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Chapter Text

Hermione had read a book once – back when she still read for pleasure – about an old woman who remembered two separate and conflicting accounts of her own life. The narrator had made a decision in her youth, one single decision that would shape the years and decades to come, and two paths had diverged in that moment, blossomed into whole separate lives with friends and children and careers all their own. In her old age the woman remembered them both, with great confusion and distress.

It had been a sad book, and a hopeful one.

Hermione had been thinking about her parents when she first picked it up, about the two separate lives that existed in their memories – though of course the one set, the real set, was forever locked away from them. They were happy in Australia, she had made sure of that, but the life they were living was not their own.

She had thought about this book often in the early years after the war. There had seemed to be so much time back then, so much time for grieving, so much time for thinking. This was before Harry and Ginny had left, of course, before Arthur’s illness and Molly’s deep, debilitating grief.

It was odd that when Hermione thought of it now – in the dark and quiet moments when she woke in the night with her heart pounding and Ron’s arm like a weight over her chest, the small, clear moments that filled her with a terror she did not understand – she thought of her own life.

There was the life she had planned: the degree in international law, the internship at the ministry, the hours and years of study and work. In that life she had been going to change the world, she was sure. There had been languages to learn and spells to master and books to read. In that life she would have loved reading them.

And there was the life she was living: her marriage to Ron, the little house she kept for him with the herb garden out back and the tiny veranda. The empty nursery. Sunday dinners with Molly, late evenings helping balance accounts for the joke shop. Weekdays at the Ministry yes, but only in the smallest, sleepiest department: the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office. A small life. A cozy life. A life that filled her with an overwhelming joy, except when it didn’t. Except for those brief, strange moments where it didn’t.

Try as she might in those moments, Hermione could not see how her two lives had diverged. How that had become this. She could not reconcile the girl she remembered with the woman she had become. Some nights she woke up feeling as if the room, the house, the world had filled with water while she slept. As if she had been drowning without knowing it, drowning for years now, and if she could just break free, if she could just reach the surface…

Tonight was one of those nights.

Hermione had struggled free of Ron’s embrace before she was truly awake, came to herself halfway across the room. Where was she going? She staggered to the window and threw it open, choked down deep, ragged breaths of the night air.

“Something’s wrong,” she whispered.

“Hermione.” Ron’s voice was thick with sleep. “Come back to bed, love.”

There was fog in the garden. The cool air on her damp skin was rejuvenating. “Something’s wrong,” she said, loudly this time. Where had all this fog come from? What was on the other side of it?

“Hey.”

A hand on her back. Ron’s hand. She leaned into it from force of habit, but it felt too hot. Too soft. She wanted the slap of the night air, the chill of the rough boards under her feet.

“Come on,” he said.

He sounded so calm, so confident. Hermione let him lead her down to the kitchen, sat obediently at the table while he fussed over the stove. She could not think. Ron’s broad, freckled back was to her. They had been married seven years now and she knew every inch of him, had spent actual hours of her life drinking in the sight of those freckles. Her husband was a beautiful man.
Watching him now she felt the familiar pull, the helplessness with which she stared, and panicked.

“This is all wrong,” she said as he turned towards her again. She was not sure what she meant by “this,” but was somehow certain that Ron did know.

“Get this down you,” he said, and put a glass in front of her.

Warm, honeyed milk. It was what he always made, when she got like this. Hermione took it uncertainly. It was always too sweet. She had never cared for the taste of honey, but Ron was so often right about what she needed. It always helped. It always calmed her down. Maybe, once she had calmed down, she would be able to fight her way up to the surface of her own thoughts. Ron would help her.

Hermione drank her milk.

Her breathing slowed. The fear faded. She looked over the rim of the glass at her husband, feeling embarrassed. Ron was smiling. Helplessly, feeling a warm glow rise up inside her, Hermione smiled back.

“Alright?” he asked.

It was like someone had plucked a string that ran down the length of her spine; the whole of Hermione’s body reverberated, tuning itself to the sound of that beautiful voice. She had to close her eyes for a moment. And then his arms were around her, and they were again the arms of the man she loved: safe and strong and warm.

“Alright,” Hermione told him. “Take me back upstairs?”

She knew what would happen next. He would lead her up to their small room, their narrow bed. He would make sleepy, gentle love to her on top of the covers. Afterwards while he slept she would lie with one hand on her naked belly and look at him: his beloved face, his big, square hands. She would be filled, as she was now, with so much love that there would be nothing else.

No books, no memories, no questions.

Just a love so deep it was drowning her from the inside, and she could not understand why she had been afraid.

Chapter Text

When we suffer a traumatic brain injury – the kind that renders us a shadow of our former selves, cuts us off from our ability to experience and connect and express – it is sometimes possible, eventually, for our minds to rewire themselves. This is a slow process, and an unpredictable one. Neurons fire into the unmapped tangle around the damage, struggling to find one another, to connect. To form new, circuitous routes through the darkness, secret pathways of cognition.

Amidst this creeping growth the dead zones stagnate, crumble into dust and disrepair, like deserts in the jungle of our thoughts. If we were to superimpose one map on top of the other, new over old, healed atop undamaged, it might not be obvious we were looking at the same landscape.

There are things that can be done to us that change the shape of our minds forever.

There was fresh, clean air on Hermione’s face when she opened her eyes the next morning. Hermione took a little breath of it like a sip of cold water and rolled her head to the side, stretching the stiff muscles in her neck. She had been up in the night again, she remembered. That was why the window was open. And Ron had helped her, as he always did.

At the thought of her husband Hermione braced herself for the wave of affection she knew would follow, would sweep her away from her own thoughts. He had been so kind. She remembered the concern on his face, the little furrow that had appeared between his eyebrows. She had been too upset last night to notice, but now, remembering, it worried her. She rolled to look at him.

Ron’s face was slack in sleep. As usual Hermione had to struggle not to let the beauty of that face overwhelm her. Sometimes – and this was always most pronounced directly after one of her nighttime panic attacks – it was like staring into the sun. She forced herself to focus on the pieces, rather than the whole. A strong chin. Broad cheekbones under that smattering of youthful freckles. His ears.

Focus.

She brought her attention slowly, carefully, up to his forehead and breathed a sigh of relief. The furrow between his eyebrows was gone, smoothed over in the night. She had not permanently marred his face with worry. Without taking her eyes from that spot, Hermione eased backwards out of the bed. There was a trick to it, she had learned. She wanted nothing more than to press her lips to his forehead, to breathe in the fresh-grass smell of him. To stretch her body alongside his and kiss him awake. But he needed his sleep. If she loved him – and Hermione really loved him – she would let him sleep.

The open window helped. Hermione held her breath until she was near enough to look out over the back garden, still thick with fog, and take in another silent gulp of fresh air. Then she eased the window shut to keep out the damp, tiptoed out of the little bedroom and closed the door behind her.

Exhaled softly.

It was a little easier when she couldn’t see or smell him. Hermione stretched again, focusing on the tightness of her muscles and the way the wooden floor felt beneath her feet, the tickle of hair down her back. That got her another five steps down the hallway and into the shower, where the stinging cold of the water gave her yet another hold on reality. By the time she had finished and dressed herself, coaxed her thick frizz into curls, Hermione had cleared just enough space around the edges of her mind that she could think again, just a little.

That was how she lived now, how she had learned to live in the years since her marriage. Hermione’s love for Ron had taken over large parts of her mind, but they were not so much deserts as great ravines. The paths she’d formed along their verges were precarious; one wrong step, one moment of inattention and down she would slide. All roads led to Ron.

It was Sunday, she thought now. She would have to go round the shops for bread. Perhaps for a packet of sausages as well, for a late breakfast. And that meant she wouldn’t be home to see him come down the stairs. He would be wearing only his joggers, she knew, skin still damp from his shower, his broad forearms…

No.

Hermione kept to the path. Ron didn’t like it when she got like this.

“I want you to be happy,” he’d said after their honeymoon. “You can’t be happy if you only ever think about me, can you? I want you to still want stuff.”

There had been a small part of Hermione that had wanted, just then, to roll her eyes. In the year before their wedding they had fought (it seemed ridiculous now) nearly constantly about the things Hermione wanted. To study abroad, for one. To postpone marriage for another.

“We’re eighteen, Ron,” she had told him. “We have our whole lives ahead of us. Whole careers. You know I love you, but…”

“But not enough,” he had answered.

And perhaps he had been right, Hermione thought as she put the kettle on now, seven years after that argument. She had denied it furiously at the time, but he had been right about everything else. Marriage, certainly. And school.

Hermione had lasted three months at the little French university she had attended during their briefly broken engagement. And then had come Ron’s surprise visit, and the news about Arthur. They had made lunch together in her little dorm room and she remembered the exact moment she had realized how right he was about all of it. The moment that first deep ravine had formed and she had fallen headlong to the bottom.

He had brought her a cup of tea and they’d sat on her bed with their backs against the wall, just sat in perfect silence as she drank it. And then Ron had taken her hand. She had looked down at their fingers twined together, his skin pale against hers, and she had seen for what felt like the first time how beautiful his hands were. How perfect. It had brought tears to her eyes. The thought of staying in France while he left for England had made those tears streak down her face and drip into her empty mug. Ron had touched her face, looking stricken.

“I want to come home,” she had begged him. “Please take me home.”

So perhaps Hermione had not loved him enough, in the early days. And if he had been right that she’d wanted too much before, he was probably right about her wanting too little now.

That conversation had been the beginning of her long, slow climb up to the free edges of her mind. To keep the worry in his eyes at bay, Hermione had gotten herself a job. “Nothing too strenuous,” she’d told Kingsley Shacklebolt. He’d come to personally oversee her interview. “Nothing that involves a lot of research. I just want to keep busy and enjoy my life.” It had been a herculean effort, leaving the house to speak with him. She had wept all the way up the street, bent forward as if fighting a tremendous wind that tried to push her back home, back to Ron.

“Well of course Arthur’s department is scrambling a bit,” Kingsley said. “But I can’t think you’d be interested in that. It’s pretty dull work.”
“Perfect,” Hermione had said.

And it was. Even with the majority of her brain busy loving Ron, Hermione could run the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office with her eyes closed. Mostly she spent her time there setting aside little anecdotes to share with Ron over supper, perfectly crafted to show him how happy she was. How fulfilled.

He wanted her to have independence, so independence she would have. Hermione focused all the free edges of her formidable intellect on figuring out what Ron might want her to want.

And if what she really wanted was to sit beside him all day and just look at the perfect components of his face, to listen to the perfect cadence of his voice and take his perfect body so deeply into her own that they would become one person…well. That wasn’t important, was it?

Hermione finished her tea and went out to the shops.

Fighting the impulse to simply run to the nearest corner store (today was indeed particularly bad in the “too much love” arena) she apparated to Diagon Alley. She would buy herself something nice. Ron didn’t like her money to go towards the house; he liked to take care of them both, to provide for them. Her money (and there wasn’t much of it – an inexperienced witch did not start out at a high salary) was for spoiling herself.

Ron liked it best when she bought books, of course. This was the one thing Hermione could not quite bring herself to indulge. It bothered her how difficult it was to read them now. They sat on the bedside table gathering dust while she watched the way Ron’s eyelashes brushed the freckles on his cheeks. No. Hermione shook her head as she passed Flourish and Blotts. No books today.

There was a little open-air market on Sundays, just adjacent to Knockturn Alley. Hermione strolled through it and picked up the things she needed for brunch, forcing herself not to rush, to nod and smile and exchange pleasantries with the people she met. You didn’t really need to pay attention to what people were saying, she’d learned. If you just nodded and smiled and agreed with them, they usually went away quite happy. Hermione nodded and smiled her way through the crowd, thinking about how to spoil herself.

Sweets were no good – he knew she wasn’t really fond of them. She didn’t need a new wand or an owl. Hermione had passed Madame Malkins when she reconsidered, turned on her heel and entered the stuffy little shop. Maybe a nice scarf would do the trick.

“Yes hello,” Hermione said absently to the busy little woman who hurried over to greet her. “I’m only looking. What are these?” She gestured somewhat randomly with her arm, which happened to sweep over a clear glass display case. This was a mistake. The short woman puffed herself up excitedly and began to explain about the assortment of expensive jewellery inside.

Something, something, goblin made. Detection charms for malevolent spells and potions? Fleur had worn a goblin made tiara to her wedding with Bill. Hermione and Ron had danced that day – she could remember the feel of his hand on the small of her back…

Someone else was speaking to her now. Hermione nodded and smiled as she pretended to inspect the earring that had been pressed into her hand. Ron’s palms had been sweating, only slightly. If she closed her eyes she could probably feel the heat of them right now, except that she was in a shop. She was being spoken to.

“I agree completely,” Hermione told the second person. She smiled again, trying to show more teeth this time. Ron’s hair had been too long at the wedding. It had fallen into his eyes and she wanted to go back in time, wanted to brush it away just to touch his face.

A hand inserted itself between Hermione’s eyes and the goblin-made earring. It was a pale hand, slender and well-manicured. Elegant. One of the long fingers came up to meet the thumb and…

Snap!

Jolted from her reverie, Hermione looked up at the person who had so rudely snapped his elegant fingers under her nose.

“You agree completely that the recent bans on House Elf immigration are a necessary precaution?” Draco Malfoy asked. He was taller than she remembered, and his own hair – no longer slicked harshly back – fell into his eyes as he stared down at her. Not the soft brown eyes she’d been thinking of: these were sharp and grey. “Because I was just trying to provoke you, Granger. What’s happened to your face?”

Hermione put her free hand up to her cheek. It felt normal enough to her. “I’m…hello,” she said uncertainly.

“Yes, hello,” Malfoy said. He was looking at her as if she was mad. “You’ve said that eight times now. If it’s all the same to you, you could stop smiling like you’re about to go for my jugular.”

Hermione let the smile drop. Too many teeth that time. She’d have to practice in front of the mirror again.

Malfoy was still talking and she struggled to focus. This was something she could tell Ron, she realized. None of them had seen Malfoy in years. He’d been at school with her for those three months – she had been so startled at seeing his pinched, unhappy face in the hallways. During the first week of classes he had appeared surreally in the doorway of her room, had expressed sincere regret for, as he’d put it, “the entirety of my life up to this point,” and then bowed to her and fled.

That had been the beginning of one of the strangest periods of Hermione’s life, and one that she had put entirely out of her head until this moment.

“Aren’t you in France?” she interrupted him now.

Those grey eyes, which had been narrowed in suspicion, were beginning to go a bit wide. “I was,” he said slowly. “I have my degree now. I’ve been offered a job at the ministry.”

Something in Hermione – something deep and buried and angry – twitched as she heard this. Malfoy had gone to her school. He was taking her job. He was living her life. But as quickly as the feeling surfaced, it was gone. He could have all those things if he wanted them: Hermione didn’t.

“Lovely,” she said. His eyes went even wider. Hermione nodded encouragingly, smiled for good measure. “It’s lovely to see you again.”

Her last impression, as she paid for the pretty silver earrings, was of a set jaw and an unsmiling, almost angry, mouth. But Hermione did not think of Malfoy for long. She stood outside Madame Malkins and watched her reflection in the window as she put the earrings on, pulled her hair into a neat knot. Ron liked to see the back of her neck. Her cheeks were flushed, that was good. The filigreed silver twinkled just below her jaw. Good. She had an anecdote ready. Hermione smoothed her hands down the front of her robes, trying to stop them shaking.

As she turned to apparate she caught a final flash of silver from the window. Not the earrings this time, but Malfoy’s eyes. Watching her.

Molly was at the house already. Hermione knew the second she opened the door – her mother-in-law’s cleaning charms smelled like lemon and sunshine, a touch Hermione never seemed able to replicate.

“Hermione dear!” the older woman cried as she bustled over. “Ron and I were just thinking about lunch.” She pulled Hermione into a soft, fragrant hug. “Lovely to see you.”

Hermione let her head rest on Molly’s shoulder for a moment. She didn’t say, weren’t we seeing you for dinner? As much as she’d been looking forward to the afternoon with Ron, she could not begrudge the extra visit. Sundays were difficult for Molly.

“How was St. Mungo’s?” she asked, gently extricating herself and waving her wand at the shopping, which sailed across to the counter.

Molly shook her head. “Worse,” she said. “It’s a struggle to speak now, and he doesn’t understand. He can’t…” she broke off, shook the tears from her eyes and turned briskly to the stove. “But let’s see about these sausages, shall we? And I’ve got your favourite apples for the pie tonight, Hermione.”

And then she was busy at the stove and it didn’t matter because Ron had come in.

Hermione forgot all her plans to appear independent. She fairly flew across the room and into his arms, the smile she had worked so hard to display in Madame Malkin’s spreading naturally across her face.

“Hi love,” Ron said into her ear. He squeezed her softly, pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “You smell like the fog.”

She burrowed her face into the collar of his shirt. “You smell incredible,” she said.

“Easy now,” he laughed. “Come on, let me look at you. Where did you get to this morning?”

Hermione allowed her husband to extricate himself from their embrace, settled for taking his hand and tangling their fingers together as he looked her up and down.
“Diagon Alley,” she said. “I wanted to do some reading about House Elf immigration laws, but Flourish and Blotts didn’t have the book I needed.” The lie did not trouble her. It was worth it to see Ron’s smile. “So I went to Madame Malkin’s,” she continued, “and bought myself something. Can you tell what it was?” She let go of his hand with a little pang of grief, spun slowly around for him.

“Not new robes,” he said. “Mum, come and help me! What’s Hermione wearing that’s new?”

Molly saw it immediately. “My love, are those goblin wrought?” she asked, putting her hand out to touch the earrings.

“They are,” Hermione said. “Ron’s been insisting I treat myself to something, and these were so lovely. And they detect malevolent spells, apparently, so I can pretend they’ve a practical use.”

Ron made a noise from behind her.

Hermione was familiar with Ron’s noises. She knew how he sounded when he slept, when he ate, when he moved between her thighs at night. She knew joy and hope and anger. The noise that he made now was one of fear. But when she turned to look, his expression was carefully blank.

“What sort of spells?” he asked.

“Oh…” Hermione put a hand up to touch one of the earrings. It was delicate and cool against her fingers. “Latent hexes, poisoned food, that sort of thing. I should imagine most common potions and curses.”

He nodded tightly.

“Do you not like them?” she asked, concerned. “I know you said money wasn’t tight, but it’s alright if they’re too much. I could return them tomorrow.”

“You’ve got work tomorrow,” Ron reminded her. He reached out to take hold of the one Hermione was holding, tugged on it. She could feel her earlobe stretching. “It’s not the money,” he said. “I just don’t think the silver suits you. It’s a bit drab.”

Hermione bit her lip.

“Why don’t you let me buy you something a bit brighter?” Ron asked as his mother reached over to swat his arm. “Quit it, Mum.”

“What a thing to say to your wife!” Molly scolded. “I tell you, Hermione, he’s lucky you’re a more even tempered woman than me. I think they’re just lovely.”

But Hermione was already taking them off, shoving them deep into a pocket in her robes, trying not to cry. Ron’s eyes were on her. He wouldn’t like it if she cried.

“I saw Malfoy in Diagon Alley,” she said to distract them all, and to her great relief that topic lasted them through nearly to the other side of lunch.

Chapter Text

To Hermione’s annoyance, Malfoy was waiting for her at work the following day.

“I heard you were down here,” he said, eyes sweeping the tiny office. “I just didn’t believe it.”

Hermione had only just sat down, but she set aside her quill and sighed. She’d been looking forward to having a good long daydream this morning. Ron had still been sleeping when she left, but he’d be at the joke shop with George by now. She would bring him a sandwich at lunch, but hadn’t decided what sort. Roast beef or ham? She had made one of each this morning. Maybe she’d bring them both, let him decide in the moment?

She was startled from this pleasant reverie by a sharp pain beside her face.

“Ouch!” She stared up at Malfoy. Had he just flicked her ear?

He was smirking. “It’s impossible to get your attention these days, Granger. I said, what happened to your new earrings?”

Hermione put her hand up to touch the little blue stud in the ear he’d just flicked. It still stung a little. “Ron didn’t like them,” she said absently. The sharp jolt of anger was fading already. Who cared what Malfoy did, so long as he went away soon? “And it’s Weasley now, not Granger.”

The smirk faltered. “What, I don’t get violently hexed for laying my hand on your person? What does a man have to do to rile you up these days?”

Smiling and nodding was not the answer here. Hermione reluctantly turned what spare attention she had to the man in front of her. “Malfoy,” she said. “What do you want?”

“I’m with Control of Magical Creatures now,” he said. “I was told there’ll be the occasional liaison with your office. And then I found out it was your office and of course realized you must be using it as a stepping stone towards, I don’t know, toppling the government? Restoring the rights of the dispossessed? World domination? I thought I’d come and ask what your plan was so it didn’t interfere with mine.”

Hermione was truly irritated now. “I haven’t got a plan,” she told him. “I have a life. And it sounds like you’ve no reason at all to be down here. You’ve just come to raise trouble.”

“And to reminisce,” Malfoy said, he took hold of the second chair in the office (it had Hermione’s coat on it at the moment, and that was its prime function) and sat down smoothly. They were so close that their knees were almost touching. He was very close, and he smelled the way he had seven years ago: like parchment and very old libraries. “About the good old days,” he explained when she looked at him blankly. “Why did you leave France? I’ve wondered for years.” His voice was cool, polite, but Hermione could see a muscle clenching and unclenching in his jaw.

“I left to get married,” she said. All the warmth of the last seven years spilled out into her voice. She couldn’t help it. There should be trumpets behind that statement. It should be writ large against the sky.

Malfoy was not hearing trumpets. He looked as if she had said something horribly inappropriate, only he was too well-bred to call attention to it. She half expected him to hold a handkerchief delicately to his nose to protect himself from the stink of her happiness. His lip was just ever so slightly curled.

“You just vanished,” he said. “You didn’t drop your classes.” Then, in a lower voice, as if he could not help it, “You didn’t say goodbye.”

Hermione laughed. “None of that matters when you’re properly in love,” she told him.

And for a split second she saw something else on Malfoy’s face. Something under the scorn: it was hurt.

“Right, of course,” he said, standing swiftly. “Not a subject I know anything about.”

“Draco,” Hermione heard herself say. Feeling oddly off balance, she put out a hand as if to touch his robes (he was still so close) and then came to her senses and withdrew it. The conversation was making her temples pound. Surely Malfoy couldn’t have placed much weight on…what? A few conversations nearly eight years ago? It all seemed very vague now, and very far away. “I’m sorry,” she said uncertainly. “If I gave you the wrong idea at some point…”

“Please,” Malfoy said, and his voice was smooth again, so smooth she wondered if she had imagined his expression. “I won’t embarrass you further. My belated congratulations, Granger. Weasley.”

And then he turned on his heel and left her office.

It smelled like him for hours. Hermione went home early with a headache.

But Malfoy did not stop coming. She ran into him again and again over the next few weeks, and every time he fought to get her attention, worried and bullied and jostled her out of her daydreams. He did not try to reminisce again (for which Hermione was grateful; she felt oddly reluctant to think too deeply about their brief friendship). Instead he mostly bent her ear to the plight of magical creatures everywhere. Hermione hated this too.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked in the middle of a very long diatribe about forest management. “Draco, the centaurs are fine. Why should we worry about a few new acres of farmland? I’m making a roast for dinner tonight.” Roasts were so difficult. They had to stay in the oven so long, which meant that you had to keep remembering about them. Hermione dried them right out every time, and Ron was always disappointed. But this time she was going to get it right.

She wandered back to her office, ignoring the gobsmacked look on his face.

After that it only got worse. Hermione began to walk in the other direction every time she saw him coming, which meant that she was having to pay far more attention to people’s faces than she wanted to just to stop him surprising her all the time. This was the reason behind the headache that seemed to sit constantly behind her eyes lately, she thought.

“How’s Potter these days?” he asked her one morning when he’d cornered her in the cafeteria. It had been going on for a month at this point.

“He’s fine,” Hermione said. She was not bothering to smile now. “We spoke with him at Christmas I think. He and Ginny are having another baby.” She ignored the pang of sadness at the thought. This was the only consistent point on which she and Ron disagreed. She wanted more than anything to carry his child, to fill the tiny house with small, red-haired babies with his eyes. Ron was not ready.

“It’s July,” Malfoy said.

“Sorry?”

Malfoy looked at her like she was mad. “It’s July,” he said again. “Christmas was seven months ago.”

“Then I suppose they’ve had it by now,” Hermione said irritably. “We’ll have sent a card I’m sure.”

Malfoy just…walked off. This was unusual; he did not often leave their conversations without saying something provocative.

The reason for his quick exit was immediately apparent when Hermione got home.

“What the hell, Hermione?” Ron said when she walked through the door. No prelude of course; they’d always launched straight into their fights.

But fights weren’t supposed to happen anymore, Hermione thought. She tried not to panic. “What’s wrong?”

Ron flung down the newspaper he’d been pretending to read. His face was red. “What’s wrong?” he repeated. “That’s a laugh. I’ve only had Malfoy in at the shop, haven’t I?”

“Oh?” she said, baffled. “Draco was there?”

“Yeah,” Ron said. “Draco. Only wanted to tell me a few things about my wife he wasn’t sure I was aware of, didn’t he?”

Hermione’s whole body went ice cold. “No,” she said automatically. “He wouldn’t…” She was not sure what was making her so frightened.

“He would,” Ron said flatly. “Poncy little fucker. Is any of it true?”

“I…” Hermione said. She did not know what to say. Had Draco told him about their late-night study sessions in France? Surely even Draco could not make that too scandalous. But Ron, she knew, was an easy mark for jealousy. “That was all a long time ago,” she said uncertainly.

Ron wrinkled his nose in confusion. “What are you on about? He said it’s been all the last month.”

Hermione opened her mouth to furiously deny this, then shut it with a snap. “Tell me exactly what he said,” she said at last.

Ron shook his head angrily. “Says you’re distracted and secretly miserable at work,” he told her. “That you don’t care about anything anymore, and what the hell am I playing at, not getting you looked at. Like there’s something…” he broke off, and Hermione saw fear on his face for a split second, before anger smothered it again. “Like there’s something wrong with you,” he finished furiously.

Hermione reacted to that fear without needing to think. “What nonsense,” she said briskly. “Of course there’s nothing wrong with me. What a thing to say to you.”

Ron’s posture relaxed. “That’s what I told him,” he said. “And then George threw him out.”

“Good,” Hermione said. Her heart was still beating rather quickly.

“He talked like you were friends or something,” Ron said now, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “What’s that all about?”

Hermione had a split second image of Malfoy sitting in a hideous squashy armchair. She’d found it in a charity shop, she remembered now. It was a dusty sort of pink, that chair, and Malfoy – Draco. Draco was sitting in it with his feet tucked up and under him, graceful hands wrapped around a mug of wine. He was speaking very quietly. His eyes were soft and warm and relaxed and looking at him Hermione felt a furtive sort of excitement. It was building between them, slow and inevitable.

And none of that mattered. None of it was real. Hermione had loved Ron and then she had, for a brief period of foolish stubbornness, run away to university. And then she had loved him again, had come back to him, and nothing outside of that was real. It did not bear thinking about. Her head ached.

“He talks to me at work a lot,” she got out between waves of pain. “I think he wants to have a friendly rival. Like we were in Hogwarts, but with all the mudbloods and punching taken out.”

Ron cracked a smile. Finally.

“Now would you come over here and kiss me?” Hermione asked. She knew his touch would soothe her head. And she needed that smile closer, needed it right up against her skin.

But kissing did nothing to calm her nerves. She went to bed that night with a restless, shaky feeling in her chest that she could not identify.

It was still there the next morning. It was not until Hermione pulled on her cloak and saw with some surprise that her hands were shaking that she recognized the feeling. It was anger.

This realization stopped her in her tracks. She hadn’t been angry in years – the route to that emotion had been obliterated by the great landslide of her love for Ron. Throughout their marriage she had had no reason to find a new path to it. And now, having stumbled upon one quite by accident…

Her hands would not stop shaking.

She did not visit Ron at lunch. She did not daydream about his freckles, or picture the chubby hands of their future children. All day she thought only of Malfoy (not Draco, not that soft-eyed boy in an old armchair), and the sound the palm of her hand would make against his face.

At the end of the day she had her opportunity. He was alone in the lift and Hermione caught it just at the last second with her foot between the doors, slipped in like a stormcloud. Malfoy did not have the grace to look alarmed. Not even when, a moment later, she had whipped out her wand and fired a bolt of red light at the control panel. It wasn’t a proper spell, just directed rage, but it did the trick. The lift shuddered and screeched to a halt.

“If you wanted to get me alone,” Malfoy drawled, “you just had to ask.”

Hermione did not have time to play. She fired off another bolt of magic at his feet, watched with satisfaction as he leapt back. So what if she couldn’t think of any real spells at the moment?

“How dare you?” she asked.

“Be more specific,” he told her. “Though by all means carry on with the display.”

Hermione thought about throwing her wand at him. “How dare you speak to Ron?” she asked instead.

Malfoy seemed quite unperturbed. “Interesting,” he said. “I’ve been pushing you for weeks and this is the thing that fires you up? Would it bother you to know I wrote to Potter as well?”

“I don’t care about Harry,” Hermione said fiercely.

“I think you really mean that,” Draco said. He sounded appalled.

“Of course I really mean it,” she said furiously. “I don’t care about Harry or centaurs or werewolves or you. I care about my husband and my home. What can I do to make you understand that and leave me be? How can I make you hear me?”

“I’m hearing you,” Malfoy said. “I just don’t think you’re hearing yourself.”

Hermione threw her arms out and shoved Malfoy hard against the side of the lift. He hit it with a very satisfying thump, but bounced a little. So she strode forward put her hands on his shoulders, shoved again so that he went against the wall and stayed there. It was a terrible idea, she knew that immediately. The closeness of their faces made her think…no.

She put her head in her hands and stepped back.

“Granger.” Malfoy’s voice was soft. “I’ve asked around.” He laughed shortly. “I’ve nearly had myself arrested, I’ve asked around so much. Nobody seems to think there’s anything wrong with you. They all say you’re just happy now.”

Hermione could feel herself beginning to panic. He was too close. The walls were too close. This had been a mistake. She needed to get home to Ron, needed to get away from the smell of Malfoy, the intensity of him. Something was wrong. She closed her eyes.

“Something is wrong,” Malfoy said. He took hold of her shoulders now, which was not an improvement. Hermione could not remember the last time any man other than Ron had touched her like this, except that she could. It had been Draco. He had taken her by the shoulders and pressed her back against the wall of her bedroom seven years ago, just as firmly as she had done to him a moment ago. Ron was always so gentle. Draco’s fingers bit into her skin. They would leave bruises. They had left bruises then, and she had liked it.

She could not think about this. It was breaking her skull open to think about it.

“Granger,” Malfoy was saying now. “Listen to me. Come on. Hermione.” He shook her a little, but she did not open her eyes. “Just listen to me for a second. This is not you. The girl I knew would not be caught dead locked up in that department downstairs, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be happy playing housewife. Something has happened to you.”

This was so like the thoughts she had during her panic attacks that Hermione felt a little sick. “Let go of me,” she whispered. “That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?” Malfoy said. His grip on her shoulders did not ease up. “None of this makes sense. You don’t talk to any of your old friends, including Potter somehow, you don’t care about your work, you let me shove you around, which is frankly unsettling as hell. You can’t focus on a conversation for more than half a second. Hermione!” Seeing that her attention had begun to wander he shook her again, hard this time.

“I want to go home,” Hermione whined. Her head hurt. Everything about this was wrong – the way Malfoy touched her, the feel of his breath on her face. The horrible familiarity of it. She needed to see Ron. And to do that she apparently had to convince Malfoy she hadn’t been…cursed with happiness? She squared her shoulders and met his eyes, tried to focus.

“Malfoy, there’s no conspiracy here. If I was different at Hogwarts it’s because I was constantly fighting for my life. And if I was different in France – ” she saw and ignored his flinch “it’s because I was all at loose ends. Things are better now. I’m happy now. Why wouldn’t I be more…more relaxed?”

“Fuck,” Malfoy said. He slumped forward, his forehead coming to rest against hers. Hermione closed her eyes again, feeling dizzy. He sighed. Stepped back. “Alright, answer me this: how do you calculate the runes for a protective circle on ground composed of more than one substrate?”

“What?”

“I was in arithmancy with you,” he said. “I hated it. But you could do runic computations in your sleep. This is an easy one. Tell me the answer and I’ll never bother you again.”

“I…” Hermione tried to focus on the problem. It was simple, he was right. But she couldn’t make sense of it.

“This isn’t happiness,” Malfoy insisted. “It’s not that you don’t want to think about things; it’s that you can’t. Someone has fucked with your brain, Granger.”

The runes for a protective circle, Hermione thought. She’d cast them a hundred times during the war. But when she tried to think back now all she could remember was how thin Ron had been, the colour of his blood when he’d splinched himself. How she’d stayed awake listening to his breathing in the night.

But was that true? Some small part of her mind insisted that it was not. She had been thinking of Horcruxes, during those sleepless nights. Horcruxes and how cold the nights were getting, how hungry they all were. Had she noticed Ron’s breathing at all, back then?

“I can’t remember,” Hermione whispered. “I can’t think.”

“Exactly,” Malfoy said. “That’s exactly right. And what else don’t you remember?” His eyes were hot. “I thought you just didn’t want to talk about it, but that’s never been your style. You don’t sweep things under the rug just because you regret them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. But he had left bruises on her. The perfect indentations of his fingers on her thighs, thumbs on the inside where he’d spread her open. They’d been there the day Ron had come to fetch her away, and she had been so ashamed, thinking of those bruises. Wondering how she had let another man touch her.

He had looked up at her while he did it. His eyes had been hot then too and his mouth had been cool, and it made her sick now, to think of it. “Please stop,” she said.

“You haven’t been imperiused or confounded,” Malfoy said, relentless. “I’ve cast a dozen finite incantatums at you just this week. Nobody’s modified your memories that I can tell. So we need to figure out what has happened.”

But this was too far. Hermione swallowed through her nausea and took out her wand, pointed it at the control panel. “Reparo,” she said. The elevator began to move again. “There is no we.” She told him now. “I remember everything. But I don’t want to talk about it. I never want to talk about it.”

He was quiet as they trundled up to the main floor. But as the doors opened he put out his hand and caught hold of her wrist again. His touch was cool and firm and made her head spin. She needed to get back to Ron.

Malfoy was shoving something into her hand. A piece of paper.

“Just take it,” he said. “In case you need help.”

Hermione put the piece of paper in her pocket. “Stay away from me,” she told Malfoy. And went home to her husband.

But she found, much to her dismay, that he had gotten into her head. It wasn’t that she couldn’t stop thinking about their encounter, exactly: it was more that she couldn’t think about it. And thanks to Malfoy, that bothered her.

“How are you doing that?” she asked Ron abruptly that evening. He was tinkering with something at the kitchen table. A prototype for the joke shop. It seemed to have a lot of mechanical legs and very little ability to use them. Hermione knew what it was – she was sure he had told her – but she did not seem to have retained the information. There did not seem to be room.

“Sorry, what?” he asked.

“How are you…how can you focus to do that?” she asked. His frown of confusion made her think guiltily of the little furrow between his eyebrows, but she went on. “It looks complicated,” she told him. “Sometimes, when I try to think about complicated things now, I just…I get distracted by how much I love you.”

Ron’s face broke into a grin. “Distracting, am I?” he asked.

Hermione tried and failed not to smile back. “I mean it,” she pressed. “I used to…I used to think about other things. Don’t you worry about that?”

His grin faded. He set aside the little device – it spun aimlessly on the spot – and got up to take her hands gently in his. “Are you worried?” he asked. “I thought you were happy.”

Hermione freed one hand to hold it up to his face. “I am,” she reassured him. “I’m so happy, Ron. I didn’t mean that.”

“You just worry too much,” Ron said. He pulled her close. The heat of him made Hermione’s heart pound. It was such a contrast to how she’d felt about Malfoy’s proximity – there was no sick twist to her stomach, no intense feeling of wrongness. Quite the opposite in fact. As Ron kissed her – softly at first, then insistently – Hermione tried to feel relieved at how good it felt to be touched by him.

“Is this alright?” he asked a few minutes later, pressing her down onto their mattress. “Do you like this?”

“Yes,” Hermione told him. “Yes, Ron. Please.”

But afterwards she lay awake. He had not answered her question, not really. And Malfoy…Malfoy…Malfoy was right. It took so much work and focus to simply continue existing on the edges of her overwhelming love that she had not been able to consider how strange it was that she should be this way. That love should be like a cavern in her mind into which her whole being had fallen. And every time she did begin to wonder – every time those edges grew ever so slightly wider, every time she felt a glimmer of hope and panic…

Hermione tried not to panic.

Partly, she thought, it was so nonsensical. After all, who would benefit from her feeling this way? It was a funny thing to do to two people, to curse them with wedded bliss.

Only…Ron’s bliss was different from hers, wasn’t it? It did not physically pain him to leave a room without her. He did his job (and did it so wonderfully, her mind hastened to add) without being driven to distraction by thoughts of her. He still had friends, still wanted to go round the pub, still followed Quidditch. He did not have to hold his breath in order to walk away from her.

Hermione held her breath.

She sat up in the rumpled bed, careful not to disturb her husband. She felt that she was circling something, but that whatever it was must be approached with the utmost caution. The way you might tiptoe along the edge of a cliff without looking into the abyss.

So the next things Hermione did she did without looking directly at them. As her hands went to the bedside table, gently eased open the drawer without making it creak, she thought about the way Ron’s broad mouth felt against her stomach, her neck. As she felt inside the drawer, as her fingers closed around a little box and drew it out, she thought about Ron’s laugh – the deep one she only heard when he was with George.

As she got to her feet and tiptoed out of the room she thought about the way he had looked that night on the run when he had left her and Harry. The undercurrent of guilt on his face. She thought about his face in the kitchen earlier that night; it was the same face.

She thought about that all the way to the kitchen, but she carefully did not ask herself, what does Ron have to feel guilty about? She did not ask herself anything, even when she stood in front of the tea cupboard. Even when she opened the tiny box she had taken from the bedside drawer, slipped on the goblin made earrings.

Hermione opened the tea cupboard.

Nothing happened.

Of course nothing happened.

What did Ron have to feel guilty about?

The honey was at the front. It was in a little glass jar. One of their neighbours kept bees, he’d told her once. They got a new jar every few months, but Hermione had never, not one time in seven years of marriage, seen Ron use it for anything other than the warm milk that so calmed her fears.

As soon as she touched it she knew. It was only the faintest of sounds – like a single note from a wind chime, but far away. As Hermione brought the jar closer the noise grew louder, still that delicate, pretty chiming. What useful little trinkets, these earrings were. Probably they were spelled so that no one else could hear them. Someone standing beside her might not know that this honey…

Hermione opened the jar.

The noise was deafening.

Maybe it was something Ron had brought home from the shop this week, she thought. Maybe he would put it in her tea one morning – but he never made her tea anymore, never made anything except that warm milk – and she would sprout feathers or turn blue. It smelled amazing. Like fresh cut grass, she thought.

Ignoring the cacophony from the earrings, Hermione seized a spoon from the sink and scraped at some of the crystalized honey on the lid. She licked the spoon.

And as the sweet grains dissolved on her tongue Hermione felt it well up inside her.

Love.

It filled all the nooks and crannies of her mind, left room for nothing else.

She was going to be sick.

Hermione put the lid back on the jar. She went to the sink and rinsed the little spoon. She clutched the edge of the counter and closed her eyes and tried to think.

Once she would have known what to do. There were methods to analyze these things – she should be able to separate the honey, work out what kind of potion was diluting it. Brew backwards to an antidote. But even if Hermione’s mind had been clear enough to retrieve any of the information she’d need to do all that, she had nowhere to do it. She pressed the back of one hand against her mouth to stifle a groan. There was no haunted lavatory in their tiny house for her to turn into a potions lab. No Snape to steal ingredients from.

No Harry and Ron to watch her back.

Hermione retched, spat bile into the sink as quietly as she could. If she was not quiet Ron would hear her. He would come down the stairs and he would take her in his arms and every fibre of Hermione’s being wanted that desperately.

She could not think.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, after all, to go upstairs and tuck her head under Ron’s chin. She could go to sleep and figure this all out in the morning.

The earrings were still chiming their secret alarm to her. She could not go upstairs.

Hermione ran the tap, stuck her head right under it to take a mouthful of the warm water, spat it out and then drank. She let the cold water run over her face, then her hair until she was drenched and spluttering.

Simple thoughts, she told herself. Clear and simple thoughts:

She had never loved anyone as much as she loved Ron. And:

Ron was poisoning her. And:

Her parents were in Australia and did not remember her. And:

Harry was in America and was not speaking to her. And:

Everyone else…

Hermione closed her eyes. Everyone else had watched her live this way since the war, had seen her trapped in this miasma of love and had not questioned it. Had not seen that she was still in here. Except…

Hermione laughed. It was far too loud. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stop the strangled, hysterical noise, but it was too late. Ron was a light sleeper – you had to be when you kept your wife on as tight a leash as he did. He would be awake now, would be coming down the stairs any moment.

She fought against the sickening joy that rose up inside her at the prospect of seeing his face, fished in her pocket for her wand. As if she could curse him. As if she could do anything other than throw herself in his arms. But there was something else in her pocket. A little piece of paper, folded very small.

Malfoy’s address.

Hermione crossed to the little kitchen hearth, trying very hard not to listen for Ron’s footsteps on the stairs. She would not be able to think of anything else if she heard him coming. The earrings helped. She was still holding the jar of honey, so they were relentless in her ears as she unfolded the scrap of paper.

There was a jar of floo powder on the mantle. She tossed a handful into the flames without giving herself time to think.

Malfoy had seen her. He had snapped his fingers and flicked her ear and shaken her awake. He had known she was still here. The thought of going to him now filled Hermione with an awful, queasy dread, but…everything she felt was a lie.

There was a sound from the stairs. She did not let herself consider what it might be. Just looked into the green fire, whispered the words, “Spinner’s End,” from the paper, and threw herself forward.

Chapter Text

“I think you’re probably my penance.”

Hermione put her quill down and used both hands to lift her hair away from the back of her neck, feeling the movement of air on her damp skin, and did not answer. It was too warm in the library – the cleaning staff had been on a group holiday somewhere in the tropics and had come back with new ideas about what an October afternoon in France could feel like. They were locked in an apparently vicious debate with the librarians, who maintained that the humidity was giving the books Ideas.

It was mostly giving Hermione frizz. Draco, on the other hand…

“Do you know your hair has a bit of curl to it?” she asked him. “I never would have guessed back in school.” He was too neat to allow anything truly unruly, of course. But if you looked closely (and god help her, but she was looking closely these days) the finer hairs at the nape of his neck seemed to be developing some character. A bit of flip.

“Excuse you,” Draco said primly. “It has no such thing.”

Smiling a little (and not allowing herself to think too deeply about it), Hermione leaned forward and touched one of the twisty bits brushing his collar. Coaxed it to curl around her finger. If the knuckle of that finger brushed against the hollow behind his ear, well…in the humid little bubble of their study sessions Draco Malfoy had wavy hair; anything could happen.

“What do you call this, then?” she asked him.

“Witchcraft,” Draco said. His voice had gone a little hoarse. On the desk between them he was still clutching his quill, which had dribbled a long black line through his meticulous notes. He did not seem to have realized.

His hair was just as soft as it looked. Hermione tugged very gently on the lock she was holding, noting its bounce. Noting as well, the way Draco’s eyes closed as the backs of her fingers skimmed the side of his neck.

“Granger.” His voice was almost a whisper, his eyes still closed. “What are you doing?”

“Gathering information,” Hermione told him. She eased her hand out of his hair (the lock she’d been playing with held its newly defined shape) and leaned back to look at him properly.

He had filled out since the trials. The gauntness she had seen on his face during the final days of the war was long gone, though the high, sharp cheekbones remained. He’d taken to wearing his hair pulled partially back, but it suited him best the way it was today: carelessly loose and ever so slightly mussed. With his sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the two buttons open at his neck, he looked very unlike the poised, angry boy she had known most of her childhood.

Hermione would have said that he looked carefree, except that just now with his eyes still closed, leaning almost imperceptivity after her retreating hand, mostly what he looked was helpless.

It was a little worrying, how much she liked that.

So, fine. Perhaps the humidity was giving her ideas after all.

.........

“Granger.”

A cool touch to her face. She was thirsty. Why was she so thirsty? With all the humidity shouldn’t she just be drinking through her skin?

“Like a frog,” Hermione said, and opened her eyes.

There were cobwebs on the ceiling above her. That was the first thing she saw, and something about them made her angry. It was one thing for the library staff to quibble about atmospheric enchantments, but if they were neglecting basic dusting charms now…

No. That wasn’t right. Her ears were ringing and her throat was dry, and this was not the library in France.

She was so angry.

Hermione dusted her ceiling every day. She’d never particularly cared about cobwebs, but Ron was happiest when she kept things neat. So every morning she stood on the bed and swooped her wand around and she was not sure, now, that she had ever been this angry in her life. This was not her ceiling. These were not her cobwebs. Her ears would not stop ringing. She scowled upwards as if she could ignite the room with the force of her fury.

Into this intense beam of hatred intruded the face of Draco Malfoy.

His hair was loose and messy. There was a crease on his cheek where a pillow had pressed into it. He was very close.

She could not breathe as he looked at her. The ringing in her ears reached a high, furious crescendo. Hermione had lain on his floor once while Bellatrix tortured her, had looked up and caught these same grey eyes and held them as she screamed. Ron had been screaming too. She’d heard him pounding on the cellar door, had tried to stay quiet for his sake, and Malfoy had held her eyes as if he was trying to help, as if he was choking back screams as well, and he had just watched.

He was just watching now.

Hermione was confused and afraid, and she hated him for it. In what universe did she not hate Malfoy?

But Draco had sat close to her as well, messy-haired and off-balance, had leaned towards her with a different kind of helplessness. Hadn’t he? Hermione put her hand up and touched one of the swinging locks of this man’s hair. It was very straight.

“Malfoy,” she said uncertainly. Draco, she thought. Which was it?

“I have your wand,” he told her.

Which was all it took. Hermione sat up so quickly that her forehead cracked against his chin, sending them both sprawling. Through the sharp pain Hermione saw his own wand go spinning across the floor – it had been in his hand when she woke up. She scrambled after it, fingers closing over the cool wood, then closed her eyes and turned (well, rolled) on the spot, thinking of home, thinking of Ron.

No.

Malfoy’s wand was responsive in her hand. Familiar. It felt like a splash of cold water. The apparition had begun to work, the crushing darkness was closing around her, but Hermione wrenched herself back, ears still ringing horribly in her poor knocked-about head. It felt awful, yanking herself out of the spell like that. For a second Hermione felt as if she was being pulled in all directions, as if she was suddenly aware of the seams of her own body, just as they were beginning to split.

But she flexed her fingers against it, gritted her teeth and held on, and the moment passed.

She lay gasping on the floor. Her whole body hurt. In the pain and confusion she held two thoughts simultaneously, though the seam between them was splitting too: Ron would be worried. And she could not go home to him.

“I suppose I should have seen that coming,” Malfoy said from his own spot on the floor.

Hermione swallowed hard. Which…ouch. “My throat hurts,” she said. “Why does my throat hurt?”

“I came downstairs this morning to find you unconscious at the foot of my sofa,” Malfoy told her. He propped himself up on one elbow, managing to make the pose look decadent. As if he was sprawled on his floor merely to best display himself: his long legs, the elegant lines of his body. Hermione noticed for the first time that he was only half dressed. The soft grey trousers were fastened snugly, but a dark belt hung from the loops at his hips. His dress shirt – a deep green that was nearly black – was completely unbuttoned. She could see the scars that lashed their way across his wiry chest, though they were more faded than she remembered. Hermione looked away.

“You had a magnificent bruise on your throat when I rolled you over,” Malfoy went on, something not quite steady in his voice. “Which I believe is the result of you stunning yourself and then collapsing forward on top of your own wand like a lunatic.”

Hermione surprised both of them by laughing. She felt drunk on confusion. It was so loud inside her head. “Just like the troll!” she said. Then, when Malfoy looked at her like she was mad, “In first year. Harry shoved his wand up its nose.”

He looked disgusted. “I used to think Potter was heroic,” he said. “No one said anything about nose-fucking a mountain troll.”

“We were eleven,” Hermione said in her most withering tone. It came out a bit raspy, but almost normal.

She rolled her neck experimentally, very aware that Malfoy was looking at her. He was not laughing.

She had not quite made it to the sofa, after coming through the fireplace last night. The sheer panic of that moment in her kitchen – she shied away from thinking about it now – had faded quickly, and she had wanted…she had been afraid…

Malfoy was watching her, and he was not laughing. The look on his face was still and steady and patient and familiar. No one had looked at Hermione like that in years; like they expected her to know what was going on, to understand it and explain it and fix it.

But Hermione had nothing now to fix it with. She was fighting to stay on the paths of sanity she had so painstakingly carved out in her mind, the routes to cognition that skirted along the edges of her love for Ron. But those paths too were built on love. She had spent years mapping them out, but their only purpose was to think about how to make her husband happy, how to keep him smiling and admiring and content. None of them led out. None of them led away.

Except perhaps the one she had found two days ago, quite by accident. The one that had brought her to anger.

Hermione clung to anger. To the cold fury that had been simmering inside her since she woke up. She closed her eyes. Tried to focus through the pain and the odd, insistent noise in her ears. It wasn’t really a ringing. More musical. Like windchimes.

The earrings.

Warning her she was in danger.

In danger from Ron. Because it was not Malfoy she was angry with at all.

She had to go home.

She was never going home again.

“I don’t trust you,” Hermione said, because if she let herself really think about any of this she would run screaming for the door.

She expected a snide remark. Seven years of Malfoy sneering at her under slicked back hair and mean eyes outweighed whatever soft-edged half-memories she had of France, to say nothing of the last, antagonistic month. But when she looked at him he only shrugged, his face unreadable.

“Counterpoint,” he said as he got to his feet. “Do you trust yourself?”

He said it like he knew the answer.

Hermione sat up. She was wearing Ron’s old pajamas – the ones with the faded gold stripes and the hole in the left knee. Draco’s wand was on the floor beside her, and there was a jar of honey in her pocket. She drew her legs up to her chest and put her left arm around them, rested her forehead against her knees so she did not have to see him, and reached into her pocket. She took out the jar without looking, held it up towards the messy haired boy from the library in France. Towards Draco. It was easier when she didn’t look.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s loud,” she told him. “Just take it.”

He did. The incessant chiming in Hermione’s ears cut sharply off, and she felt some of the tension go out of her body. But it wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t keep her safe. Gritting her teeth, she forced the next part out. “Your wand too.”

She could hear his hesitation before he spoke. “Are you sure you don’t – ”

“Malfoy,” Hermione snapped. She closed her eyes, pressed them hard against the bones of her knees until they ached. “You wanted to help. Take your damn wand.”

It was very hard, letting him do it. She wrapped her right arm around her legs as well, and took hold of her left wrist as if she was restraining herself, as if she could hold herself together this way. She kept her eyes closed, did not watch where he put it.

“What else?” he asked. His voice was matter-of-fact. She appreciated that.

“Close down your floo,” Hermione said.

This time he did not question her. She listened as he got to his feet and cast the necessary spells to block her escape. The urge to laugh was back. She tried to swallow it down but her voice came out wavering between mirth and anger. “You’ll have to lock the doors and windows,” she said. “Unless you’ve got a wine cellar you can convert into a dungeon. Only this time…”.

She had been looking at Malfoy when Ron and Harry had burst into the room at Malfoy Manor. She remembered the expression on his face – a relief so profound it dwarfed her own. Remembering it now Hermione could not hold out any longer. She scrambled to her feet and lurched to where Malfoy was standing, seized hold of his shirt.

Standing there, clutching a fistful of his open button-down and swaying slightly, her fingers accidentally brushing the bare skin of his chest, Hermione struggled with herself. Fury against love against confusion. Even as she opened her mouth she was not sure which would win.

“Don’t let me go back,” she whispered.

And then, for the first time since he had woken her, Malfoy’s composure broke. Gone was the cool intensity. The man standing in front of her – he was half-supporting her weight now, his grip on her forearms almost punishing – was livid.

“Weasley,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but she nodded anyway. “What did he do to you?”

But they had gone too far. Malfoy’s anger had dulled her own. What had Ron ever done but adore her? Hermione gritted her teeth as the memories came. His hand rubbing warm circles on her back. His laugh as they sat down to a dinner she had horribly burned. His beautiful face and his careful touch and his courageous heart.

It was no good. She looked up at Malfoy’s face, at the muscle twitching in his jaw, and opened her mouth to say that it was a mistake, that she had to go home, that she loved her husband.

But their faces were so close. And behind his jaw, in the untidy sweep of his hair, she could see one lock with just the hint of a flip to it. As if it was trying, very secretly, to curl just a little. She wanted to reach out and touch it, and the thought of touching him made her feel ill. And she could remember, just, a time when it had not felt that way at all.

“You have to stun me again,” Hermione said to that secret curl. “It’s no good. You have to stun me so I don’t go back.”

And she closed her eyes again, did not respond when Malfoy spoke to her in a voice tight with anger and confusion. She kept her eyes closed and tried not to think about where he might have put his wand, how she might take it back from him, turn on the spot and reappear in her husband’s arms. She kept her eyes closed and searched for the path back to anger, but she had lost it. She did not find it again before the darkness took her.

.........

“It’s a little dehumanizing,” she told him.

They were in the small neat garden outside the alchemy labs. Neither of them had classes nearby, but they had recently discovered a quiet grove under some apple trees at the back, and had taken to eating lunch there. It was deserted, and blessedly cool.

“To be fair,” Draco said, “Merfolk aren’t actually human. But I take your point.” He broke a square of chocolate from the bar he was holding and passed it to her.

“Not the Adamo paper,” Hermione said, taking it. “What you told me the other day. That I’m your penance.” The chocolate snapped satisfyingly under her teeth. It was so perfectly bitter that it came around to being almost fruity. “What exactly did you mean?”

She was watching his hands as she said this, and was interested to see how still they went. How tense.

“I talk a lot of shite, Granger. Don’t trouble yourself to take any of it seriously.”

“Hmm.” She leaned back on the grass, still watching him. He wanted to be let off the hook, but Hermione was inclined to make him squirm. He had been painfully earnest in the library, and she knew it.

“I’m not interested in being an instrument of your redemption Draco,” she said now. “It’s boring. And it doesn’t make for a balanced friendship.”

His head shot up at the last word, his face stricken. Then he smiled.

“What balance?” he asked lightly. “As far as I can tell you’re only in this for the wine and pastries. Speaking of which.” He held a paper bag towards her. The pastry inside was crisp and flaking, rolled into a very tight spiral with an almost lacquered finish. The smell of it made Hermione’s mouth water.

“I provide the coffee to go with the pastries,” she said briskly, not to be deterred. “Regardless of the aspersions you cast on its quality. That’s balance. I gave you my notes for Contractual Charms last week, and you got me in touch with that expert on invasive eastern gillyweed. That’s also balance. Using me to punish yourself for a decade of bigotry and a spot of cowardice is just tedious and uncomfortable and you know it.” She held the pastry up between them and tilted her head at it. “What is this beautiful thing?”

“It’s a kouign amann,” Draco said. “And have some mercy, would you? I was trying to be poetic.”

“Hmm,” Hermione bit into the kouign amann, which was bliss. Caramelized sugar and salt and hundreds of layers of flaking, buttery pastry. Crisp and rich and delicious. “I’ve never been very interested in poetry.” She licked her fingers just to see the way his eyes were caught and held by the motion, the way they darkened.

As an afterthought she added, “or mercy.”

.........

The second time she woke up Hermione was on the sofa. The horrible confusion had lifted, only to be replaced with an equally horrible clarity. The longing for Ron was the same. She gritted her teeth against it.

“It’s a love potion,” Malfoy said.

Ten points to Slytherin, Hermione thought that as her head spun. Chocolate and pastries and Malfoy’s eyes on her mouth. She rolled onto her side and was helplessly, violently sick off the edge of the sofa.

It splashed on the wooden floor. Malfoy, face impassive, vanished it even as she heaved again, watched as she wiped her mouth with the back of one shaking hand. His belt was fastened now, but the buttons of his smart shirt were crooked. Hermione imagined his hands shaking as he did them up. “Yes, obviously,” she said rudely, trying to steady her breathing. “Why haven’t you fixed it?”

“Aguamenti,” Malfoy said, and pushed a full glass of water into her hand.

Hermione wanted to rinse her mouth, but there was no sink handy. It would be rude to spit on the floor. So she just drank, gulping down the first sour mouthful in desperation to get to the clean taste beneath.

Ron was probably thirsty. He never remembered to drink enough water. Hermione kept a jug of it charmed to stay cool on the kitchen table, with slices of cucumber and lemon bobbing amongst the ice. What if his mouth was dry? She closed her eyes against another wave of nausea at the thought of Ron’s mouth.

“I’m going to kill him,” Malfoy was saying. Hermione turned her head to look. He had taken a step back, was standing behind a high wooden chair, beside the couch, clutching the back of it with white-knuckled hands. His face had found an expression at last: it was tight and dark and furious. “I’m going to – ”

“Malfoy,” Hermione said. Her own voice was tight. “Why haven’t you fixed it?”

There was an awful pause.

“Naturally, because he does not know how,” drawled a voice from the wall behind him.

The room was dim. Hermione could not make out the details of the face in the portrait hanging opposite, but she did not need to.

“Snape,” she said. Of course. Because who better to turn to in her hour of need than Draco Malfoy and a sarcastic portrait of Severus Snape. “What do you mean?”

Malfoy released his death grip on the chair, came around to sit on it. He still did not look normal. He looked like he thought sitting down was a thing human beings did, and therefore he ought to try it, but the motion was foreign to him. He looked like he would be far more comfortable committing murder.

“There are a thousand different concoctions that fall under the classification “love potion,”” Snape’s portrait said. “None of which can be utilized long-term without considerable…consequences.”

Hermione put her poor, ruined head in her hands.

“There are antidotes,” Snape went on. His voice was neutral – neither cruel nor comforting. “Brews that will counteract the effects, neutralize the potion in your system, halt further damage. But whatever damage that has been done…”

“I’ve started a few potions,” Malfoy said quickly. “It helps that you brought the jar. We know some of what went into the one he used. But it’s not…it isn’t…”

“There is no universal cure,” Snape said.

There was a horrible silence. Hermione breathed through her nose, trying not to be sick again.

“I thought about taking you to St. Mungo’s,” Malfoy said. There was a derisive snort from the portrait. “But the first person they’d contact is Weasley.”

“Ron,” Hermione said. She couldn’t help it. Her heart leapt at the thought of him walking through the doorway. Suddenly she could hardly breathe with the desire to find Ron and press the length of her body against his, cling to him and love him and believe him. Malfoy saw it on her face.

“Exactly,” he said.

Hermione closed her eyes. Once she would have been able to rattle off ideas, lists, ingredients for the possible potions. Now she just knew how many moles Ron had on his back, how he liked his toast, how he wanted to be held after making love. She had studied him more thoroughly than any textbook, and to the detriment of all else.

Maybe she would kill Ron, when this was over. If it was ever over. Since it was taking everything she had not to weep over the thought of him moderately thirsty, murder felt like a stretch. But it had been important to her, once, to have long term goals.

“Of the three I have brewing,” Malfoy said, “the first will be ready in three days. It’s a generic antidote – how you respond to it should tell us a little more about what we’re dealing with. At the very least it should make your feelings less…acute.”

Hermione nodded.

“In the meantime,” he began, but Hermione interrupted him.

“Just stun me again,” she said shortly.

“Granger,” he began. “Three days is too long to – ”

“Just stun me!” she snapped. Then closed her eyes again and tried to sound sane. “I’m dying, Malfoy. I want to claw your eyes out and obliviate myself and run back to him. I can’t think about anything else. Just…” She opened her eyes. “Have some mercy, would you?” she asked.

One side of his mouth quirked up. “I’ve never been much for that,” he told her. But he did as she asked.

.........

“I’ve been thinking about balance,” she told him. They were on opposite sides of her cramped little room, but the distance between them made it feel cavernous. Draco had taken the dusty rose armchair as usual. Hermione had started out cross-legged on the bed with her back against the wall, but now she was stretched out, propped lazily on one elbow. Enjoying the way his eyes kept tracing the lines of her body, catching helplessly on the slim, bare legs below her skirt.

There was a swallow of wine left in her mug – Draco’s was empty. She felt warm and expansive and restless. It had grown dark outside while they worked – a little breeze was coming through the window now, smelling of flowers.

Draco rolled his eyes.

“And why you haven’t kissed me,” Hermione added, and watched the colour rise in his cheeks. He was holding himself so still she was not sure he was breathing. Like a statue. He was beautiful enough to be one.

“Granger,” he said.

“You’re quite beautiful,” she told him, in case he didn’t know. And to see him blush. If only she’d known five years ago how easy it was to fluster this boy.

“Granger,” he said again. This time it came out almost as a groan.

“Are you waiting for permission?” she asked. Her heart was beating very quickly. She was not un-flustered herself.

But he shook his head.

They were quiet then. Hermione could hear noises from the street downstairs – they drifted in through the open window. When she was sure Draco was not going to speak, she picked up her mug again, held it carefully in her free hand and looked down into it.

“Is it because you don’t want to, then?” she asked.

At that he groaned properly. When Hermione looked up he had his head in his hands. “Granger, I’m a fucking Death Eater,” he said, in a voice that was trying for lighthearted and fell about a continent short. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’re a war hero.”

Which was enough to kill the mood. Hermione went from feeling warm and expansive and a little tipsy to very irritated indeed in the space of a few seconds. She sat up sharply. Smoothed her skirt down. He did not deserve her bare legs.

“I see,” she said. “So you used to think I was less than human,” She ignored the intake of breath that wanted to be either apology or denial. “And now you’ve decided I’m more. Am I meant to be flattered you still can’t believe I’m a person?”

“It’s not like that,” Draco said. “I know you’re a person.”

“Do you?” she asked. “Because from here it looks as if I’ve made the jump straight from Mudblood to Madonna.”

He could not meet her eyes. The bit of sun he’d caught over the last few weeks (along with her recent line of questioning) had brought some colour to his cheeks; at the word mudblood, it drained away in an instant. Without it, Draco looked pale and pinched and unhappy. He looked the way she remembered him, except that his feet were bare and he was in her bedroom.

“It isn’t your humanity I’m worried about,” Draco said in the direction of those vulnerable-looking feet. “Can’t you see that?”

“How stupid of me,” Hermione said furiously. “And here I’ve been operating under the assumption that we were friends. That we were starting from scratch. I should have seen that the gulf between us looms too large to be bridged by anything so mundane as sexual tension.”

He laughed unhappily. “Granger, please understand what it means when I tell you: I have never wanted anything so badly as I want your friendship,” And then, as if it didn’t matter anymore, he looked at her. “I can survive the sexual tension, as you so romantically choose to call the unqualified torture of keeping my hands off you, if it means I can have that.”

“That’s your penance?” she asked.

Draco, not catching the danger in her voice, nodded.

“Pity,” Hermione said crisply. “Let me tell you what that means." She tipped up her mug to catch the last drop of wine, then leaned forward to place the empty vessel on the floor beside her bed. The wide neck of her jumper slid down as she did so, exposing most of one shoulder. Her skin was burning; she could feel his eyes on her. She looked up to meet them.

“It means I will move on,” she said, and saw him flinch. “And you won’t feel like you did a noble, self-sacrificing thing when you watch it happening – you’ll feel like an idiot. Whoever I fall in love with won’t be someone you admire, Draco. He won’t be some superhuman man you’ve decided is worthy of me. He’ll be Viktor Krum or Ron or some Frenchman who makes me laugh. He’ll just be a person. Someone who doesn’t care if I’m a war hero or a muggleborn. Someone who wants me.”

Despite her irritation, despite the tension between them, Hermione felt her throat tighten, and a hot prickle behind her eyes. She pushed past the desire to cry, furious with herself and with him.

“And you’ll have to know that it’s happening,” she went on relentlessly. “While you and I debate remorse and redemption you’ll know that every night I go home and whoever he is he puts his mouth on me, and his hands. You’ll know I go down on my knees for him when he tells me to.” She was not sure where this was coming from, this low, impassioned, naked monologue. But Draco’s eyes were ice cold and his hands were gripping his arm rests and Hermione had never been a merciful person.

“Because it could be you, Draco,” she told him. “It could be your mouth, your hands. You could have me on my knees whenever you wanted. If you decided to actually believe I’m a person, just a person, then you have to be one too. Just a person. Just someone who wants me.”

The silence that followed was long enough that Hermione felt the anger and the eloquence draining out of her, leaving…sadness mostly. If she hadn’t begun this conversation he would be leaving now, perhaps pausing at the door to brush a strand of hair away from her face, his body close enough to her own that she could feel his breath on her skin. She would be feeling the warm, lazy happiness that had permeated their time together. The feeling of possibility. She should have left it at that.

Because, really, would there ever be someone who wanted her in the way she meant? Viktor and Ron had both set her on a pedestal of sorts. Their touches had been gentle, reverential. Boring. They had admired her, respected her, but they had never…Hermione twisted her hands in her lap, looking down at them. At her rumpled skirt and her too-large jumper.

“Come here.” Draco said.

The roughness in his voice made her look up in surprise. He did not look gentle or reverential. He looked…the unqualified torture of keeping my hands off of you, Hermione thought. He looked tortured.

Hermione stood up. She smoothed down the front of her skirt, hands shaking, and crossed the room to stand in front of him. His eyes were very dark as they swept over her. She smirked and twitched one hand as if to reach for him, but Draco shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Don’t move.” He sat forward suddenly, his back straight. Hermione was between his knees, his face just inches from her sternum. She wanted to put her hands in his hair, wanted to topple them backwards into the soft chair.

But instead she stood very still, feeling the balance of power shift between them, as Draco reached out and touched her leg. Just gently, on the back of her calf. His fingers were light and cool and he was the one smirking as he dragged his hand higher, palm at the crook of her knee now, and she was the helpless one struggling not to lean in to his touch.

“I like that,” he told her.

His hand was under the edge of her skirt now, his thumb sweeping a lazy circle on the front of her thigh. Her skin was burning.

“What?” Hermione asked, a little breathless.

“When you do as you’re told,” Draco said. He said it roughly, as if it were an ugly thing to say. As if he was challenging her.

But Hermione, embarrassingly, involuntarily, pressed her thighs together at his words, a little breath of air escaping her lips.

And then was on his feet, crowding into her space as she had crowded his, one hand on her hip and the other rising to cup the side of her face. She could see his pulse jumping in his throat.

Hermione looked up at him through her lashes, wide-eyed and innocent.

“I like to do as I’m told,” she said. Then she turned her head, ever so slightly, so she could catch the edge of his thumb with her lips. “Sometimes.”

Draco laughed a little brokenly.

“Well?” Hermione asked, pressing the word like a kiss against his skin. Neither of them had moved. “Should I call Ron?”

That, finally, did it. Draco groaned. He shifted his hand so the palm was cupping her jaw, traced her lips with his thumb.

“You’re going to be the fucking death of me,” he said.

And then he was bending his head, pulling her flush against him, and he was kissing her. A soft, surprisingly sweet kiss. Hermione went up on her toes to meet it. When he pulled away she was trembling.

He must have seen it, because the edge of his mouth twitched up. It was not quite a smirk – this hungry, self-satisfied smile – but it was not far off.

“Darling,” he said. “It’s alright.” She had not known he could sound so fond. So gentle. He pulled her towards him again, lowered his mouth to the place where her neck met her shoulder. She felt the pressure of his teeth, inhaled sharply at the shock of pain, and then his tongue was there, soothing. She whimpered involuntarily, was rewarded with a low chuckle.

“I’m going to ruin you too,” he whispered.

.........

The third time Hermione woke up she was in a small, bright bedroom. There were bookshelves on these walls also, and a messy, crowded little desk tucked into a corner behind the shabby bed. But there were no cobwebs on this ceiling, and the window – which looked out over several adjoining rooftops – was wide open.

Draco Malfoy was standing over her, a glass of water ready in his hand.

Darling, he had called her. And she had forgotten. Darling had slipped out of her mind easy as a dream, along with everything else they had said and done to each other that night.

Hermione swallowed back her nausea. She did not throw up on his shoes again. She took the water and drank it.

“I’ve made some arrangements,” he said, stepping back.

His hands were clasped behind his back, his posture easy. She appreciated the space. It was less confusing, to have him at arm’s length.

“It’s the same day,” she said, her voice scratchy. She looked at the neat green shirt - properly done up now, though he had left the top two buttons open. She could see the white of his throat. She swallowed. “You’re wearing the same clothes. Why am I awake?”

“Arrangements,” he said. “Take a look around, please.”

Hermione stood up. Her legs felt shaky. Too much time unconscious, she supposed – it had happened to her back in the DA sometimes. She did not much care about her surroundings, but gave a dutiful glance at the desk.

She had seen that it was crowded; now that she looked properly she saw that it held a veritable fortune in rare artifacts. A stone pensive in the center, surrounded by several sneakoscopes, an opal scrying mirror, an array of potions in clearly marked vials. Something larger was propped beside them, draped in an opaque cloth. She looked at Malfoy.

“It’s all fully functional,” he told her. “Under the cloth is a Foe Glass – Severus suggested I cover it, but I’ll leave that to your discretion.”

“I don’t understand,” Hermione said.

“You say you don’t trust me,” he said, voice easy. “Now you don’t have to. There are at least four different warning systems in this room that will keep you ahead of any nefarious ideas on my part.”

This was both reassuring and extremely awkward. Hermione cast around for something to say to defuse the situation. “I can’t use a pensive without a wand,” was what came out.

“Right,” Draco said, unoffended. “Which leads me to this.” He took her wand out of his pocket. Hermione reached for it automatically, then snatched her hand back.

“You can’t give me that!” she said, panic in her voice.

“I’ve warded the house every way I can think,” he said. “You can’t apparate in or out, the Floo is closed. There are confounding runes on all the walls – you won’t even be able to find the front door. You are as much of a prisoner here as I can make you, Granger, and if you find your way out I will personally track you down and drag you back, if I have to kill the whole Weasley clan to do it. But I won’t knock you out like an animal, and I won’t keep this from you.” He put her wand onto the desk beside the pensive. The wood clicked softly against the polished surface. “I can’t.” His voice cracked on the final word, and when she looked at him his eyes were…they were burning. She had to look away.

Hermione reached out and touched her wand. The wood was warm and alive.

“Three days until the first potion is ready?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Once I’m cured,” she said, and had to swallow hard before she could continue. “Once I’m cured, if I want to go back to him. You won’t stop me, will you? If I still love him?” If I still, she thought suddenly, want to kill him?

Draco’s face did not twitch. His shoulders were relaxed, his jaw unclenched, his hands clasped formally behind his back. Hermione found herself imagining him suddenly as a small child in a much grander room filled with even rarer objects, having been instructed by a stern parent that he must not touch. That the things around him were precious, were fragile, and he was not to break them. He would have stood in just this careful way. “I won’t stop you,” he said.

She breathed out, releasing tension she had not known she was carrying. That was alright, then. It wasn’t like she wouldn’t ever see Ron again. Once she could think again, once the effects of this stupid potion were gone, she could go home to him. Could melt into his arms and breathe in his smell, stand on tiptoe and press her lips to his. Smash her fist into his perfect nose.

And, really, did she need to stay here in the meantime? Couldn’t Draco just bring her the antidote when it finished brewing? And she could drink it at home, and Ron would look at her with his beautiful chagrined face, and she would slide into his arms or she would slide a knife between his ribs. The details were not important. Hermione turned on the spot as she imagined it, imagined their laughter and their joy and the air punching out of his lungs, concentrated on all that…

Crack!

Hermione stumbled back from the apparently empty space in the middle of the room, reeling as if she had run full-tilt into a stone wall. “Ouch,” she said. There were tears in her eyes as she looked over at Draco, whose face was implacable. She swallowed down panic.

“It’s just a few days,” he said.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “Please.” Hermione snapped her mouth closed to prevent the rest of the question from escaping. Please let me go. I need him. She put a hand over her mouth for good measure, looked at Draco with mute appeal.

His voice, when he spoke, was steady.

“I’m going to fix it,” he told her.

Hermione nodded.

But when he turned to leave the room she looked at Draco’s hands, still held behind his back, the right clasping the left. They were objectively beautiful hands – slim and graceful and strong.

They were also shaking.

Chapter Text

There was sun on her face and a gentle breeze coming through the open window of Malfoy’s house.

You could survive torture, Hermione thought. You could storm the ministry and defend the castle and ride a dragon to freedom, and through it all you would be too busy running and breathing and fighting and living to feel anything so mundane as despair.

It was powerlessness that could break you. `

Hermione kept her eyes closed. She breathed in that gentle, warm air and she loved Ron with every fiber of her being, and she did not know how to stop.

In the interminable weeks she and Harry had spent camping out during the war, scrounging for food and horcruxes and hope, she had thought a lot about powerlessness. When there was nothing to be done but to keep existing, nothing to fight or run from, just the drag of time and the weight of isolation and the cold crush of dread. Those weeks had nearly killed them.

That kind of despair, Hermione had realized, could only be countered by rigorous discipline.

So she had been disciplined. She had scheduled their days down to the minute, despite Harry’s decidedly unheroic sulking, and she thought now that it had kept them alive after Ron had left them.

That same attitude had kept her alive for the past seven years.

Because Ron had come back for her. Ron had barged into her life and altered her brain chemistry and demanded she behave like a normal person in spite of the crippling, devastating love he had magically manufactured in her. Hermione had dragged herself by the bootstraps through seven years of cold showers, of brushing cobwebs from the ceiling and polishing the silverware, plugging away at work and making pot roasts and planting a sodding garden. Doing anything and everything to keep herself busy, to do this impossible thing he had asked of her.

Routine, discipline, fortitude.

The room in Malfoy’s house smelled pleasantly of warm wood and linin, and the idea of surviving the next three days without her husband filled Hermione with more despair than Voldemort ever had. It took all the discipline she could muster to just lie there and feel the breeze on her skin and not think about how to get back to Ron.

To stay suspended in this moment of waking and not slide into longing and love and…no.

She opened her eyes and stretched out, toes finding and pressing on the footboard. The bed was small and ancient. Its frame was made oak maybe, or walnut, too darkened with age to be easily identifiable – and it creaked when she moved.

Ron would need to fold himself in half to fit in this bed, she thought, and gritted her teeth.

Discipline.

There was an entire world around her. If only she could make it feel real. If only she could make it matter.

Hermione pressed her toes harder against the footboard. Not thinking about Ron was like trying not to faint, she thought. Love blackened the edges of her vision – a woozy darkness. She needed something to anchor her in place, but Malfoy was not here to make her angry.

She flexed her toes. The wood was cracked just above the mattress. She could feel a patch of rough slivers at the edge of the fault line, and as she struggled with herself one of them caught on the sensitive pad of her foot, jabbed into her.

The pain was like a bright light behind her eyes. She sucked in a sharp breath and sat upright. The little jolt of adrenaline…it was real. It made everything else real. Hermione could suddenly feel the sun on her shoulders and the cool breeze, could really feel them. She wanted to grasp at all of it desperately before it could slip away.

“Alright,” Hermione said out loud. “Pain, then.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, her back to the window, and sat for a moment, keeping the lines of her back clean and straight, her posture good.

Fortitude.

There was a little clock on the wall. It was shaped, absurdly, like a cartoon dragon, the carved wooden beast smirking out at her as it cradled the round clock face under one arm. It read ten to seven. The slender second hand made a full circle as Hermione sat watching, timing this moment of clarity, her mind empty to everything except the throbbing in her foot and the tickle of hair at the nape of her neck.

It was not until a further twenty seconds had passed that her concentration began to slip.

Ron liked to surprise her sometimes, or he liked to try. She was so attuned to his presence, his smell and the sound of his footsteps, that it was rare she did not know exactly where he was at any given moment. Sometimes if he was home early from work she would sit with her back to the door, pretending to busy herself with chopping carrots or folding laundry. And Ron would tiptoe across the floor until he was directly behind her, until she had to close her eyes in order not to turn and throw her arms around him, would lower his face and brush a tickling kiss just behind her ear.

And Hermione would gasp and laugh and swat at him as if she was surprised, her heart thumping with excitement and pleasure.

If she closed her eyes now the gentle movement of her hair in the breeze could almost be a precursor to that kiss, could almost be his fingers brushing it aside, his mouth quirking into a smile as he bent…

Hermione lifted her bare foot and slammed it down against the floor, pad first, driving the sliver of wood deeper.

“Ouch!”

The pain was remarkable. Bright and sharp and clarifying. Her eyes flew open, fixed again on the smirking dragon, on the sweeping needle of the second hand. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The back of her neck was sweating a little. She had not braided her hair before bed – it would be a tangled mess by now.

Twenty seconds.

She was hungry. That was real – her stomach was growling. Her throat was dry. She was in a little attic room with an open window and a body that felt things and wanted things.

Thirty seconds. Hermione glanced around, trying to take as much in as quickly as she could.

There was a reading chair beside her bed, with a pile of clothing folded neatly on it. The chair, like the clock, felt unsuited to the rest of the room. Unlike the bed and the desk it looked well-cared for and luxurious. It was dark green, with a rounded back and a soft, deep cushion. Leafy vines had been embroidered in an even darker green along the back and arms so they seemed to be dangling from invisible trees. As Hermione watched their leaves rustled, responding to the breeze in the room, some of them lifting briefly away from the fabric. A delicate, whimsical enchantment. She could imagine a little girl curled up in this chair, a book on her lap, idly tracing those vines, looping them around her fingers.

A pale girl with a mischievous smile, too many curls and too many freckles, the sun picking out a red tint in her hair, smiling up at Ron as he grinned at Hermione, both their faces soft with love and pride…

Hermione stamped hard on the floor again, driving the splinter up into the meat of her foot.

“Fuck!” It came out as a gasp, ragged in the morning air. There were tears in her eyes – whether from the pain of the splinter or the image she did not know – and Hermione dashed them away and looked at the clock again.

A minute and a half. Roughly consistent with the first trial.

So. A brief flash of pain afforded her eighty to ninety seconds of focus. She could build a routine around eighty seconds, Hermione thought. A small, desperate little routine.

“I can work with this,” she said briskly, and got out of bed.

The folded cloth on the chair was indeed clothing. Plain grey trousers and a dark blouse, both of them well-made, albeit for a woman significantly taller than Hermione and a touch more slender. She had to give herself another shot of pain (as the splinter had worked itself deeper the shock and sharpness had gone, leaving just a dull ache that was less effective) to concentrate enough to open up the side seams an extra inch. But her wand motions were crisp and precise as she did it, and that gave her hope.

Forty-five seconds worth of hope. Then when it came time to raise the hems Hermione found herself bending over the enchanted chair and gasping for breath, thinking of the two inches of pale skin that always seemed to show at Ron’s ankles no matter how carefully she lengthened his jeans.

Forty-five seconds was not enough time. But when she put the pad of her foot against the floor and ground down on it, the resulting pain was not enough even for that any longer.

In the end, almost blind with love, Hermione just rolled up the cuffs of the trousers, fingers trembling. The sleeves of the blouse were a slippery silk that would not cooperate – they dangled past her fists. She stamped her bare foot into the floor repeatedly, but it gave her nothing.

Her routine had lasted all of three minutes.

Hermione stood there in her second-hand clothing, and her wild hair, weeping furiously because she was undone by the thought of her husband’s ankles.

There was a knock at the door.

“What?” It was almost a bellow. She did not care enough to dash away the tears from her cheeks, did not care enough to hide anything.

“Why does that sound like fuck off?” Malfoy asked. He pushed at the door so that it swung inwards, but instead of stepping over the threshold he just leaned there, easy and handsome in the morning light. “And Severus wants to know if we should worry about the structural integrity of the house.”

She stared at him. He was holding a paper napkin and a stack of toast spread extravagantly with butter. It had dripped all down the hallway. His trousers were not rolled up at the cuffs. Nor was there a strip of pale, vulnerable ankle showing. His feet, like hers, were bare. He looked posh and careless.

“You look like a madwoman,” he told her.

Hermione would have been grateful to him for ignoring her tears if this had not been so very irritating. Butter had dripped on one of his feet.

“Don’t you have plates?” she ground out.

Malfoy looked at the toast he was carrying as if seeing it for the first time, hair falling across his forehead as he did so. It was an artful, attractive fall. “Yes, but they aren’t clean,” he said carelessly. “Have you not seen disposable napkins before? They’re a muggle invention. You just toss them in the fire when you’ve finished eating. Nothing to wash, and nobody has to wheedle the stains out of linen. It’s shockingly convenient.”

Hermione scoffed. “That is the laziest thing I have ever heard,” she told him. “Trust you to embrace muggle culture only when it allows you to be indulgent and…and…indolent.” She knew this was a disproportionate response, but the butter on his foot was the last straw. Her own foot throbbed.

“Oh, a judgemental madwoman,” Malfoy said. “Excellent. Eat your indolent toast and come downstairs, would you? If you break the floor Severus will have vapours.”

Hermione lunged forward to snatch the greasy package from him, taking hold of the door with her other hand and slamming it hard in his face. There was a satisfying little yelp as he leapt backwards. She hoped it had gotten him in the nose.

But when she glanced up at the dragon clock she saw that a full three minutes had passed since his knock, and she was breathing quickly out of annoyance rather than grief and panic.

Something in her – something nearly as numb as the foot she’d been abusing – could not help rising to Malfoy’s bait. He knew how to be annoying enough to hold her attention. So anger still worked, she thought. It hadn’t become less effective. Which meant that the same was likely true of pain – she just had to figure out a consistent way of getting it.

Hermione ate her toast sitting up against the wooden headboard in bed (she did not want to get drips on the beautiful chair), the sleeves of the beautiful, expensive blouse pushed up to her elbows. As she ate she picked at the fraying wood, working little slivers free. Feet weren’t sensitive enough, she thought. Once you got past the skin there weren’t many nerve endings. Hands though…

Hermione selected the sharpest of the splinters, aware that her thoughts had begun to swing towards is Ron even eating breakfast today? She pinched it carefully between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, placed the tip under the nail of her left thumb, and shoved.

This time she stayed silent. She also nearly fell off the bed in her determination to do so, her energy going into a quiet flail instead of an outburst. It hurt. And it did not stop hurting. Hermione clenched her fists hard, sucking air through her teeth, the pain sharp and bright behind her eyes. Then she got to her feet, wrapped the remaining splinters in the cleanest of her napkins and tucked the bundle into the pocket of her borrowed trousers.

She wrestled her hair into a bun (not thinking about Ron’s displeasure when it was this wild), walked downstairs with her left finger pressing into her thumb, testing whether the sensation would dull. It did not.

Discipline. Fortitude. Routine.

Hermione could do this.

“I’d like to take you to Knockturn Alley,” Malfoy said when she emerged into the sitting room downstairs. “But I’m afraid you’ll bolt.”

Hermione pressed at her thumbnail. It felt hot. “I’ll probably bolt,” she told him. “What’s in Knockturn Alley?”

“Someone I’d like to consult,” he said. He was standing by the fireplace, one hand up on the mantle, just a few steps from Snape’s portrait. Hermione had the impression they had been talking together before she came in. “She’s apparently expert on nasty potions like this.”

“Delightful,” Hermione said. She tried to keep her voice expressionless.

“We’ll have to disguise you,” Malfoy was saying. “And me as well. I doubt Weasley’s reported you missing under the circumstances, but…”

Hermione let her attention wander. It would not be difficult to give Malfoy the slip, she thought. He was so careful to keep his physical distance from her, he would hardly be keeping a hand on her at all times. Knockturn was just off Diagon Alley. Even if he took her wand away she would never be more than a quick sprint away from the joke shop.

“I am not sprinting to the joke shop,” Hermione said, cutting Malfoy off mid-sentence. She did not sound as if she meant it. Malfoy looked taken aback. “Excuse me,” she told him.

Without waiting for a response she turned and stepped out into the hallway, opened the first door she found. It was a lavatory. As rickety and cramped as the rest of the house, there was no bath or shower, only a stained toilet and a wash basin under a cracked mirror.

Hermione locked the door and took out her packet of splinters. She did not think too much about it – she just jammed one under the nail of her left index finger, biting hard on her lip to keep from yelping, and looked at her face in the mirror. Her lip was red, and there were huge, dark circles around her eyes. She looked haunted.

I am not sprinting to the joke shop,” she whispered to her reflection. The madwoman in the mirror certainly looked as if she meant it now.

Just for good measure Hermione shoved large slivers under the nails of the next two fingers on her left hand as well, as she repeated her mantra, leaving only the pinky unmolested. For now. All three of the new ones were only partly in, the tips of the wood reaching just to where her nails ended. she initial jab hurt the most – this way they were primed for an emergency.

Feeling a little ill but much more in control of herself, she went back to the living room.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Malfoy had not stopped looking alarmed. “Now?” he asked.

“Unless you’d rather give me a few hours to plan my escape,” she said.

Snape made a derisive noise from his frame. “This is foolishness,” he hissed.

Malfoy shot him a warning look, which was ignored.

“She’ll be on the Weasley’s doorstep before you can sneeze,” Snape said. “Ask her yourself,”

Hermione’s left hand curled into a loose fist. She could feel the uneven pieces of wood catch against her palm, but the splinters were still painful enough that she didn’t need to put pressure on them. She could feel her whole body in a way she was no longer used to – could feel her heart pounding and her stomach twisting, the cool slip of silk against her skin. It was her body and she was the one controlling it.

“I am not sprinting to the joke shop,” she said.

Malfoy looked at her. It was a serious, assessing look, and Hermione found her spine straightening in the face of it as she felt the urge – dusty and unfamiliar – to be judged worthy.

Malfoy knew what he was seeing. He smiled at her. It was not his pestering, arrogant smile. It lit him up from the inside, made him look almost boyish.

Off-balance and tipsy with pain, Hermione smiled back.

Behind them, Snape snorted. “By all means,” he said, “disregard my advice. Your own judgment on this matter is clearly sound.”

“Don’t be a twat,” Draco told him. He held out his hand to Hermione and she took it, still smiling like an idiot. “You can’t find the door unless you’re physically touching me,” he said. As if she needed an explanation. A reason to stand in his living room holding his hand, which…she absolutely did. Hermione looked at their joined hands, feeling the cool smoothness of his skin, the rightness and nauseating wrongness of that touch, and fought a wave of vertigo.

“Easy,” he said, squeezing gently. “Breathe, Granger.”

But it was not until she curled the fingers of her free hand against her own palm, pushed at the little points of wood so the pain rolled through her, that she felt in control of herself again.

“Didn’t you mention disguises?” she asked.

Draco flushed a little, dropping her hand. Then he fished in his pocket and drew out a little vial, the sight of which made Hermione recoil.

“It’s only Polyjuice,” he told her. “Even if I wanted to poison you I’m not foolish enough to try while you’re wearing goblin crafted jewelry. Here.” He took out another empty vial, deftly poured half of the potion into it. Then he produced two hairs – one long and silvery, the other shorter and darker, almost wiry, and added them to the vials. He sipped his without another word.

“See?” he said as his face began to bubble. “Safe as houses.”

Hermione took the other vial from him and drank, closing her eyes against the taste of it. The discomfiting stretch of the Polyjuice potion did not bother her this time – she only barely felt as if the body she’d been in all morning belonged to her. It did not hurt nearly as badly as the wood beneath her nails.

When she opened her eyes Malfoy had morphed into a short young woman with dark curls and a round, innocent face.

“Interesting choice,” Hermione said. Her voice had gone airy and cool.

“It was short notice,” Malfoy said. His own voice was quite high. “Besides, the person we’re going to see isn’t fond of wizards. Come on.” He held out his hand again.

Hermione minded even less about taking hold of it now that it wasn’t really Draco’s hand and she wasn’t really holding it with her own. And her blouse fit better, she realized. The cuffs ended right at her wrists where they were meant to. She must have grown taller.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said.

They took the Knight Bus into the city.

“I’m not risking a side-along with you in this state.” Malfoy said, speaking to himself as much as to her. “Chances are you’ll try to drag us off course and we’ll both be splinched.”

But the Knight Bus, which worked at least partly off of the intentions of its passengers, was nearly as bad. Hermione kept longing for home so violently that the wheels would swerve underneath them, annoying the conductor to no end.

Eventually she closed her eyes. “Distract me,” she whispered hoarsely. “What was Snape talking about when we left? What was his advice?”

Malfoy’s voice, when he answered, was tight. Was he angry? “To put you under the imperius curse,” he said shortly. “And to keep you that way for the next three days.”

Hermione tapped her fingers on her leg, taking comfort in how even the gentle movement sent waves of pain up her forearm.

She remembered Draco snapping his fingers under her nose, flicking her on the ear at work.

“Your judgment is sound,” Hermione said without opening her eyes.

“What?”

“I trust you,” she told him. It was easier to say with her eyes closed, with this mouth that did not belong to her, to this face that did not belong to him. “I’m not saying it’s what I want. But do what you have to do.”

They were silent the rest of the way.

The Knight Bus dropped them just outside Borgin and Burke’s, which did not particularly interest Hermione, just out of sight of the Weasley Wizard Wheezes, which absolutely did. By this point the slivers were all firmly embedded in the skin under her nails, and although they were still uncomfortable the urgency had gone out of it. But a whispered engorgement charm on one of them, making the sliver grow almost imperceptivity longer, felt horrible enough to keep her under control.

“Down here,” Malfoy said. He led her into Knockturn Alley, past a slew of businesses displaying wares – mostly either rotting, sinister, or uncomfortably alluring – towards what looked like the very end of the street. Hermione noticed her surroundings only haphazardly, as the pain from her fingers ebbed and surged. She timed the engorgement charms for when Malfoy seemed distracted. She felt awake enough to be ashamed at how difficult this was for her. How much effort it took to take such small ownership of her mind.

So she kept walking, focusing mainly on not thinking anything at all, between a pair of old wooden pillars placed beside the last shops. There were two more of them just at the end of the lane, dark and splintered and tall, and then there was nothing. Just a tangled sort of thicket that would have been more at home in a country ditch than in London.

“Are we lost?” she asked in her airy new voice.

“No,” Malfoy said shortly. He stopped, pulling gently on her hand. Hermione turned to ask what was happening, only to see that he was looking up. She tilted her head, following his gaze.

The pillars were not pillars at all: they were legs. Perched on top of them, much higher than seemed reasonable, was a little thatched cottage with smoke-stained walls that seemed to bow outwards. The sign above the door said, “Wort and Wick.”

“It looks like Baba Yaga’s hut,” Hermione said as Malfoy walked to the nearest wooden leg and kicked it hard. The leg made a grunting noise, and a rope ladder flopped down from the stoop, unrolling itself in the air until it landed at their feet. Malfoy, still somehow graceful in a body that was shaped completely different from his own, began to climb.

Freed from the stability of his hand, Hermione felt cut adrift. “I’m not going to sprint to the joke shop,” she whispered. She let herself have one longing thought of the burst of light and sound and warmth that would greet her if she did just that, the way Ron’s face would go from confusion to recognition to relief, the laughter and comfort that waited for her there. And then she followed after Malfoy, her borrowed long legs tangling in the rungs as she hauled herself up.

The shop, when they had clambered onto the stoop and pushed their way inside, was not at all as sinister as it had seemed from the outside. Hermione could not quite care enough to focus on the décor, but the air was acrid with incense and the atmosphere of the place felt…

She looked at Malfoy, whose button nose was wrinkled in distaste, his round face tipped up in an expression she recognized from school. Hermione made a fist. Her fingers throbbed.

The place felt cheap, that was it. Garish.

“Welcome,” someone said. A trapdoor in the floor opened and a head – topped with messy auburn hair – emerged from what ought to have been empty space. The woman under the hair was just as garish as her shop. She was young – just out of school, Hermione would have thought – and there were stains down the front of her brown dress. “You’re here for the new hair serum I reckon,” she said after looking Draco up and down. “Just did up a new batch yesterday. Goody Scarrow’s special.”

“Er,” Draco said. “I heard something about some excellent, erm, cold brew?” He sounded very dubious, and with good reason. The young woman – maybe Goody Scarrow, maybe not – did not seem to have any idea what this was supposed to mean.

Hermione let her mind wander as Draco tried without much tact to back them out the door. The young woman, clearly sensing the loss of a moneyed customer, began thrusting trinkets into his hands and describing them in a tone that managed to sound both cheerful and threatening.

“Got that off a merman in the south of France,” she was saying. “Swapped it for a case of pears. Take a look. You’ll want to take a look.”

It was all very stupid, Hermione thought suddenly. Malfoy was stepping on her foot. Two days ago she had been a content housewife in a perfect home with a husband for whom she would happily carve out her own liver. Now she was in a dodgy shop with Draco Malfoy and this brash teenager. She didn’t want to be here. Her hand hurt. She wanted Ron, and where was he?

Hermione looked hard at the floor, hoping for another secret trapdoor that a different redhead could emerge from, but there was nothing. She would just have to go to him, that was all.

“I have to go,” she said into the silence.

Because it was very silent.

“Do you now?” the young woman said in a very different tone.

She was watching Hermione, head cocked to one side, and she did not look so young now. Malfoy…

Malfoy, Hermione saw, was frozen in place, staring into the lump of concrete that had been thrust into his hand. This seemed like it might be an important development, but it was hard to care.

“Yes,” Hermione said firmly. She turned and put her hand on the door, which did not budge.

“Somewhere to be?” asked the witch.

Hermione pushed at the door, then gritted her teeth at the flash of pain. She had forgotten about the slivers. She rested her head against the door as her fingers throbbed, trying to get ahold of herself. Trying to worry about Draco.

“What have you done to my friend?” she asked.

Goodwife Scarrow (it seemed much more likely now that this was not just some hired shop hand) laughed. “He’s fine,” she said. “Just a little preoccupied. But you don’t seem too worried.”

Hermione gritted her teeth. “I am,” she said, trying to make it true. Then she registered the other witch’s words and turned her head to look. He, she’d said.

And sure enough, Draco was not the round-faced woman he’d polyjuiced into earlier that morning. He was his lanky, handsome self, albeit in a skirt and blouse three sizes too small. His legs looked even longer than usual.

Goody Scarrow was looking at his frozen form with satisfaction. “Selkie tears,” she said. “The rock’s infused, so they leech out if you hold it too long. Negates most disguises.”

Hermione was still touching the door handle. She jiggled it, to no avail.

“Stop trying to run away,” the woman said. “I can help you.”

Hermione let go of the door handle. She pushed her poor abused fingertips hard into her own palm, and forced herself to make eye contact. There were no whites or pupils to the other witch's eyes any longer, she saw now. The whole of each orb was the bright, shiny copper of a new penny.
“You can fix me?” Hermione asked.

So disconcerting was Scarrow’s presence that Hermione was ready to hear any kind of fairy tale bargain. What would she have to trade to be healed? Her voice, her soul, her heart? But Scarrow just laughed.

“That’s not what I said,” she told Hermione. She looked her up and down quickly – a professional, cold assessment – and raised an eyebrow. “Long term love potion?” she asked.

Hermione nodded.

“Right,” Scarrow went on. “Didn’t say I could fix you, lovely. Said I could help you.”

A chill went down Hermione’s back. She did not like the sound of that, somehow. “What does cold brew mean?” she asked, stalling.

Scarrow snorted. She waved a hand at Draco. “No idea where this one heard it,” she said, “but it’s the passcode to my real shop.” She bent down to pull open the trapdoor at their feet. Warm light spilled up onto the floor. Without bothering to look back at Hermione to see if she would follow, the small witch descended a set of steep stairs.

Hermione did follow.

The little staircase went down much further than the rope ladder outside had. It spiraled back on itself three times before they reached the little room at the bottom, which was both cozy and forboding. It smelled of spice and antiseptic; cinnamon and lye.

“Welcome to the Gall Jar,” Scarrow said jauntily. “Where the special is always revenge.”

So that was the help that was on offer. Hermione scowled.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” she said. But it sounded false even to her ears. Scarrow didn’t grace it with an answer.

“All manner of charms and potions here,” she said instead, gesturing to the row of dimly lit shelves behind her. There was a small hearth at the back wall, where a little cauldron bubbled away. “Tricky little dark magic ones, with what I call a justice clause worked in – so the soul damage goes to him instead of you. Or if you’re not fussed about that there are other options. More straightforward. Depends if you want him hurting or dead.”

How Hermione had gone from trying to flee towards Ron to plotting his demise within the span of ten minutes she did not quite understand.

“If I tried to kill him,” she said baldly, “I think it would kill me too.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I can live without him.”

Scarrow didn’t seem bothered by this. She just nodded. “I have spells for that too,” she said. As if they were discussing garden gnomes instead of murder suicide. “How long were you under?”

“Seven years,” Hermione said, and felt a little gratified when the woman’s eyebrows rose. “And counting,” she added.

But this was a bridge too far. “Tell me another,” Scarrow said. “If you’re under a love potion right now I’m a Veela.” She started to go on, and then took another look at Hermione. Then her eyebrows shot up nearly to her hairline. “But we’re having a conversation,” she said, for the first time sounding a little uncertain. “You’re here. You’re not clawing your way through the door to fling yourself at him. How are you doing that?”

Hermione felt her hand twitch involuntarily, and the sharp witch’s eyes went straight to it. She sucked in a breath.

“Clever girl,” she said.

“He doesn’t like it when I’m stupid,” Hermione heard herself say. “He likes me to be able to think. So I try…I try to be able to think.”

Scarrow looked simultaneously disgusted and impressed. “Well that’s a new one,” she said. “Little boy who pulls the wings off beetles and makes a fuss when they won’t fly for him. Well. You won’t be ready to put him in the ground.”

Hermione shook her head. Scarrow tsked. She gave Hermione a considering look, her eyes lingering on the throbbing hand, and turned around. She ducked into one of the narrow aisles and began to pluck things from the shelf there. “No,” she muttered to herself. And, “not yet.”

Pulling the wings off beetles, Hermione thought. Was that what he had done to her? She clenched her fists, feeling sick.

“Are you sure Draco’s alright?” she asked. “He hasn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t the one…”

“He’s fine,” Scarrow said without looking up. She sounded irritated. “I don’t allow his sort in my shop.”

“Former death eaters?” Hermione asked, ready to argue. But Scarrow just snorted.

“Men,” she said shortly. “You think he’s here to help you? That one wants to own you just the same as the other did, even if he goes about it different. They’re all the same once you peel the skin off.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” Draco said from the staircase.

Hermione turned.

He was leaning against the wall in his most indolent fashion, one arm stretched out so he could inspect a loose thread on the sleeve of his blouse, and Hermione knew instantly that he was very angry.

She heard a noise from the shelves – Scarrow making some kind of darting motion – and Draco moved with astonishing speed, his wand a blur, face still politely bored. “Expelliarmus,” he said, and his free hand went out to catch something. It was not a wand. Hermione thought it was a vial of some kind, but Draco did not bother to check, just vanished it with a flick. There was a squawk of indignation from the potions witch, but when Hermione turned to look she was silent, lips pursed.

She looked between the two, both angry and appraising, and tried to care. Whose side was she on? That one wants to own you, Scarrow had said.

It was Draco who spoke first.

“I broke your toy,” he said, and tossed the bit of concrete onto the ground between them. Scarrow’s lips tightened even further.

“Yours was already broken,” she spat, jerking her chin at Hermione.

If this was meant to provoke him, it apparently failed. Draco simply shifted his back against the wall and looked at the witch, eyebrows slightly raised. “Cute,” he said. “But I’m not here to spar. You’re Goodwife Scarrow, I presume. I was told you might be able to help her.”

“And what’s in it for you?” the witch asked acerbically.

Draco turned his wand on the loose thread at his sleeve, and they all watched it weave itself back into the fabric. His midriff showed as he moved. It was all very ridiculous, Hermione thought again. But she did not bolt for the staircase. Pulling the wings off beetles, she thought, and imagined Ron’s long fingers plucking at her. Her own fingers ached.

“Entertainment,” Draco said. He was smirking.

“I won’t do business with you,” Scarrow told him.

Draco shrugged. He was still inspecting his clothing, and with a little tsk he shook at the fabric, which expanded to fit him as if simply relaxing back into its natural shape. Clothing, Hermione thought with irritation, wanted to look good on Draco. Even the softly pleated skirt, which he absolutely should not have been able to pull off, looked somehow elegant.

“Consider me her bodyguard,” he said. “And temporary financial backer. You’ll get rid of me faster if you help her.” There was something dangerous about Draco now, Hermione thought. She did not remember him moving that quickly as a teenager, did not remember this careful control. Where had he learned it? When?

After a moment of tension, Scarrow sighed. She turned back to Hermione.

“When were you dosed last?” she asked.

“Three days ago,” Hermione said.

The witch gave a low whistle. “Best try for an antidote first,” she said.

“I’ve been brewing one,” Draco said. “But it’s more a general cure-all. I don’t know if I’m on the right track.”

“How often did he dose you?” Scarrow asked Hermione. She seemed determined not to address Draco directly if she could avoid it.

“Once a month for years,” Hermione said, thinking of the warm milk he’d brought her in bed. It had been like a ritual – the first of every month. “But…not so often recently. Maybe every six weeks. Just when…” she swallowed. Air from an open window, fog obscuring her mind. Pulling the wings off beetles. “When I would start to come out of it.”

Malfoy made no sound at all in response to this, but Hermione felt as if she could hear his jaw tightening.

Scarrow did not seem surprised. “Not amortentia if it was wearing off,” she said. “Obligate Drift, maybe. Or one of the Holdfasts. Lots of them on the market these days.”

Hermione swallowed. “You can just buy them?” she asked. “That easily?”

Malfoy snorted.

“Just down the road,” Scarrow told her. “On the right side of the tracks no less. Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes sells two different strains of Holdfast, last I heard.”

Hermione tried not to choke. Her voice, when it emerged, was odd and strangled. “If it was Holdfast,” she said, “What would I put in an antidote?”

Scarrow cracked her neck. “Glimrot spores,” she said. “A bit of salamander fat. Enough tarnroot to make your tongue numb. I could sell you a bottle but you’re better off brewing one with your own blood in it. And something from him as well if you can get it.”

Hermione glanced at Malfoy.

“Not him,” Scarrow said. “Him. Whoever’s been poisoning you, girl. Drop his whole head in the cauldron – that’ll cure what ails you!” She seemed to think this was very funny.

“And that will help?” Hermione asked. “The glimrot and…” she looked at Draco again.

“Salamander fat and tarnroot,” he said. “I’ve got you, Granger.”

Scarrow shrugged again. “Not much,” she said. “Seven years? You’re in the habit now. Probably why he was weaning you off – not much need for it after that long. Keep a rat in a cage long enough and it won’t run even when the door opens.”

“I did run though,” Hermione said. She felt the wooden splinters under her fingernails, every one of them individually stabbing her, keeping her grounded. Keeping her here. Discipline. Fortitude. An open window.

The other witch eyed her. “You did,” she granted. “But I’ve seen this a hundred times. It ends three ways: your death, or his, or both. That’s if you don’t scurry straight back into the cage, and don’t tell Goody Scarrow you aren’t considering it.”

“What the fuck is the point of you, then?” Draco asked, all his composure suddenly gone. “Aren’t you meant to be helping women in this situation? Isn’t that your calling?”

Scarrow shook her head. There was an unsettling gleam in her eye. “Oh, but I do help them,” she said.

“With bloody what?” Draco asked.

“With the part about his death,” Hermione said, so she would not have to hear Scarrow say it. She gestured at the shelves around them, at the sharp-fingered instruments and glittering vials at which she did not want to look too closely. “It’s all revenge, Draco. That’s what she does. That’s how she helps.”

There was a sickening silence.

“Don’t be a fool,” Scarrow said into it. “You’ll always want him, girl. You’ll always itch to have him close by, always worry about his comfort and his health and his happiness. He’s inside you now. You think you can dig him out with a bezeor and some chicken soup from Pretty Boy here? He’s ruined you.”

“I’d like to go now please,” Hermione said.

And just like that, everything in Draco’s face untwisted and he was calm again. He nodded. Gestured to the stairs so Hermione could walk ahead.

“Did you bear him children?” Scarrow called after them.

Something in her tone made Hermione look back. The witch’s face was intent, intense. Her copper eyes glinted.

“No,” Hermione said slowly. “No children.” She tried to read Scarrow’s face, but it gave nothing away. The witch did not call after them again.

“Well that was hideous,” Draco said when they reached the street. “I’m sorry.”

Hermione shrugged.

“I thought she’d know more,” he said. “I’m going to kill Pansy.”

Hermione shrugged again. She kept walking, hoping he would take the hint and follow, would take her back to his awful little house and lock the door behind her. Maybe she could knock herself unconscious again. Her fingers hurt badly, and she was tired of the pain.

“The Knight Bus won’t come through here,” Malfoy was saying. “We’ll have to catch it at the end of Diagon Alley.” He had not taken more Polyjuice – perhaps whatever Scarrow had done to him would have neutralized it, Hermione thought – and so when they reached the mouth of Knockturn Alley he paused to duck under an awning and transfigure some of his features. Hermione watched idly as he did it, as his hair darkened and curled around his shoulders, his nose shrank.

And none of that mattered at all a moment later, because Hermione’s head turned of its own accord towards the open, busy street, and all the air went out of her lungs. She was moving before she knew she had seen him, every part of her turning towards gladness, towards sunshine, towards a place where discipline and fortitude did not matter, were not needed.

Because Ron was in the street ahead of her. His head was turned away – he was speaking over his shoulder to someone – but she could see the perfect lines of his body, could see the sun on his freckles, could feel the heat of him even from a distance.

She tried to stop. She really did. But the part of her that wanted to stop was so very small, and the part that loved Ron, needed Ron, needed to be touching him, was so big. Desperately, Hermione clenched her left hand into a fist, whispered the engorgement charm and felt the slivers under her nails stab further into her skin. There was no burst of clarity now.

She doubled them again, but it did not stop her taking a single, swaying step towards Ron. Then another. Hermione tried to cast the spell again. It did not seem to be working. Her hand hurt, but vaguely, and it was very far away. Any moment now Malfoy would pull himself together and see her, and her chance would be lost. Any second she would break and run to Ron and it would all be over.

She lost track of the number of times she cast as she walked. Three steps. Four. Her wrist was wet. Ron’s hair was bright in the sun and Hermione was going home. She was going…

Two things happened more or less simultaneously.

Ron looked at her. He saw her. Stupid as she was about everything else around her, Hermione was finely attuned to the movements of Ron’s face. Disguise or not, when he met her eyes there was recognition there.

When he recognized Hermione he did not break into his familiar smile, or open his arms for her to fling herself into. No. Ron just stood there in the sunshine looking stricken at the sight of her. And when she stumbled towards him he actually took a step back.

And as he did there was a voice like a fishhook in her mind:

Turn around.

Hermione spun on the spot, towards the person on the other end of that hook, then spun again, back towards Ron.

The voice was beautiful. She wanted to obey it. But Ron was beautiful too.

Forget about him, the voice told her. Firm and soothing. Turn around and come back to me.

Hermione turned. She swayed a little, then took one hesitant step towards Malfoy, who was hurrying towards her with his hand outstretched.

“Wait,” Ron said. And despite everything Hermione could feel herself pulled to him. But before she could change her mind again Draco had reached her, was seizing hold of her left hand, and even through the fog of love potion and imperius curse, Hermione screamed.

She kept screaming as Draco, his face stricken, shifted his hold to her wrist, the pain flooding back into her as if a dam had broken. And then they were apparating, squeezing into darkness together and emerging with a loud pop on the street in Cokeworth.

Draco was still holding her wrist, was staring down at the bloody mess attached to it and making odd, choking noises. Hermione swayed, watching him. She felt…

Good. Despite the agony of her hand (she was still making little yelps of pain, she could hear herself doing it) she felt good. Now that Ron was not in front of her and Draco was, there was no competition. She felt easy and eager and good. The only thing that would make this better was if the voice would come back and she could listen to it again.

She prodded at Draco with her right hand, looked quizzically into his horrified face. “Isn’t there anything you’d like me to do?” she prompted.

A series of conflicting ideas flitted through her head, too tenuous to be commands, too tenuous to properly grasp even. She had a brief and intense desire to hold Draco – to put her arms up over his shoulders and stroke a soothing hand down the nape of his neck – and also to punch Ron. A series of further violent images followed that, quick and slippery in her mind, and then with a hint of desperation the thoughts changed. She saw herself reading a book, ignoring Draco as he spoke to her, licking crumbs off her fingers in a garden somewhere, laughing…

And then, abruptly, the curse was torn off her. The easy peace was gone, and Hermione wanted to howl with grief for it.

“What did you do to yourself?” Draco was asking.

Hermione looked at him. “It helps me focus,” she told him, although currently pain was doing the exact opposite. “I think the dose is wrong though,” she said.

The humour fell flat, but it did not matter. Hermione let him lead her back into the little house, the makeshift prison that was meant to keep her from Ron. She let him sit her down in the room with Snape’s portrait, let him numb her poor tattered fingers. He was talking in a low, intense voice, but Hermione could not concentrate. None of it mattered She felt simultaneously exhausted and as if something horrible was bubbling up inside her, pressing at her skin to escape.

And suddenly Draco’s words snapped into focus.

“When this is over,” he was saying, his voice low and furious, “I am going to peel the skin from his fingers and feed it to him.”

“Stop,” Hermione said.

Draco’s hands stilled and he looked up at her, expression warring between contrition and fury, but Hermione was not seeing him. She was seeing Ron, seeing his pain and his anguish and his fear as Draco…as Draco…

She was dimly aware of something falling off the shelf behind her. The house seemed to be trembling with her, the whole of it swaying beneath them…

Hermione looked at Draco, panicked, to find that his face was calm again. He was holding her hand, careful to avoid the swollen mess of her fingers, and his eyes were a fixed point in the chaos.

“Oh, we’re adding accidental magic now are we?” he asked, his voice light. “Granger, when you’ve perfected madwoman in the attic will you move on to other classics? Can we expect a portrayal of vengeful sea witch, perhaps? If you insist on adorning yourself in rotting kelp and molesting the remains of drowned sailors I’ll have to ask that you do it out of doors.”

The walls stopped moving.

“Breathe,” he told her.

Hermione did. “You didn’t mean it,” she choked out.

“Didn’t I?” he asked lightly. Perfectly calm, perfectly in control. Hermione could not stop the tremor that went through her – went through the house – at his words.

“Just say you didn’t mean it,” she said, looking up at him.

Draco nodded after a moment. “I talk a lot of shite,” he said, bending over her hand again. “You’d think I would have learned by now.”

But he did not make any more threats towards Ron.

It took a long time to extract all the slivers of wood from beneath her nails, to charm the bits of flesh back together. Draco worked at it in silence, and when he had finished he spread a salve on her fingertips. It tingled gently.

“This was unnecessarily disgusting, by the way,” he told her. “There are some nice little stinging hexes I can teach you that don’t leave a mark at all. There’s no need to be so dramatic about it.”

“Desperate times,” Hermione said. She felt numb.

Desperate was the right word. Loving Ron had made her desperate. She had been so desperate she had not noticed herself being destroyed. And now? No tidying frenzy was going to distract her into a better tomorrow. There were no bootstraps to pull. She had shredded herself to the bone to stop from wanting Ron and it had not worked. There was no better tomorrow. There was no routine to be built here, no fortitude to draw upon. Discipline, for the first time in Hermione Granger’s life, had failed her utterly.

The tingling was no longer gentle. Her fingers, as Draco wound bandages around each one, felt as if they were burning.

“I don’t want it to hurt any more,” she said, defeated.

“I’m sorry,” Draco told her. There was no judgment in his face. He had finished, was sitting back in his chair and watching her, hands on his knees.

Hermione wished he had not stopped touching her. She did not want that cool comfort to have ended. She felt herself swaying towards him, but his proximity still made her stomach swoop with nausea.

Everything was ruined.

“Why are you helping me?” she asked. Because it did not matter, really. She closed her eyes.

Draco took her face in his hands. His touch was firm and cool. Again she felt swooping nausea, the contradictory push and pull. Everything else in this room, this house, this world, might feel insignificant and unreal against her love for Ron, but Draco Malfoy’s hands were solid. They anchored her in place.

And so actually it mattered a great deal why he was helping her, Hermione thought. Because if he said now that he loved her, had always loved her, had held a torch these seven years and kept a pedestal empty for her return…she would break. It would break her to be loved like that.

But that wasn’t what he said. When Hermione opened her eyes there was nothing romantic in Draco’s gaze.

“Drama, drama, drama,” he said lightly. “Get it together, Granger.” But he did not answer her question. And she, grateful for small mercies, did not ask again.