that abundantly clear.

He stood in front of her in the low light from the window and looked at her. Just looked. Long enough that she felt the colour rise to her face, which was ridiculous — she was a grown woman and a trained healer and he had already had his hands on her — but the looking was different. Deliberate. Like he was allowing himself something he had been careful about for a very long time.

“You have no idea,” he said quietly, “how long I’ve wanted to do this properly.”

“Tell me,” she said, before she could think better of it.

Something shifted in his expression. Settled.

“Later,” he said. “I’ll tell you all of it. Right now I’m going to be rather occupied.”

He reached for her then, and the first thing he did was pull the elastic from her hair so it fell around her shoulders, and he ran both hands through it slowly, almost reverently, watching it with an expression that made her chest ache.

“Your ridiculous hair,” he said, with a softness entirely at odds with the words.

“You have a problem with my hair,” she said, slightly breathless already.

“I have been thinking about your hair,” he corrected, with great precision, “for considerably longer than is appropriate, and I intend to make the most of having it within reach.”

He tilted her face up and kissed her again — deeper this time, slower, the kind of kiss that was less a beginning than an arrival. His hands moved from her hair to her jaw to her shoulders and down her back with unhurried intent, and she made a small sound she had no time to be self-conscious about because his grip tightened in response and he broke the kiss just far enough to speak.

“That,” he said against her mouth, “was a very good sound.”

She found the buttons of his shirt with considerably more impatience than she’d intended, fingers working while he kissed her jaw, her neck, the soft place beneath her ear that made her fingers stall completely. He made a low, satisfied sound when he found it and returned to it with clear purpose.

“Malfoy—”

“I’ve been waiting over a year,” he said into her neck, unhurried. “You’ll manage.”

She got his shirt open. He shrugged it off without looking at it. She put her hands on his chest and he went still for a moment, letting her, watching her face with that quiet attention she was rapidly becoming undone by.

“You can look,” he said, and his voice had changed — low, warm, the cultivated composure thinning into something much more honest.

She did look. He was pale and lean and there were old scars she recognised and newer ones she didn’t, and she pressed her palm flat against his sternum and felt his heartbeat, faster than his expression gave away.

“You’re nervous,” she said.

“I’m not nervous,” he said immediately.

“Your heart—”

“I am,” he said, after a pause, with complete dignity, “experiencing a significant emotional event.”

She laughed, surprised, and he smiled against her hair — that real smile, the one she was collecting — and then his hands found the hem of her jumper and he looked at her with the question plain in his face.

“Yes,” she said.

He took it off carefully, not quickly, and then looked at her in the same unhurried way, and she felt it everywhere — the quality of his attention, the patience of it, the sense that he was not simply present but entirely and specifically here.

“Gods,” he said, quietly. Mostly to himself. “You’re—”

He stopped.

“I’m what?” she asked.

He looked up at her from beneath his lashes, something almost rueful in it.

“Exactly as I imagined,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I imagined quite a lot.”

Heat moved through her fast and thorough.

“Tell me,” she said again.

He reached around her and unclasped her bra with one hand, which she noted professionally as impressive and personally as devastating, and pressed a kiss to her collarbone, then lower.

“I thought about this specifically,” he said against her skin, his breath warm, his hands at her waist now, holding her against him. “About taking my time. About having—” he paused, dragging his mouth slowly across her chest until he reached her nipple and closed over it, and she grabbed his shoulder hard, “—the space to do this properly.”

“You thought about this,” she managed.

“Frequently,” he said. “In clinical detail.” He kissed across to the other side with appalling patience, and she felt the vibration of it when he spoke. “You have no idea how many times I sat in that examination room listening to you tell me to keep my wounds dry and thought about taking your hair down.”

“That is deeply unprofessional,” she said, not sounding remotely like she meant it.

“Absolutely,” he agreed, and looked up at her with grey eyes gone dark. “Are you going to report me?”

“Shut up,” she said, pulling him back up by the jaw, and he kissed her with a low laugh she swallowed greedily.

They moved to the bed. He laid her back against the pillows and knelt over her, looking down, and the expression on his face was the most unguarded she had ever seen it — want and something more complicated than want, something older and more carefully carried.

“You’re still looking,” she said.

“I’m still looking,” he confirmed, entirely unashamed. He traced a slow line down her sternum with one finger, watching his own hand. “I spent a year writing letters I didn’t think you’d ever read. Trying to explain something I barely had language for.” His hand stopped at her waist. “I’m making up for lost time.”

She pulled him down to her.

He worked her out of the rest of her clothes with the same infuriating patience, hands moving carefully, mouth following in a way that made her grip the sheets. He kissed her hip and the inside of her knee and the back of her thigh, mapping her out with unhurried thoroughness, occasionally stopping to appreciate something that made her say his name in a voice she didn’t fully recognise as her own.

“Draco,” she said. His name in her mouth instead of his surname. He stilled for a moment, and when she looked down at him his expression was undone in a way that made her feel powerful and unsteady in equal measure.

“Say it again,” he said, quiet and raw.

“Draco.”

He pressed a long kiss to the inside of her thigh and looked up at her. “You have no idea what you do to me,” he said.

She reached for him.

He moved up her body and settled over her, holding his weight on one arm, and looked at her face. His hair was dishevelled now. His composure was nearly gone, just the structure of it remaining, and underneath was something she had been trying to read for two years and was only now getting the full translation of.

“I’ve got you,” he said. Softly. Like it meant several things at once.

“I know,” she said.

He moved and she stopped thinking in sentences.

He kept his face close to hers, which was not something she had expected — she had expected him to be contained, even now — but he wasn’t, or he had decided not to be. He murmured things into her hair, against her temple, low and continuous, a private commentary she had to concentrate to catch.

You’re extraordinary. I’ve thought about you every day for over a year. You feel exactly — Merlin, Hermione, you feel—

Her name. Her actual name, not Granger, which she had never noticed she wanted until she had it.

She said his name again and he responded to it immediately, the rhythm shifting, and she understood that it affected him the same way — that they had been Mr Malfoy and Healer Granger for so long that first names here were a specific intimacy, something earned, something that meant we have crossed into different territory and there is no going back.

She did not want to go back.

She held onto him and he held onto her and at some point he said, low and intent against her ear, “Tell me what you want,” and she told him, which she wouldn’t have predicted she could do so easily except that it turned out he made it easy — the way he responded when she did, the immediate focused attention, the low sound of approval that moved through her like a struck chord.

“That’s it,” he said, quiet and certain, and the praise undid her in a specific way she hadn’t known about herself until now, like something clicking into alignment. “That’s exactly it. You’re so—”

She stopped hearing the words individually. She felt them.

Afterwards, she was aware of her own heartbeat first, then his, then the dark ceiling above her, then his arm pulling her against his side with quiet certainty. She went, because there was nowhere else she had any interest in being.

His hand moved slowly through her hair in the dark. Not impatiently. Not toward anything. Just the motion of someone who has wanted to do something for a long time and is simply, finally, doing it.

“You know,” he said eventually, to the ceiling, “I think about the sandwich frequently.”

She pressed her face into his shoulder.

“The sandwich,” she said.

“The sandwich,” he confirmed. “You were eating a very undignified lunch and you looked up at me and said you almost died and I thought—” He stopped. “I thought, there she is.”

The ache in her chest was warm and specific and not unpleasant at all.

“I was startled,” she said. “You had just woken up.”

“You had crumbs on your robes,” he said fondly.

“I was eating lunch.”

“At my deathbed.”

“I maintain that was professional.”

He made a sound she had come to understand as fond disagreement expressed with maximum efficiency.

“Twenty-one months,” he said, after a moment.

“Yes,” she said.

A pause. His hand still in her hair.

“I can work with that.”

She pressed her smile into his shoulder where he couldn’t see it.

He probably knew anyway.

Outside, Boston carried on in its cold, indifferent, quietly beautiful way. Letters on her desk. His coat on the chair. Two cups going cold in the living room.

A year and eleven months, she thought.

It was, all things considered, nothing at all.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

She arrived in London on the twenty-third of December.

Harry and Ron were already at King’s Cross before her train had even pulled in, which she would later cite as evidence of their complete inability to behave normally under any circumstance whatsoever. Harry was wearing a Christmas jumper that appeared to light up intermittently, and Ron was holding a biscuit the size of a dinner plate.

Hermione stepped onto the platform and let them pull her into something that was more noise than hug and significantly less dignified than she might have preferred.

“You look different,” Ron said, pulling back to examine her properly.

“I’ve been away for a while,” she replied.

“No,” he said, narrowing his eyes slightly. “Different different.” He glanced at Harry. “She looks different.”

“She looks happy,” Harry said simply. Then he smiled at her in that quiet way of his that had always made her feel seen in the most inconvenient possible manner.

Hermione rolled her eyes automatically.

She did not argue.

They took her luggage and she allowed it, and they walked through the station and out into the damp grey December air of London, and Hermione thought — as she had thought while getting off the plane, while going through customs, while watching the familiar countryside blur past the train window and slowly become city — that she was home.

She went to Malfoy’s the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

He opened the door before she knocked, which she chose to interpret as coincidence rather than evidence he had been standing by the window waiting for her like a deeply repressed Victorian heroine.

He looked exactly as he always did. Which was to say unmistakably and infuriatingly like himself — pale, tall, dressed entirely in black, his hair slightly untidy in a way that looked deliberate even when it probably wasn’t. His expression was composed in that specific manner that had stopped fooling her somewhere around Boston. Possibly earlier.

He looked at her for a moment.

“You came,” he said.

“I said I would.”

“You did,” he agreed quietly, stepping aside to let her in.

She crossed the threshold and the door shut behind her. The house felt different from the last time she had been there. Warmer. There was a fire burning somewhere further inside, actual warmth threaded through the expensive architecture rather than the careful chill she remembered. It felt lived in now.

She turned back towards him.

He was still watching her.

“I am in love with you,” she said.

“I know.”

“I have several things to say about it.”

“I assumed you would.”

“Not right now,” she clarified.

His head tilted slightly, the faintest movement. Curious. Patient.

Hermione set her bag down beside the wall, crossed the hallway, and kissed him.

His hands came up to her face immediately, calm and certain, like this was not a beginning but a continuation of something already established between them. Which, she supposed, it was.

They stayed there for a while, quiet in the hallway.

“I had Nott and Zabini over,” he said eventually against her temple.

“Tell me there’s a plan to remove them at some point,” she murmured.

“They’ll leave eventually,” he said. “Once they feel they’ve annoyed me sufficiently. Which generally takes—”

“Granger!” Nott’s voice echoed from somewhere deeper in the house. “Is that you? I’ve been here for an hour being subjected to absolutely nothing.”

Malfoy closed his eyes briefly and exhaled through his nose with remarkable restraint.

“—less time than intended,” he finished.

Hermione laughed and pressed her face briefly against his shoulder. He held her there with easy familiarity, like this, too, had quietly become habit. Something known. Something theirs.

“Come on, then,” she said.

She took his hand and they walked together into the sitting room, where Zabini was already halfway through a drink and Nott looked moments away from saying something entirely intolerable.

Outside the windows, London had dissolved fully into December dark. Inside, the fire burned warm and gold across the room, and Draco’s hand remained loosely wrapped around hers with the sort of casual certainty that still startled her sometimes.

Something with shape.

Something worth returning for.

She had spent years mending him.

He had spent years finding his way back to her.

The waiting game, it turned out, had always been leading them here.

They had simply taken the scenic route.