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Chapter Text

The rain fell in slow, deliberate strokes against her window, each drop a measured beat on the stained glass like a spell being cast in morse. The charm she’d placed on the panes weeks ago made the water shimmer in streaks of amethyst and emerald, reflecting fractured jewels across the walls of her flat. From where she sat curled in her oversize reading chair, legs tucked beneath her, a forgotten book resting open on her lap. Hermione Granger watched the colors ripple and dance across her ceiling like ghosts that refused to rest. The room around her was dim, not with darkness, but with the thick, soft hush that only a lived-in home could possess. Bookshelves lined the walls, overfull and drooping like tired sentinels. Tea steamed quietly beside her, forgotten on the windowsill. A small magical fire crackled in the hearth, though the flames were more for comfort than warmth.

Her flat above Flourish & Blotts was modest by any standard, but to her, it was sacred. She’d claimed it the year after the war, gutted it down to brick and magic, and rebuilt it to feel like something between a study and a sanctuary. She had enchanted the floorboards to creak in the exact rhythm they had in her parents’ old London townhouse. The walls were stacked with enchanted portraits, none of people, but of forests, books, seascapes, the kind of places she could walk into when sleep refused to come. She had filled it with softness, with safety. With stillness.

The truth was, Hermione Granger had mastered the art of stillness. In a world still reeling from the scars of a war that had split families, rewired friendships, and reshaped the very laws of magic, she had found a way to hold her place. While others drank and laughed and floundered in their attempt to feel something again, Hermione had buried herself in work. She was the youngest department head in over a century at the Ministry, a rising star in Magical Legislation, known for her brutal intelligence and even more brutal work hours. Magical creature rights, cursed object retrieval, magical education reform, her name was etched on them all.

But the nights, Merlin. The nights were hard. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a warm body in her bed. She mused, perhaps, not since her short lived relationship with Ron. She’d found with how busy her work had become that she had neither the time nor the energy to invest in one nights or relationships. There were still hours, long after the reports were filed and the policy memos signed, where the quiet settled into her bones like frost.

Sometimes she still saw Bellatrix’s face in the shadows of her flat. Sometimes she woke in a sweat, wand in hand, no idea how it had gotten there. And there were other ghosts too, quieter ones. Friends she hadn’t seen since the war. Moments she hadn’t realized she’d lost until they were too far gone to grasp. She lived with them, and they with her, like silent roommates.

She closed the book on her lap without reading a word. It had something to do with time travel and love and tragic letters lost to the years. Something achingly romantic and deeply implausible. She wasn’t in the mood for fantasy, not tonight. Just as she rose to fetch another cup of tea, a sharp, unmistakable knock cracked through the stillness of the flat. Her body tensed before she could stop it, reflex born of darker days.

Her fingers brushed instinctively against her wand as she stepped softly across the worn floorboards toward the door. She knew that knock. No one else in her life knocked like that. Ginny Weasley stood dripping wet on her doorstep, one hand on her hip, the other clutching what looked like a soaking-wet leather-bound flyer. Her smile was feral. Her hair, damp and tangled, framed her face like a halo of flame. She was still dressed in Harpies green, but her robes were half-unbuttoned, like she’d thrown them on just to get there faster.

“I swear to Merlin, if this is about another cursed Quidditch glove—”

“Better,” Ginny cut her off, breezing into the flat as if she’d been invited, shedding her coat and flinging it over the nearest armchair. “This is about a concert.”

Hermione closed the door with a sigh and followed her into the living room. 

“I don’t do concerts.”

“You don’t do anything, which is exactly why we’re doing this.” Ginny flopped onto the couch with the confidence of a woman who had long since made peace with ignoring boundaries. “Besides, it’s not just any concert. It’s A Gallow’s Kiss.”

Hermione blinked. 

“The what?”

Ginny sat up straight, scandalized. 

“Tell me you’re joking.”

Hermione threw her friend a look.

“I’m not.”

Ginny looked offended.

“Are you telling me you’ve been living up here, queen of all things muggle culture and cleverness, and you haven’t heard of them? Hermione, they’re huge! And not just musically, they’re a full-on movement. Half the Auror division is obsessed. Even Kingsley went to see them last month, said it was like being punched in the soul.”

Hermione arched a brow, skeptical. 

“That doesn’t sound terribly enjoyable.”

“That’s because you haven’t heard him.” Ginny’s voice dipped, low and reverent. “The lead singer. No one knows who he is. He wears a mask, never speaks publicly, doesn’t give interviews, won’t let the label use his real name. But his voice…” Ginny shook her head, eyes wide. “It’s not just singing. It’s like he’s bleeding right there on the stage. Like the words have teeth.”

Hermione folded her arms. 

“Very poetic.”

Ginny flailed her arms.

“I’m serious. You’ll feel it. It’s not just noise, it’s magic. Not literal, obviously,” she added quickly. “But it feels like it. Like it touches some old part of you you forgot existed. And the lyrics? Merlin they’re bloody brilliant.”

Hermione hesitated. That description stirred something in her, something low and forgotten, buried beneath years of caution and policy briefs. The idea of rawness. Of something felt rather than analyzed. Hermione avoided that like the plague. Ginny pounced on the hesitation. 

“Harry bailed last-minute. I have two front-row tickets, Hermione. Barricade. Right under the stage. I wasn’t going to go alone, but there’s no way I’m wasting this. And honestly, I think you need this. Plus, you’re Harry’s best friend, you have to make up for his transgressions against his wife.”

Hermione frowned. 

“Why do people keep saying that? I have a perfectly good life.”

Ginny snorted.

“You have a perfect life, Hermione, though, you could use more cock in it if I’m honest.” Ginny corrected gently. “But it’s not a good one.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was heavy. True. Hermione looked away first. 

“Fine. I’ll come.”

Ginny beamed, victorious. She dug the soaked flier out from her pocket and handed it over. The charm on the paper flickered, showing a dark stage wrapped in shadow and a figure stepping into a single beam of light—broad shoulders, a guitar slung across his back, and a silver mask glinting over his face. His mouth was open mid-lyric, and though there was no sound, Hermione felt a strange thrum against her sternum. Like the paper itself was humming. Her fingers brushed the edge of the flier. Something inside her clenched. And then, unbidden, from the cobwebbed corners of her memory, a name rose like smoke.

Malfoy.

Her breath caught, then released. No. Don’t be ridiculous. Draco Malfoy had disappeared during the war. No body. No headlines. No arrest, no trial, no redemption tour. Just gone, like a whisper swallowed in the chaos. She hadn’t thought of him in years, a footnote to her school days. But as she stared down at the masked figure in that flickering charm, poised, haunted, hungry for something unnamed, she couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe she should have. It was easy, most days, to pretend she had healed.

Hermione had learned to perform the motions of recovery like they were incantations: wake up early, run a diagnostic charm, eat something with protein, arrive at the Ministry before anyone else, drown in parchment, and only come up for air when the building dimmed around her and the janitorial spells began their quiet sweep. She signed her name more times than she spoke it. She gave speeches with passion and precision. She drank tea instead of firewhisky. She kept her flat clean, her wardrobe crisp, and her grief cataloged in alphabetical order under “things that do not serve me anymore.”

But every once in a while, she would see a flash of something out of the corner of her eye, a silver mask in a shop window, a glint of platinum hair in the crowd, and her body would remember what her mind refused to. Panic was a curious beast. It didn’t roar anymore. It whispered. The war had ended five years ago, and Hermione Granger had made something of herself in the rubble. She had not just survived; she had built.

She was twenty-four now, the head of Magical Legislation, a pioneer in inter-species diplomacy, the driving force behind the Department’s push to ratify the Wandless Equity Act. They said her name in rooms where no one else under forty was invited. She had been offered positions abroad, titles with gold trim. Even the French Minister of Magic had once made a rather flattering, and thoroughly inappropriate, proposal over charmed wine and diplomatic contracts.

But for all her accolades, Hermione sometimes wondered if she’d simply shifted the battlefield from curses to bureaucracy. She fought with words now, but they still cost her the same energy. Still left her exhausted and bruised, only now the scars didn’t show on her skin. Love had been the trickiest battlefield of all. She had tried, once, twice, maybe more than she wanted to admit.

Ron had been her first attempt at rewriting the story, but it had always felt like trying to fold time back into a shape it no longer recognized. They were too different, too scorched by the same fire. After him came a brief affair with a Muggle linguist who couldn’t say the word “Horcrux” without flinching, then a charming, utterly vacant wizard from the Department of Games and Sports whose only consistency was his unreliability and if Hermione were honest the sex was lackluster and hardly anything but performative.

Hermione had since decided that she wasn’t meant for epic love stories. She had already lived one, hadn’t she? With a world hanging in the balance, with friends dying and returning from the brink, with good and evil bleeding into one another so violently that it was hard to tell where they ended. Maybe that had been the story. Maybe everything after was just the epilogue that no one ever see’s or talks about, the happily ever after that becomes a broken, run down fairy tale.

Still, when she had stood in front of her mirror that morning, brushing her hair into something soft and manageable, something a little less severe than her usual bun, she had stared at her reflection longer than usual. Her curls framed her face with reluctant elegance. Her eyes were lined with the faintest flick of gold charm, not too much, just enough to feel like she wasn’t walking into a lecture hall. She hadn’t worn this dress, soft black velvet, sleeveless, low in the back, in over a year. She wasn’t even sure why she reached for it. Ginny had sent her a howler that afternoon from the Harpies’ locker room.

“If you show up in Ministry robes or anything beige, Hermione, so help me, I will hex your knickers clean off. Concert attire, darling. You’re about to see the love of my life scream into a microphone. Put in some effort.”

Hermione had rolled her eyes so hard she gave herself a headache, but the dress had made its way out of the back of her wardrobe anyway. Now, standing barefoot in her dimly lit bedroom, the flier still hovering midair and casting a faint shimmer across her bedspread, Hermione couldn’t deny the strange sensation that had settled in her chest. It wasn’t anxiety, exactly.

Not excitement either. It was something old, something watching. She reached out, fingers brushing the glowing edge of the charmed flier again. The masked man’s silhouette leaned forward into the beam of stage light, his throat taut with strain, his stance something between battle and devotion. There was something familiar in the way he held his mic, like a wand, like a lifeline. She closed her eyes.

Draco Malfoy had vanished during the last days of the war. She hadn’t known what to make of it then. At the time, they were too busy counting the dead, ferrying the wounded, rebuilding the world one shattered stone at a time. His disappearance was noted, vaguely, but without ceremony. No one had mourned him. No body had ever been found. Some said he’d been killed by Snatchers. Others whispered he’d escaped to France, or Bulgaria, or Azkaban under a different name.

Some claimed he’d died a coward, others that he’d defected for good and fled before the Dark Lord fell. Hermione had not believed any of it. Because in truth, Malfoy had not been a villain by the end. He had been something stranger. Something wounded. When she’d looked into his eyes during those final months, across bloodied corridors, in the ruins of classrooms they used to learn in, she hadn’t seen hatred. She’d seen fear. And maybe that’s why his memory lingered more than others. Because fear was the most human thing she’d ever seen on him.

She shook her head, pulling herself back into the moment. Malfoy was a ghost. Nothing more. The man she was about to see tonight, a masked singer with a voice that could break the spine of silence, he was someone else. Surely. Had to be. Still… she wore her wand strapped to her thigh beneath her dress, a habit she hadn’t used in years. She was fine, she’d insist. It was for just in case. She grabbed a soft leather jacket from her wardrobe, slipped it on over the dress, and tied her curls loosely back with a simple charm. Not too polished. Not too romantic. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone. Hermione moved to the window and opened it just enough to let the breeze in. 

The sky outside had cleared, the rain now a memory soaking into cobblestones. Diagon Alley below was calm, lit with lanterns and late-night stragglers. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a group of younger witches laughing as they walked toward The Leaky Cauldron, their voices sharp and excited. She hadn’t felt that kind of anticipation in years. And maybe she didn’t believe in fate. Maybe she thought destiny was just a word people used to explain coincidence and regret. But something about tonight felt inevitable. Like a song she’d forgotten the lyrics to, playing again in a key her heart still remembered.

The venue pulsed with anticipation. That was the only word for it, pulsed. As though the building itself had a heartbeat synced to the crowd’s breathless rhythm. Hermione stood at the barricade, her fingers lightly curled around the cold steel bar, the vibration of the sub woofers already a whisper in her bones. The lights overhead were a wash of violet and ember, spinning lazily like planets caught in an unseen orbit. All around her, bodies pressed forward, clinging to space, to sound, to the possibility of something they couldn’t name but were willing to beg for. Ginny was practically vibrating beside her, wide-eyed and electric, her grin unapologetic and wild.

 “You’ll feel it,” she whispered again, as if in reverence. “Just wait.”

Hermione didn’t know what she was expecting. She hadn’t been to a Muggle concert since before the war, and even then it had been tame, string quartets, chamber halls, music that soothed rather than split you open. This was something else entirely. The energy was fevered, tribal. A hundred strangers swaying like seaweed in the undertow, connected not by logic but by desire. Not for the man, perhaps, but for what he promised: release.

But the lights cut now, full and sharp, and the crowd erupted into a deafening roar. Hermione flinched as someone behind her shrieked. The floor beneath her boots trembled. Fog rolled across the stage. Not gently. Not like mist. This fog came like war—fast, hungry, claiming everything in its path. It poured from the wings and swallowed the instruments, the amps, the cables, until only the central mic stand remained, haloed in a single white spotlight. The crowd hushed with a collective inhale, that breathless moment before something sacred or terrifying begins.

And then he stepped into the light.

Tall. Wide-shouldered. Dressed in black from boots to throat. The figure was a study in precision, in control, every movement purposeful. His arms were bare, inked in tattoos that slithered along pale skin like language Hermione couldn’t read. He wore no jewelry, no flash. The only adornment was the silver mask that covered everything above his mouth, sleek, expressionless, glinting like a second skin.

It was sculpted smooth across his cheekbones and forehead, the eye holes cut sharp and deep. The mouth below it was hard. Nonspeaking. Untouched by smile or sneer. Hermione stared. The mask was unsettling in its anonymity, a blank canvas that offered nothing. And yet it dared you to guess. To project. She felt her breath catch, shallow and slow.

He didn’t greet the crowd. Didn’t speak at all. He simply reached for the microphone and wrapped his fingers around it like a lifeline and sang. The voice struck her like a spell. There was no gentleness in it. No polished studio gloss. His voice was all broken glass and thunder, dragging each note up from somewhere low and raw in his body. It wasn’t pretty. It was true. Honest in the way bleeding was honest.

He didn’t flirt with melody, he wielded it, the way a wand wielded magic. Each lyric came like a blow, landing hard and then echoing through her ribcage. She didn’t understand the words at first. They came too fast, wrapped in drums and screaming guitar, but the tone of them, the pain, the fury, the ache threaded into every syllable, rang out clear. These weren’t songs. They were wounds. This man wasn’t performing. He was confessing. Eulogizing. Ripping open pieces of himself and flinging them into the void to see who bled, too.

Hermione couldn’t breathe.

The first three songs were pure fire, rage, grief, addiction to chaos. She watched the way he moved, unchoreographed and powerful, sometimes with the mic gripped in both hands like it might shatter, other times with his head tilted back, hair sticking to his skin as if in prayer. But it was the fourth song, the one with no introduction, no title displayed on the flickering setlist, that caught her completely off guard. The stage lights softened, sliding from violent reds to a pale, glacial blue. The crowd quieted as though instinctively sensing something sacred was coming. He stepped forward, slower now, his chest rising and falling in heavy rhythm. The guitar began low and steady. The drums softened to a heartbeat. And then the words came, quieter, more deliberate.

“I wrote your name in a language I never learned,
Carved it into the places war left empty.
We never kissed. We never burned.
But gods, I still wonder what we could have been,
If I hadn’t been the enemy.”

Hermione felt like the ground dropped beneath her. She stared up at him, but not because she recognized his face. She didn’t. There was no flicker of memory, no specific trigger. Only the sound of his voice and the ache in his words. And somehow, impossibly, it was hers. It was a grief she hadn’t known she carried. A loss for something that had never been real. Not quite love, not quite hate. Something in between, something haunted.

Her hands shook. She clutched the barricade tighter. The lyrics felt like fingertips ghosting over an old scar. Like the voice inside her head that had whispered once, only once, what if we’d been different? She had never allowed herself to ask that question aloud. Never dared to imagine Draco Malfoy without the sneer, without the Dark Mark, without the war. But hearing this now, this voice, this song, was like listening to a ghost sing back her secrets.

She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t need to. She only knew that someone out there had bled in the same places she had. Ginny was beside her, swaying slowly, eyes closed, lost in the music. But Hermione was still. Frozen in place, heart pounding in her throat. The last lines were almost whispered, the mask dipping low toward the mic:

“I never learned how to want gently,
Only how to survive.
But sometimes I still dream of you,
In another life.”

When the song ended, the crowd exploded in cheers. Hermione did not cheer. She couldn’t. She was still wrapped in silence, hollowed out by the echo of words she hadn’t known she needed. Something about the voice lingered, not familiarity, not recognition, but resonance. Like when she heard a line in a book that shattered something unspoken inside her. It didn’t matter who had written it. Only that they had.

As the band launched into another searing anthem, Hermione slowly exhaled. Her gaze flicked upward one last time. And the singer, masked, impassive, burning beneath the lights, was looking down. Not at the crowd. Not at Ginny. At her. Or maybe not. Maybe it was a trick of the light, of adrenaline, of memory. She looked away first, but her pulse didn’t slow. The lights dimmed again, low and blood-warm. Fog clung to the stage like breath, curling over wires and boots and steel. Ginny had gone still beside her, arms folded against the barricade, pupils blown wide with awe.

“They’re closing with it,” she whispered, voice tight with knowing.

Hermione turned to her slowly. 

“Closing with what?”

Ginny didn’t look at her. She looked only at the stage. 

“Just Pretend.” Ginny replied giddily. “It’s their most famous song. It’s the song that blew them up into megastars. It’s also my favorite.”

Hermione didn’t recognize the title, not at first. But something in her stomach twisted. A slow, creeping sense of déjà vu she couldn’t name. The masked singer stepped forward through the fog, shirtless now, drenched in sweat and stage light. The serpent tattoo on his arm glistened in ink-black defiance. He adjusted the mic with a gloved hand. No fanfare. No speech. Just silence. And then the first lyric ripped through her like a curse.

“I’m not afraid of the war you’ve come to wage against my sins.”

Hermione’s breath caught. Her knuckles went white on the barricade. The voice was deliberate, low, controlled, but trembling on the edges. Not angry. Resolute. And familiar in the strangest way. Not as a memory. As a mirror. It didn’t take long before her mind reached for him. Not the man in front of her. But someone she hadn’t thought of in years. Pale skin, hollow cheeks, rage folded into silence. A boy pushed too far, too young. A boy who had once stood on the Astronomy Tower with his wand trembling and a death sentence in his hand. Draco Malfoy.

“I’m not okay, but I can try my best to just pretend.”

And just like that, she was sixteen again. Wandering the dungeons alone, breathing through nightmares of the impending war, and passing him in corridors where no one else dared look him in the eye. He had never said a word. But he didn’t need to. She had understood him by the silence. It was the same silence bleeding from this stage now. This wasn’t a performance. It was penance.

“So will you wait me out, or will you drown me out?”

She hadn’t waited. She’d left him to the consequences of his choices. She had watched him with pity. With fear. With judgment. But never with understanding. And now the weight of those seconds, their mutual avoidance, the cruel symmetry of two people circling each other across war lines, landed on her shoulders like a shroud.

“I can wait for you at the bottom
I can stay away if you want me to
I can wait for years if I gotta
Heaven knows I ain’t getting over you”

Hermione’s breath hitched. Her heartbeat grew uneven. This wasn’t about a fan’s obsession. This wasn’t even about recognition. This was grief. This was a man mourning something that had never lived long enough to die, a question never asked. She could feel it in her magic, that song had been written for someone. And she was starting to believe it might’ve been written for her.

“I know the pain that you hide behind the smile on your face.
And not a day goes by where I don’t think I feel the same.”

That line, It broke her. Because she had smiled through her pain too. Smiled at Harry’s wedding. Smiled through awards, through promotions, through speeches about unity and hope and healing, all while her own soul had never quite reassembled. And the idea that someone, he, might have seen that? Might have felt that? It was unbearable. Because she’d seen it too. She had seen the fear behind his fury. She’d glimpsed the boy beneath the mask long before he’d ever needed one.

“So will you wait me out, or will you drown me out?”

The line repeated like a haunting. A chant. And suddenly she was back in the hallway outside the Room of Requirement, sixth year, where he had stood behind Blaise Zabini, eyes locked on her as chaos burned around them. He hadn’t spoken. But the look on his face had been a scream. She hadn’t known what to do then. So she did nothing.

“I can wait for you at the bottom
I can stay away if you want me to
I can wait for years if I gotta
Heaven knows I ain’t getting over you”

The crowd was singing along now, but Hermione didn’t hear them. She only heard him. The voice that was slowly pulling her apart. And she realized with sudden, terrifying clarity—this wasn’t the first time he had waited. He’d waited for forgiveness. For reprieve. For someone to see him as more than a name. And she had been silent. She could feel tears now. Slow, hot, gathering at the corners of her eyes. She didn’t blink them away.

“We’ll try again when we’re not so different.
We will make amends, til then I’ll just pretend”

The mask didn’t shift. But she could see the tension in his throat, in the grip he had on the mic. This wasn’t just a fantasy. This wasn’t art. This was longing. This was the truth.

“Weigh down on me, stay ‘til morning. Way down, would you say I’m worthy?”

Her legs nearly buckled. Worthy. He was asking to be seen. To be forgiven. To matter. And somewhere beneath the logic and reason and rigid compartments she lived her life inside, Hermione Granger did still believe in redemption. She had built her career on it. Fought for creatures and criminals and laws that had once written off entire communities. But she had never offered that grace to him. Not once.

“We’ll try again when we’re not so different.
We will make amends, till then I’ll just pretend”

The lights dimmed, then flared once more, final, searing. The music crescendoed into a scream. A crash of drums. And then silence. He dropped the mic. And walked offstage. Hermione stared after him, rooted to the floor, her fingers aching from how tightly she had been clutching the barricade. She was trembling. Her throat felt raw. Ginny turned to her, beaming. 

“Wasn’t that incredible?”

But Hermione didn’t answer. Her eyes were still on the stage. On the ghost that had once been a boy she never dared to understand still flitting across her mind. And for the first time in years, she wished she had.

The sunlight hit her face like a punishment. Hermione stirred beneath the duvet with a groan, dragging one arm over her eyes. Her head throbbed, not from alcohol or lack of sleep, but from something heavier. Emotional weight that hadn’t dissipated with the hours. She sat up slowly, her bare feet touching the worn floorboards of her bedroom. The room was silent, save for the ticking of the enchanted clock above her bookshelf.

The shirt was still there. Folded neatly at the foot of her bed. Black, sweat-stained, and unmistakably the lead singers. The crowd had surged for it, but somehow it had landed in her arms. As though meant for her. She picked it up with trembling hands, pressing the fabric to her chest. The scent still clung to it. Smoke. Citrus. Steel. Memory. Her mind circled the same refrain over and over.

“Would you say I’m worthy?”

Hermione rose slowly and walked to the small window overlooking Diagon Alley. It was still early; the cobbled streets were empty, the lanterns flickering faintly beneath the sun. The world was ordinary. Quiet. But something in her had shifted. She couldn’t un-hear that voice. She couldn’t un-feel the song. And she couldn’t shake the truth that now lived like a whisper in her bones: It had to be him. Not just a singer, not just a mask, but Draco Malfoy. Somehow, some way… she would find out for sure. And this time, she wouldn’t look away.

When she’d made her way into work after the end of the weekend, she found Monday mornings at the Ministry were supposed to be clinical, gray, orderly, and far too brisk for emotion. The fireplaces flared green with irritated officials, memos zipped like insects across corridors, and the usual stack of reports waited on Hermione’s desk with all the subtlety of a hex. Her quill had begun writing without her even directing it, responding to inquiries she didn’t care about, signing forms she hadn’t read. She hadn’t touched her tea. That never happened.

The world was moving. She was not. She sat stiff in her chair, hands folded in her lap, staring at the far wall of her office as if it might peel back to reveal a stage drenched in fog. Her fingers ached from clenching them. Her throat was dry, tight, like she’d swallowed something jagged and it hadn’t quite passed. She’d heard a thousand voices in her life. But that one, that one refused to leave. And it wasn’t just the voice. It was the words.

She had spent the night turning those lines over and over again in her mind like stones, rubbing them smooth with repetition until the edges no longer cut, but now, they only sank heavier. It didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t make sense. She hadn’t seen Draco Malfoy in five years. There had been no obituary, no funeral. He had vanished after the Battle of Hogwarts and, unlike others who sought redemption or infamy, had left nothing in his wake but silence. And yet, now, that same silence was being filled with lyrics he could’ve written with her name in mind. No. Not could have. Did. Hermione pushed her chair back with a screech and stood. She couldn’t sit anymore. Couldn’t breathe under the weight of her own stillness.

She crossed the room to the window and pressed her hand to the glass. Diagon Alley bustled below, students home for the summer, shopkeepers arguing about signage, Ministry clerks ducking into the Leaky. It looked normal. Beautiful, even. But she didn’t feel like she belonged in it. Not today. Today, she felt like she had one foot in a different world—a world where a masked singer with a voice like fire was screaming confessions into microphones, begging to be heard by one person only. She should’ve let it go. She should’ve smiled and filed it under coincidence, moved on. But Hermione Granger had never been good at letting things go.

After leaving work at five pm (her usual time being 10 pm), she stood at home, robe half-buttoned, wand clenched in one hand, the other holding the shirt he’d thrown into the crowd. She hadn’t meant to bring it back from Ginny’s. It had just… ended up there, as if it belonged. She ran her fingers along the stitching. It was standard cotton. American cut. No tag, no spell work, nothing magical at all. Except it felt charged. Her magic pulsed beneath her skin when she touched it, subtle but certain. A hum of recognition, like the resonance of a name you’ve heard in a dream but can’t recall in the waking world. She pressed the shirt to her nose and inhaled deeply. And there it was again. Cedarwood. Smoke. And something sharp—ozone and earth. The scent of someone who lived close to storms.

Her memories weren’t strong enough to be sure. She didn’t know what Malfoy smelled like. But her instincts were screaming now. She should’ve said something to Ginny, asked about the band, about their history. But she couldn’t risk the question, not yet. Not until she was certain. This wasn’t something she could afford to say aloud. Not until she saw for herself. And there was only one way to do that. She crossed to her wardrobe, dropped the shirt gently on the bed, and knelt to unlock the bottom drawer. From beneath stacks of old files and photographs, she pulled out a shrunken box wrapped in faded navy velvet. A gift from Harry. She tapped it once with her wand. 

“Engorgio.”

The velvet expanded into the original-sized box, and when she lifted the lid, the Cloak shimmered inside, soft as starlight, weightless and impossible. The Invisibility Cloak. It had felt like cheating the last time she used it. But now? Now it felt like a key. Later that night, she stood outside the venue again. Same line. Same lights. Same crowd buzzing like a living thing. But this time, she wasn’t here for the show. She was here for him. Her heart thundered behind her ribs. What if she was wrong? What if it wasn’t him? What if it was? She pulled the cloak over her shoulders. And vanished.

Backstage was chaos. Security walked with radios clipped to their shoulders, stagehands barked into headsets, and enchanted lighting rigs floated overhead like sentient stars. Hermione moved like a shadow through the hallways, her breath caught between panic and purpose. Every time she rounded a corner, she expected to be caught. Every time she passed a mirror, she caught a flicker of her own reflection and flinched. But she pressed forward. Down two more corridors, past a break room with a half-eaten pizza on the table, and finally she found the dressing room door. It was unmarked, cracked slightly open. Music was playing softly inside, an acoustic version of one of their heavier songs.

She slipped through the doorway, heart in her throat. His back was to her. He stood shirtless, toweling off his hair, his tattoos more visible now, stark against pale skin. There were scars, too. Along his shoulders, his spine, as if he’d been cut and healed unevenly. A wand scar or worse. He set the towel down, reached for the edge of his mask, paused. Hermione held her breath. Then, slowly, he peeled it off, and looked at himself in the mirror.

The face was older, sharper, weathered, but there was no mistake. It was Draco Malfoy. Hermione’s hand flew to her mouth, her knees nearly gave out. All the years of skating on the outskirts of each other, all the distance, the bullying, the history, and yet something in her chest recognized him instantly. Not just his face. His presence. Like her body had remembered what her mind had tried to forget.

He hadn’t seen her yet, he was staring at his reflection. Her heart stopped. He set the mask down and turned, Hermione dropped the Cloak. When he saw her, he didn’t flinch, he smiled, a slow, devastating curve of his mouth that held no cruelty, only knowing.

“Took you long enough, Granger.”

For a moment, the room didn’t feel real. It was too quiet. Too still. As if time itself had bent inward to cradle the moment in its hands, unwilling to disturb it with sound. The fog of her breath lingered in her throat, and the flickering light above the vanity hummed faintly as if reminding her that she was, in fact, awake. She stood there, cloaked in silence, in disbelief, in something else entirely, as the man she’d only moments ago been almost certain was a ghost stared at her like he’d known she was coming.

Draco Malfoy.

The name sounded foreign in her head now, misaligned with the man in front of her. His hair was damp, clinging to his temples, paler than she remembered but no less striking. His shoulders were broader, his arms stronger, and the lines of his face had sharpened into something that no longer looked like a boy who once stood on the other side of a battlefield. His mask lay on the table beside him, discarded, powerless. And without it, he looked unbearably human. The smirk on his lips wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t smug. It was soft.

“Took you long enough, Granger,” he said again, his voice lower now, as if he was afraid to say it any louder.

Hermione’s lips parted, but no sound came out. Her brain couldn’t catch up with her body. Her heart was racing, her palms damp, her wand still tucked tightly against her leg beneath the dress she’d worn for a concert, not a confrontation. A concert she had never intended to mean anything. She had come to hear a band, to escape. She hadn’t expected this. Him.

“You-” she started, her voice thinner than she liked. “It’s you.”

Draco tilted his head slightly.

“You say that like you aren’t sure.”

“I wasn’t,” she breathed. “Not until the song.”

He didn’t ask which one. He didn’t need to. She could see it in his eyes, he already knew. There was a silence then, thick and crawling, filled with a thousand things neither of them had ever said. Things they’d swallowed during sixth year, during the war, after. Things too messy, too dangerous to name when they were still teenagers bound to old magic and older names. Hermione stepped forward slowly, as if afraid he might vanish if she moved too fast.

“You’re alive,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. “You’re alive and… this-” she gestured around the room, to the clothes on the rack, the guitar in the corner, the half-empty bottle of water on the vanity, “-this is what you’ve been doing?”

Draco’s gaze didn’t waver. 

“Hiding in plain sight.”

“Draco Malfoy,” she said again, tasting the full weight of his name like a spell she wasn’t sure she wanted to cast. “Lead singer of A Gallow’s Kiss. Of course.”

He leaned back against the table, arms crossed, and there was something about his posture—so open, so unguarded—that made her chest ache. 

“I left everything behind,” he said simply. “The name. The wand. The world.”

“And the war?” she asked, too quickly.

His mouth twitched, but not into a smile. 

“That never leaves.”

The words landed between them like a shared wound. Hermione didn’t move. Her hands were shaking, but she wouldn’t let them show. She had faced worse. Faced him, once, in a hallway with curses ready on her lips. But this wasn’t the same boy. And she wasn’t the same girl.

“I didn’t recognize your voice,” she admitted. “Not exactly. But the lyrics…”

He studied her. 

“They were for you.”

Her breath stopped. Her thoughts scattered like embers in wind.

“You wrote them—” she swallowed, “knowing I might hear?”

“I wrote them not knowing what else to do with the version of you I carried,” he said, and the way he said it, soft, unembellished, cut deeper than if he’d screamed it. “I didn’t know if you’d ever hear them. Didn’t write them for that, not really. But they were always about you. Or the idea of you. The one I never got to know.”

Hermione’s throat burned.

“You bullied me,” she said, but it came out weak, unfinished.

“I did.” He nodded once. “And I was a coward. A child raised on fear and lies. I hurt you because I didn’t know what to do with you. You were everything I wasn’t allowed to admire. You broke every notion, every belief, the very fabric of my life simply by being you. You were… good. So bright and pure and I couldn’t understand how, so I lashed out.”

She flinched like the word was a slap.

“And still,” he went on, voice lower now, rougher, “still, there were moments… after fifth year, during sixth, when I saw you watching me with a sympathetic and worried look in your eyes. And I wondered. If the world was different. If blood didn’t matter. If my father wasn’t who he was. If I wasn’t who I had been trained to be—”

He looked at her then, really looked at her.

“If we could’ve been something.”

The words were gentle. Hermione felt like the floor tilted beneath her. Her fingers curled at her sides, useless. Her eyes burned with the memory of sixth year, all the times she had passed him in corridors, catching his profile as he stared down at his books like they were holding him together. The day she saw him alone on the edge of the lake, too still to be thinking of anything but escape.

The one time they’d brushed shoulders in the library and he hadn’t sneered, just stepped aside, eyes hollow. He had never said anything. She had never asked. Because Voldemort existed. Because the war had been coming. Because they had been children with the weight of the world on their backs and no space for anything so fragile as maybe. But now they were here. And maybe it had finally caught up to them.

“I used to wonder,” Hermione said quietly. “I’d lie awake sometimes and wonder… if you hated me. Or if you were afraid. I never knew which.”

“Both,” he said. “And neither. I didn’t know what I felt. I only knew I felt something. And that terrified me.”

She looked down, her voice barely a thread. 

“I felt it too.”

His eyes closed for half a second, like he needed to brace himself. When he opened them again, there was no mask, no swagger, no armor left.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” he said. “I don’t want your absolution.”

“Then what do you want?”

He stepped forward once. Slowly. Carefully.

“I want you to know that I see you,” he said, voice low, almost reverent. “Not the girl I mocked, not the woman the world praises. You. The one who’s still piecing herself together in the quiet. The one who remembers what we were, and maybe, just maybe wonders what we could’ve been.”

Hermione’s chest was aching now. She didn’t cry. She refused to cry. But the weight of it, the honesty, the loss, settled into her bones like winter. She looked up at him. 

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“No,” he said. “But I’ll never stop wondering.”

Neither would she. Not now. She turned away, just for a moment, just long enough to breathe. And when she turned back, he was watching her with the same expression he had worn on stage, unguarded, wide open.

“I should go,” she whispered.

He nodded.

“You can.”

But he didn’t ask her to stay. And that, somehow, hurt the most. She took a step back. Then another. She took a step back. Then another. Her hand hovered , but she didn’t reach for it. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, her magic thrumming in her fingertips like it was trying to say something her mouth wouldn’t speak. The air between them was charged, too full, too still. As though even the silence was holding its breath.

“Draco,” she said again, her voice softer now. “Why didn’t you say anything back then? Sixth year. You saw me. I know you did.”

His eyes flickered. 

“Because it wouldn’t have mattered. Not then. We were already marked. You were fighting for the light. I was drowning in shadow. There was no room for something like… this.”

He gestured faintly to the space between them. But there was no bitterness in his voice. Just sorrow. Truth.

“And now?” she asked, barely more than a whisper.

Draco didn’t speak. He stepped forward. One step. Two. Close enough now that she could feel the heat radiating off his bare chest. Close enough to see the tension in his throat, the faint trembling of his fingers as if even he wasn’t certain if this was real. His eyes dropped to her mouth. Then back up to meet hers.

“If I kiss you,” he said, voice hoarse, “I won’t be able to forget how it feels.”

Hermione swallowed hard. Her breath shivered through her.

“Then don’t.”

That was all. That was enough. He reached for her, slowly, reverently, like she was something sacred, and his hand cupped her cheek with aching care. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth. Her eyes fluttered shut just as his lips touched hers. It wasn’t gentle. It was desperate. Starved. Like they’d both been waiting years without even realizing it. His hand tangled in her hair. Her fingers gripped his waist.

The kiss deepened in an instant, no awkward hesitations, no stuttering doubt. Just heat and hunger and the quiet, devastating ache of finally. He kissed like he was terrified he’d never get the chance again. She kissed him back like she didn’t care about his past at all. When they finally pulled apart, they were both breathless. Foreheads pressed together. Eyes closed. He spoke first, voice wrecked.

“We could’ve been something.”

Hermione nodded, lips still parted, her thumb tracing the edge of his jaw.

“We still can.”

Draco leaned in to kiss her again and he swore magic sparked between them. 

Chapter Text

He couldn’t breathe. Not in the way he had grown used to, tight lungs from screaming lyrics into a microphone, adrenaline clamped to his ribs like a vice. No., this was different. This was her breath mingling with his, her hands tangled in his shirtless waist, the feel of Hermione Granger’s lips swollen from his kiss. Draco stood still, holding her like a secret, forehead resting against hers, eyes closed not out of shyness but necessity. If he opened them, if he looked at her too long, he might say something so honest it would undo him.

We still can.

Her voice still echoed through his chest like a chord struck in a hollow instrument. He’d imagined this a hundred ways. Dreamt of it, though never allowed himself to admit it. His fantasies were quiet, almost cruel in their restraint. A look, a touch, a whispered apology left hanging in the space between their palms. But this? Her mouth on his, her body pressed against his like she wanted him, he had never let himself believe he deserved that. He opened his eyes slowly, she was watching him, pupils wide and dark, lips parted just enough to tempt him into falling again.

“Tell me this isn’t just adrenaline,” he said, voice low, too raw.

Hermione didn’t blink. 

“It’s not.”

He didn’t answer. He kissed her again. After, when silence settled between them once more, intimate, not awkward, he sat on the edge of the vanity table, mask discarded beside him, rubbing at the back of his neck as if trying to ground himself in reality.

“I spent so long trying to erase him,” he murmured. “The boy you knew. The one I was.”

Hermione stood in front of him, arms crossed loosely over her chest. 

“So did I. Not the boy you were, the girl I was around you.”

He looked up at her, startled. 

“What do you mean?”

She gave him a faint, sad smile. 

“You weren’t the only one raised on lies, Draco.”

He wanted to reach for her again. Instead, he exhaled.

“I disappeared after the war,” he said. “Not out of shame, though I had plenty of that. Not even out of fear. I left because… staying would’ve meant answering questions I didn’t survive well enough to answer.”

“You could’ve reached out.”

“To who?” His voice rose before he caught it. He looked down, jaw clenched. “To Potter? Weasley? You? I burned every bridge I never had.”

Hermione stepped closer. He ran a hand through his damp hair. 

“The night the war ended, I took my wand, every galleon I could steal from the Manor before the Ministry locked it down, and I left. I crossed into Muggle London wearing torn robes and shaking like a child. I told the first person I saw I needed work.”

She tilted her head slightly. 

“And they gave it to you?”

He gave a bitter laugh. 

“No. They gave me a sandwich. Then told me to fuck off.”

It shouldn’t have made her smile. But it did. Not mockery. Recognition.

“Eventually I found a warehouse. I scrubbed floors. Slept in alleys. Sang to myself just to stay sane. One night, I was half-drunk in some bar, muttering lyrics into a napkin, and someone overheard. Said I had a voice like ruin.”

Her eyes softened. 

“They were right.”

Draco shrugged. 

“I didn’t want to be found. So I gave them a name that wasn’t mine. Sang behind a mask. Hid in plain sight. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t Malfoy the coward, or Death Eater’s son, or the boy who failed to kill Dumbledore. I was just…”

He looked up at her.

“Me.”

Hermione crossed to him fully then, stepping between his knees, her hands resting on his shoulders. She looked at him like she had never truly looked at him before. Like maybe she saw him now.

“You have no idea how often I wondered,” she said. “What happened to you. If you died. If you ran.”

“I did both,” he said quietly. “Died and ran.”

He reached for her hand, not pulling, just holding it, marveling at the feel of it in his. He hadn’t touched another person like this in years.

“I used to lie awake,” he admitted, “during the worst of it, when the crowd had gone, when the music didn’t help, and I’d picture your face. Not how you looked in school, but how I thought you might’ve looked if none of it had happened. If we’d met on a train, or in a Muggle bookstore, or bumped into each other somewhere neither of us had names yet. If I didn’t have the dark mark and you didn’t have the torture from my aunt.”

Her breath hitched. He leaned closer. 

“I’d wonder what it would’ve felt like to call you Hermione instead of Mudblood or Gragner.”

Her eyes fluttered shut.

“And I’d wonder what you might’ve said if I ever told you that the boy who made your life hell also stood in silence for years because he was too afraid to admit he—”

She kissed him then, to stop the sentence or finish it. He didn’t need to say it aloud because they both already knew if he did, she might vanish, like smoke, like memory, like every good thing that had ever slipped through his hands before he learned how to hold on. Her breath was still on his lips, her hands still on his body. Her presence still wrapped around him like a second skin. And for the first time in years, Draco Malfoy couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would be clever enough, sharp enough, or broken enough to make sense of the moment.

Hermione Granger had just kissed him. Not because they were drunk. Not because they were forced into proximity by fate, war, or prophecy. She kissed him because she wanted to. And fuck, it undid him. When he finally opened his eyes, she was still there. Her lips swollen, cheeks flushed, curls wild and falling over her shoulders in a mess he wanted to get lost in for the rest of his life. She looked like ruin and salvation at once. He hadn’t realized how badly he’d needed to see her real. Not the version his memory had carried. Not the symbol she had become in the press or in the Ministry.

Hermione.

The girl he had pushed down and away for years because he hadn’t had the vocabulary to want someone who made him feel unworthy. The girl who had haunted his sixth year in silence, who had watched him from across corridors with pity he both resented and needed like oxygen. The girl who had always felt like light, and light, he’d been taught, burned. But she wasn’t untouchable now. She was here, breathing him in like she hadn’t known she was starving. And now, gods help him, he was full of her. Her hands. Her mouth. Her yes. He couldn’t speak for a long moment. Couldn’t ruin it by rushing into whatever came next. Instead, he let his fingers trace down her spine, slow and reverent, like she might disappear if he moved too fast. She exhaled shakily. He ran his fingers across her cheek.

“Say something.”

She smiled, quiet, real, nothing like the arrogant smirks he used to wear like armor. 

“I’m afraid if I do, this stops being real.”

She looked up at him, eyes too knowing, too her. Draco smiled.

“It’s real.”

She closed her eyes and breathed that in. Then, finally, Draco spoke again. 

“I used to think of you every time I wrote a song I wasn’t allowed to write.”

She didn’t pull away. She nodded. Then he kissed her again, deeper this time, slower, like he was committing the moment to memory in case the world tried to take it away from him again. He hadn’t let anyone that close in years. He hadn’t let himself want anyone in years. Not since he vanished. Not since the mask. Not since the night he dropped his wand in the dirt outside Malfoy Manor and walked away from it all without so much as a backwards glance.

He’d been nineteen when he left. Not a boy anymore, not quite a man. Just tired. His mother had kissed him on the temple and told him to run. His father had been rotting in a cell that reeked of sulfur and disappointment. The Ministry had sent him summons after summons, demanding appearances, testimonies, paperwork, reparations. As if his signature could scrub blood from stone.

And eventually, a producer in New York who heard one demo and said, “You’ve got something. We’ll make it bleed.”

They asked for a name. He gave them one that didn’t belong to him: Ash Blackwell. Vague. Believable. Almost poetic. He didn’t correct anyone when they mispronounced it. He didn’t need them to know who he was. Only who he used to be. The band name was his idea. 'A Gallow’s Kiss'. He thought of the Dementor’s Kiss. Of how close he had come to it. Of how death hadn’t been what haunted him, but the waiting.

The space between sin and sentence. The almost. Everything in his life had always been almost. Almost evil. Almost saved. Almost worthy. And always, always: almost hers. He hadn’t expected her to show up at the concert. He hadn’t even known she still lived in London. He’d stopped following the wizarding world a few years back, after the Prophet published one too many fluffy features about Golden Trio’s romances and Ministry awards.

He couldn’t read about her. Not without choking. But then he saw her—front row, framed in light and crowd noise, stillness carved into the chaos—and his body went still. And when he saw her cry during ‘Just Pretend’ he nearly forgot how to breathe. He’d written that song in a hotel bathtub three years ago, drunk and aching, remembering the sound of her voice in the library and how he had once reached for her in a dream. He didn’t think she’d ever hear it. He didn’t think she’d understand it if she did. But she had. And now she was here. And he couldn’t, wouldn’t, fuck it up. 

In the throws of their kisses once again, he backed her up against the dressing room wall, hungrily reaching for any expanse of skin he could. Her chest rose and fell in quick, uneven breaths, her lips parted, those clever brown eyes darkened with something far more dangerous than curiosity. The lights were dim, casting shadows across her face, but nothing could hide the way her gaze raked over him like she was starving.

And Merlin, he knew the feeling. Draco spent years pretending he didn’t remember the exact shade of her curls, the way her voice sharpened when she was pissed, the way she bit her lower lip when she was thinking too hard. But now, with her body pressed against his, every repressed memory roared back to life. He didn’t give her time to second-guess this. His hands found her waist, gripping hard enough to bruise, as he slammed his mouth against hers. She gasped into the kiss, her fingers twisting into my hair, pulling with just the right edge of pain. Draco groaned against her lips, his tongue sweeping into her mouth, tasting her, sweet, sharp, perfect. She kissed him back like she’d been waiting for this just as long as he had, all teeth and desperation, her nails scraping down the back of his neck.

“Fuck,” He growled, breaking away just long enough to yank her shirt over her head. Her bra was some lacy little thing, pale pink and barely there, and Draco’s cock throbbed at the sight. 

“You’re so much more than I imagined, Hermione.”

She arched into him, her hands already working at the buckle of his belt, seeing as he’d already been shirtless when she arrived.

 “Then do something about it.”

That was all the invitation he needed. He spun her around, pressing her front against the wall, his body caging her in. Draco’s lips found the curve of her neck, biting down just hard enough to make her whimper, and her hips jerked back against him. He could feel the heat of her through her outfit, and it took every shred of self-control not to rip them off her right then. Instead, he dragged his hands up her sides, savoring the way her breath hitched when his thumbs brushed the underside of her breasts. 

“Tell me you want this,” Draco murmured against her skin.

She laughed, breathless. 

“You really need me to say it?”

“Yes.” I nipped at her earlobe. “I want to hear you admit it.”

Her head fell back against my shoulder, her voice low and wrecked already.

 “I want you, Draco. Now.”

That did it. He made quick work of her clothing, shoving her knickers down her thighs, and she kicked them off impatiently. She gasped, but before she could protest, he slid two fingers into her, curling them just right as his thumb worked her clit.

“Fuck—”

Her hands scrambled against the wall for purchase, her body clenching around him. He smirked, watching the way her thighs trembled. 

“You’re so fucking wet,” He murmured, his lips brushing her shoulder. “All for me?”

She let out a broken moan, her hips rocking against his hand. 

“Shut up and move.”

Draco chuckled darkly but obliged, pumping his fingers in and out of her at a steady pace until her legs shook and her curses turned into pleading whimpers. Just as she was about to tip over the edge as his thumb worked her clit, he pulled my hand away. She made a sound of protest, but he didn’t give her time to complain. In one swift motion, he turned her around, lifted her by the thighs, and pinned her against the wall. Her legs wrapped around his waist instantly, her nails digging into my shoulders as he lined himself up.

Draco’s eyes locked with hers. No masks. No lies. Just her and him and years of fucking tension about to snap. He thrust into her in one sharp stroke. Her head slammed back against the wall with a cry, her body clamping around him like a vise. Draco hissed through his teeth, his vision nearly whiting out from how good she felt, tight, hot, perfect. It had been so long since he’d had any sort of intimacy like this.

“Draco—” 

Her voice was a ragged plea, her hips rolling against his, urging him to move. He obliged. He fucked her hard and deep, each snap of his hips driving her higher up the wall, her moans music to his fucking ears. She clung to him like it was the only thing keeping her grounded, her breath coming in broken gasps against his lips.

“Look at me,” He demanded, gripping her chin.

Her eyes fluttered open, hazy with pleasure, and something possessive in his chest snarled at the sight. Mine. Draco kissed her again, swallowing her moans as his pace turned punishing. She was close, he could feel it in the way her body tightened around him, in the way her nails scored down his back.

“Cum for me, love.” He growled against her lips.

She shattered with a cry, her back arching, her thighs clamping around him like she never wanted to let go. The feel of her pulsing around him was enough to drag Draco over the edge with her, his release hitting him like a fucking curse, blinding and brutal and white hot as he shot warm spurts of cum into her. For a long moment, neither of them moved. Their breaths mingled, ragged and uneven, their foreheads pressed together. Then, slowly, Hermione let out a breathless laugh.

“So,” she murmured, her fingers tracing idle patterns on the back of Draco’s neck. “Does this mean I get a backstage pass for the rest of the tour?”

Draco smirked, nipping at her lower lip. 

“Hermione, you just earned a lifetime pass.”

The room smelled like sweat, skin, and something else neither of them could name, something tender and warm and impossibly rare. The kind of scent you only found in the aftermath of choosing someone with your whole body. They made their way to the old couch in the dressing room, Draco lending Hermione some of his spare clothes. After they’d both dressed, Draco lay there on the old velvet couch, heart still steadying itself against the sound of her breathing. Hermione was half-draped over his chest, her curls spread like ink across his skin, her hand idly tracing the lines of the serpent tattoo wrapped around his forearm. She hadn’t said a word in several minutes. Neither had he. It wasn’t silence. It was reverence. The kind that followed something holy.

Draco had thought about her before. Often. More than he cared to admit. He’d written lyrics in hotel rooms with her name ghosting behind every vowel. He’d stood in front of crowds singing confessions only one person would ever truly understand. But this, the realness of her body wrapped around his, the weight of her, the salt of her skin—this was something his imagination had never dared conjure in full. And now that he had it, he didn’t know what to do with it. He turned his face slightly and pressed his lips to her hair. She sighed.

“Is it always like that with you?” she murmured, voice hoarse with sleep and sex and spent adrenaline. He smiled against her temple. 

“Just with you.”

Her body trembled faintly, and he didn’t know if it was from exhaustion or something else. But when she looked up at him, there was nothing guarded in her expression anymore. No walls. No war. Just Hermione.

“It felt like…” she started, then stopped. “Like something ancient. Like we’d done that before. Somewhere else.”

He blinked. And for a moment, he wondered if they had. If, in some other life—some other history unscarred by blood purity and war—they had found each other. Maybe in a library. Or an apothecary. Or a Muggle record shop with dust on the vinyl and her fingers tracing lyrics instead of laws.

“Maybe we have,” he said softly.

She laid her cheek against his chest again. His hand drifted down her spine, slow, steady. He was memorizing her. Not in the way that wanted to own her, but in the way someone tried to remember a song after hearing it once, knowing full well the world might never play it again. She shifted.

“You know this doesn’t make sense, right?” she whispered.

Draco let out a quiet breath. 

“Of course it doesn’t. We make no sense at all.”

“But it doesn’t feel wrong.”

“No,” he agreed. “It feels like something that was supposed to happen a long time ago. And we just… missed it.”

She went quiet again. Her fingers were still drawing circles over his skin. It was almost enough to make him forget the fact that this moment would end. That she’d leave. That she had a world to return to, and he had spent a decade building one that didn’t have space for the boy he used to be. He had buried Malfoy. On purpose. And now she was digging him back up with every look.

“I didn’t know how to be around kindness,” he said. “I still don’t.”

Hermione lifted her head slowly.

“You’re being kind now.”

“No,” he murmured. “I’m just being honest.”

Their eyes locked. And in the quiet, he felt something shift. He cleared his throat and looked away, afraid he’d say something he couldn’t take back. They stayed curled together for a long while. The distant rumble of the emptying venue echoed beyond the dressing room door. The world was returning to motion, but Draco wanted to stay in the stillness a while longer. Where he could pretend. Pretend that they had met under different stars. Pretend that he hadn’t made every wrong choice. Pretend that they hadn’t wasted ten years wondering about what might have been. But he knew pretending wasn’t enough.

“I don’t want this to be a one-time thing,” he said, his voice barely audible.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look away.

“Neither do I.”

And with that, he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding for years. For a while, neither of them said anything. And then, slowly, softly, Hermione whispered, 

“What happens now?”

He didn’t answer right away. He sat up instead, carefully shifting her so that she sat with him, legs tangled, arms loose around his waist.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But I don’t want to disappear again.”

Her gaze flickered. 

“You might have to. Once people find out you’re alive—who you are…”

“I’ve thought about that,” he said. “For years. I figured if the magical world ever came knocking, I’d slam the door and keep hiding. But now—” he looked at her, eyes steady, voice clear “—now I think I might be done hiding.”

She studied him. 

“You’d give this up? The anonymity, the safety?”

“I’d give up the mask,” he said. “Not the music. Never the music. But… if being with you means being known again, really known, then maybe I don’t want to be invisible anymore.”

Hermione bit her lip, something shifting in her eyes. She reached for his hand.

“Then let’s start small,” she said. “Let’s not run. Let’s not declare anything. Let’s just, exist. Together. Quietly. Until it doesn’t feel like pretending anymore.”

Draco nodded.

“I can do quiet,” he said.

She smirked. 

“You sure?”

“Only for you.”

They kissed again, softer this time. Not with the hunger of before, but with the aching promise of something that might last. The kind of kiss that said stay and heal and finally. They slipped out through the alley behind the venue just before sunrise, under Disillusionment charms and cloaks. The city was still asleep, humming with early trains and the clink of bottles behind pubs. Draco carried his guitar case over his shoulder. Hermione walked beside him, arms tucked into his jacket. They didn’t speak until they reached the edge of Muggle London. He turned to her. 

“You want to come back with me?”

She raised a brow. 

“Where’s home, exactly?”

He smiled faintly. 

“It’s a flat above a bookstore in Soho. Not Flourish and Blotts fancy, but it’s quiet. Close enough to noise when I want it. Far enough when I don’t.”

Hermione smiled back. 

“Sounds perfect.”

He offered his hand. She took it. 

Later that week, a small article appeared in the back pages of The Daily Prophet. It was brief, speculative, half-dismissed by the wizarding public:

“Draco Malfoy Rumored Alive—Sighted in Muggle Music Scene?”

“Reports suggest the long-absent heir of the Malfoy family may have resurfaced in the Muggle world as a singer in the band A Gallow’s Kiss. No official statement has been made by the Ministry, and attempts to reach Narcissa Malfoy for comment were declined. Sources close to the matter urge caution, citing lack of confirmation and the potential for mistaken identity.”

Most readers scoffed. Some rolled their eyes. A few skeptics dug into photos and compared tattoos. But within days, the article faded beneath a scandal involving goblin banking and a dragon sighting in Wales. Hermione clipped the article anyway and tucked it into a book she never let anyone borrow. Draco framed it. Not for the content—but for the possibility. For the truth hidden between the lines.

They didn’t move fast. They didn’t move slow either. They met in between, in that fragile, golden space where healing began. Some days were harder than others. Some nights, Draco still woke with dreams too heavy for words. And sometimes, Hermione still flinched at sharp sounds or walked through certain shadows too fast. But they had learned to let those ghosts sit beside them without apology. 

They didn’t need perfect. They only needed now. He sang. She worked. They shared books and takeout, silence and sin. And one night, weeks later, he played her a new song on a battered acoustic guitar as she curled on the couch with a mug of tea. He didn’t sing the words aloud, just played. But she heard them anyway. And smiled.