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jomiddlemarch · 2 months

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Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future

Taking in-house on-call at St. Mungo’s on Imbolc wasn’t the absolute worst, as far as Hermione was concerned. It wasn’t a major holiday and the Scottish weather, an unfathomably vile mix of sleet and snow accompanied by icy gales that defied any warming charm, lent itself to staying in. As her social life was not exactly riotous post-break-up with Ron, however amicably resigned and rueful they’d both been about it, staying in at St. Mungo’s, with its endless supply of ginger biscuits and at least one interesting patient per ward, was tolerable. Acceptable.

It could have been, anyway.

“You like being on-call, Granger?”

That was Draco Malfoy, her fellow senior registrar, academic rival, and star of far too many risqué dreams she continued to blame on eating cheese late at night. He’d grown significantly after the final battle, which she refused to capitalize when she thought of it, just as she refused to refer to Voldemort as anything other than Tom Riddle. Draco, no longer beholden to a genocidal sorcerer who had far too close a relationship with his voracious familiar and thus no longer suffering from an untreated ulcer along as well as the fear of watching his mother being tortured in her own sitting room, had put on a good 2-plus stone of muscle along with several more inches and somehow managed to make the lime-green robes St. Mungo’s insisted on look like something that would get an approving nod during Fashion Week in Milan. It should be a fourth Unforgivable that someone so silvery blond didn’t look anemic, bilious, or curdled in the next hue over from chartreuse. He looked edible.

Delicious.

Hermione looked like a generous dollop of the Seafoam Salad her American Cousin Luella brought to every summer tea-party Hermione’s mother had ever thrown, despite being told she was such a dear but she needn’t. Hermione tried to take comfort in the many extendable pockets she’d been able to spell into her robe’s inner lining, but nothing could fully offset the color.

At the moment, Draco had opened his robes and put his feet up on the coffee-table in the staff break-room, his collar unbuttoned, his tie loosened. He’d stopped using whatever charm or enchanted pomade he’d relied on when they were at Hogwarts and his hair looked silky, a lock threatening to fall across his forehead. If they were called to an emergency, he’d probably cast a wandless Reparo vestis and immediately look the part of a Pureblood senior registrar, but in the meantime, he was…louche. Unconscionably, unbearably erotic.

Hermione thought back to the tea she’d hurried through before heading to Dangerous Dai at a brisk clip. She’d had nary a bite of Brie. Or Cheddar.

She had no plausible deniability.

Still, he was helping a bit with the judgy curl to his lips and that gleam in his grey eyes which was somewhere between curious and condescending. She’d lean into the condescending part.

“I don’t mind it. It’s part of the work, being a Healer. If you have a true vocation, you don’t resent being on-call,” she said.

She sounded like an impossible prig even to herself but needs must.

“Bollocks,” he retorted, but not meanly. “Don’t you miss your cat?”

“Crookshanks is part-Kneazle,” she said.

“Fine, your part-Kneazle,” Draco said. “Wouldn’t you rather be home with him, doing whatever it is you do away from here?”

“Are you fishing for details or trying to mock me? You’ll have to decide,” Hermione said.

“I’m trying to say it’s just the two of us here, you don’t have to pretend you love being stuck at St. Mungo’s overnight,” Draco said.

It occurred to Hermione that if she suffered a cardiac event in the next three seconds, Draco would be the one to resuscitate her and that no one ever looked their best post-resuscitation, even when magic was the primary intervention. Vanity, that’s what would keep her from having a heart attack.

Just the two of us.

For Sweet Circe’s fucking sweet sake.

Draco gave her a searching look because the pause had lengthened notably. Anyone else would have said something like Earth to Hermione, except they’d have to be Muggleborn to say that, because Wizards still didn’t grasp that Muggles had been to the Moon and sent rovers to Mars. They didn’t grasp a dog had been sent into space.

“It’s all right. I don’t actually mind it all that much myself, if I’m being honest. And before you feel compelled to point it out, yes, I am Slytherin but I am capable of candor, especially when it suits my needs,” he said.

“It suits you to be honest with me?” she said.

“We’re a team, aren’t we?” he said and she nodded before she could stop herself and ask what exactly he meant, she’d happily taken four feet of parchment on the topic. “Lying, keeping things from each other, it won’t help us. I know you don’t trust me—”

“I—” she interrupted, breaking off when she realized she wasn’t sure she wanted to say she did trust him or that she wanted to, very badly.

“I know we agreed to a fresh slate when we started training here and I also know if was too much to ask of you,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Yes, I was under duress. Yes, I was seventeen. Yes, we’re all allowed to make mistakes. But I still have a brand on my arm from a group that wanted you dead and defiled and the best I did on your behalf was to pretend I didn’t know you for a few minutes,” he said.

“What else could you have done?” Hermione said, shrugging.

“I could have risked my life. I could have died,” he said. “Potter did, when he saved me from Fiendfyre—”

“I’m not nearly as nice as Harry,” Hermione said.

Draco laughed, rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“You’re a better person than I am and you don’t have to argue with me about it. Some things are simply true. I’d like you to trust me, that’s what I’m saying, albeit terribly clumsily,” he replied.

“Albeit?” she repeated. Using humor to deflect was a time-honored tradition and she didn’t know what to do with her sizable attraction when it was suddenly not only about his broad shoulders and narrow hips, the feline grace of his gait, the North Sea of his eyes and his impossibly deft hands (Nimue help her, Draco’s hands…) but also his mind, his insight. She’d known he was clever, her equal in most fields, slightly ahead of her in Charms (though behind in Arithmancy) but she hadn’t appreciated how thoughtful he was or had become. How he could be gentle.

“I use overly formal language when I feel out of my depth,” he said. Admitted.

“You were totally at ease then, when Crispin Fillament was hemorrhaging? All I heard was good old Anglo-Saxon obscenities from you while you were trying to shove the blood back into his aorta,” Hermione said, grinning.

“That bugger. He wasn’t helping at all, and I don’t mean his choice to sing operettas,” Draco said. “It was like his blood didn’t even want back in. It felt oddly sentient—”

“Operetta can be polarizing,” Hermione said. They were having an absolutely insane conversation, Thickey Ward caliber, and she was more relaxed than she’d ever been around him while also being turned on. Draco’s expression shifted from entertained to speculative. Assessing. She resisted the impulse to touch her hair or fiddle with the collar of her robes, glad she’d kept her shoes on, regretting her laundry day choice of striped tights.

“We’ve worked together for nearly seven years and you still don’t trust me,” he said.

“I don’t suspect you of, well, anything in particular,” she replied. It seemed a weak response, even to her. It might not even be fair, but she couldn’t necessarily feel her way into being fair to him. Even if there were times when she wanted to.

“I know. It’s good of you,” he said. “It just, it’s not enough.”

“It’s not enough? You dare to demand I—”

“I’m not demanding anything, Hermione,” he interrupted. “I don’t expect more. I don’t deserve more. I only want more.”

“You want more,” she repeated. She sounded somewhere between incredulous and stupid. As he’d spent a significant amount of his youth the Crabbe and Goyle, the stupidity shouldn’t bother him as it did her.

“I believe Weasley liked to refer to me as a greedy git. I don’t pretend to have entirely outgrown that,” he said.

“That was because you hogged the pudding,” Hermione said.

“Well, I’ve outgrown that. Though I do still like sweet things,” he said. He tilted his head to one side and should have resembled an owl but of course, he didn’t. If anything, he looked like a fallen angel, though he probably wouldn’t have recognized Lucifer if she’d mentioned the name. The Bible was given short-shrift in the Muggle culture studies required at St. Mungo’s where they ran more to Pasteur, Salk and gene-sequencing. “If I want more, I must give more.”

“Is this some sort of rudimentary physics equation?” Hermione said. “You do know Newton covered this area already.”

“I mean, if I want you to trust me, I need to give you more reason. I need to share more, so you feel I’ve earned it. That it’s, I’m worth it,” he said, nodding as he spoke. Hermione felt herself flush and wanted to argue but she couldn’t think of anything compelling to refute his assertion.

“Shall I tell you why I became a Healer?” Draco said.

“If you like,” Hermione replied diffidently, as if she hadn’t wondered nearly every time she saw him and had frankly obsessed over it for the first six months of their training. Obsessed as in Ginny staged an intervention with Padma and Susan and Gabrielle on the Floo, with Luna playing mother over the teapot joining in the chorus that maybe Hermione needed to let it go or go ahead and jump Draco’s bones. She had been so far gone Luna Lovegood had told her she needed to get some perspective (which she suggested would be helped along with a tincture of canawaddle blossom and raging iron jaguar tears. Hermione had just taken the full glass of Shiraz Padma offered and nodded.)

“Because of my parents,” he said. It had been his idea to discuss his reasons but he seemed uncertain how he’d explain or uneasy about her response.

“It was their idea?” Hermione hazarded a guess. It wasn’t a good guess and she’d be shocked if she were right but it was within the realm of possibility in a world where there were both cellphones and wands threaded with a phoenix’s fiery tail-feather.

“Fuck no,” he said, almost choking on a laugh. A bitter one.

“It might’ve been,” she retorted.

“Only you would believe that possible and before you get horribly offended and flounce off, I mean only you could believe them capable of such humanity. That they would care about other people, that they would care that I did something worthwhile with my time,” he said. He made a calming gesture with his hand, the one he wore a signet ring on. It wasn’t the Malfoy signet though. “You also forget they are the most terrible snobs and think any kind of work is beneath a Malfoy or the bloody scion of the Most Noble House of Black. My mother thinks I’m overly sentimental and my father thinks the whole thing is crass and degrading.”

“I don’t flounce,” Hermione said because what he’d said was a lot to unpack and she couldn’t risk him thinking flouncing was within her repertoire.

“I stand corrected,” he said.

“Why did you become a Healer? How were your parents involved?” she asked.

“They ruined so many lives. My father, I’ve never asked, I’ve never wanted to know, but I think he’s a murderer and my mother went along with it all. Whatever she told herself about how she had to put me first, it was all an excuse,” he said, holding her gaze the whole time. “Other families left Britain. Other families refused to take a side. Millie’s parents sent her younger brothers to Ilvermorny. Zabini’s mother cast some spell on Blaise that kept Voldemort from touching him, something Darker than Dark, she called in favors all over Europe and West Africa. My parents ruined my life. This is the best way I could think of to make something of it all.”

“That’s, I don’t even know what to say, Draco,” Hermione replied.

“You don’t have to have something to say. It’s just how it is,” he said.

“Is it enough? Atonement?” Hermione asked.

“Mostly. And I like the craft. Snape played favorites and he gave me extra lessons, tradework secrets. The man was frankly a bloody genius. Sectumsempra was his juvenilia. I’m good at Potions and I was taught by one of the best Potions Masters in the past three hundred years,” Draco said.

“It’s nice to hear you admit it,” Hermione said.

“The special treatment or Snape’s brilliance?”

“Yes,” Hermione said, making Draco smile.

“I wished I could have saved him,” Draco said. “Though I don’t know what surviving would have meant for him. He was broken.”

“He wanted us to let him go. After he gave Harry the memory, he didn’t want to have to live anymore. I tried to stay. Harry and Ron didn’t see his eyes, but he looked at me and I knew it,” Hermione said.

“He doesn’t haunt me. In case you’re wondering,” Draco said. “His portrait often has a choice remark for me, but that’s all.”

“I became a Healer because of my parents too,” Hermione said.

“Yeah?”

“When it was getting close, that last year, you know, none of the adults made any plans to keep my parents safe. They told me not to worry mostly. All Dumbledore cared about was Harry and the Elder wand. Tonks, she was your cousin, she was the only one who said I should look out for my own people,” Hermione said. Tonks’s hair had been a rich chestnut streaked with white when she’d said it, her eyes the glittering green Hermione had always wished to see in the mirror, and she hadn’t minced words. She’d been as serious as Hermione had ever seen her, serious as death, and then it wasn’t spoken of again. Hermione had hoped there would be a time to tell Tonks, to thank her. “I Obliviated my parents and relocated them to Australia, I gave them new identities. I erased myself from their minds. Entirely.”

“What?” To his credit, Draco looked 90% stunned and 10% impressed. Harry had looked 100% horrified and Ron had physically recoiled when she told them.

“I did some research, figured out how to Obliviate them in the way that would keep them safest,” she said. “Voldemort wasn’t going to care about two random Muggles named Wilkins in bloody Melbourne. Other than you, your father and Snape, none of the Death-eaters were smart enough to figure it out and it turned out Snape was a double-agent, so my odds were even better than I’d counted on.”

“That’s advanced charmwork,” Draco said. “That kind of Obliviation.”

“I had to use Arithmancy too. And runes,” Hermione said. “It had to work. I couldn’t ruin their lives. I couldn’t be the reason they were killed.”

“It worked,” he said. “You saved them.”

“Yes. But it was harder to reverse than I’d hoped,” she said. She said hoped but she meant thought, planned, expected. She’d been wrong. “And when they remembered, they remembered I never asked their permission.”

“You didn’t?”

“They’d never have agreed. I cast the spell behind their backs. An assassination, my mother called it,” she said. She hadn’t told them about being tortured; they couldn’t understand Cruciatus the way anyone magical would and she didn’t want them to ask why she hadn’t confided more in them. Didn’t want them to feel guilty or worse, to accuse her of trying to make them feel guilty to justify her actions.

“You saved their lives,” Draco repeated.

“That’s what I tell myself,” she replied.

“Do you plan to specialize in memory curses? Because of your parents?” he asked.

“No. It’s not that. I became a Healer because they can understand it. They are dentists, Muggle Healer for teeth, and I was able to preserve all of that when I Obliviated them. They would have said, once, I should take up whatever career I felt called to, but they value healing. It’s something we can talk about. Without much…rancor. They see what we do as another science, this training similar enough, the way the American medical system is similar to the British one,” she said.

“Do you even want to be a Healer?” Draco said.

“It’s fine. Maybe I would have ended up here anyway. You have to master a lot of different magical disciplines and there’s some research to be done. There’s always other people around and you can get a decent cuppa in the canteen,” she said, shrugging. “The robes don’t suit me, but that’s a small price to pay.”

“You wanted something else though,” he said. “You don’t have to lie to me. I won’t try to convince you to leave St. Mungo’s.”

“There’s a course on ancient magics in Alexandria. And the Wizarding Library there, they do archival work and Anatomia liborum,” she said. “I read about it when I was researching the Horcruxes. It sounded intriguing.”

“What else?” he prompted.

“In Japan, at Mahoutokoro, there a witch studying arithmancy and algorithm engineering. That’s a Muggle science, it has to do with computers and programming, which you probably have no idea about, but it’s cutting edge work,” Hermione said.

“Instead you’re here,” he said.

“It’s not so bad,” Hermione said. It was easy to say, because she’d said it to herself about a thousand times. “I’m learning a lot and it’s important, to be able to heal people, and sometimes what’s wrong with them seems impossible, but in an absurdly funny way. My parents like it, when I tell them about work, even if I have to tone it down so they believe me.”

“Doesn’t seem like enough. Not for you,” he said.

“You’re here,” she replied, before she thought better of it.

For a moment, Draco was so still she wondered if she’d cast a wandless Petrificus totalis without consciously registering it.

“It’s not what you think,” she said.

“What do I think, Hermione?” he asked. He didn’t sound sly or arch, not remotely mocking, though he could have and she wouldn’t have been able to blame him. He sounded serious, as if she was the final arbiter of his fate, the Chief Witch of the Wizengamot pronouncing his sentence.

“It wasn’t a grand declaration,” she said.

“I didn’t think ‘you’re here’ was a grand declaration,” he replied. He’d relaxed a bit. Bully for him. Hermione felt like she might spontaneously combust, which coupled with the lime-green robes, was certain to be unattractive.

“You’re clever and well-read and you don’t cave when I argue with you but you don’t try to squash me either,” she said. “You think of things quite differently than I do, but in a good way. You’re my peer, intellectually.”

“I’m your peer, intellectually. That’s what you meant,” he said.

“You spent your formative years with Crabbe and Goyle. It’s not nothing,” she retorted.

“I played chess with Blaise Zabini for seven years. Theo Nott taught me Sanskrit and Pazu Veda in his spare time,” he replied. It felt like an obscure jab at Harry and Ron, neither of whom would claim to be excellent student, but who each had their strengths. They were, perhaps, not ones that lent themselves to spirited discussions, especially since Hermione had an admittedly limited grasp of chess and no real motivation to learn it. She wouldn’t risk the conversation devolving into a cranky argument, relitigating their school-days.

“Theo Nott was fluent in Pazu Veda?”

“They don’t teach necromancy at Hogwarts, so I can’t vouch for his fluency, but he could read it and translate,” Draco said. He crossed his legs at the ankle, a gesture of pure insouciance. His grey eyes studied her and she lifted her chin. “You’re stalling.”

“I’m not,” she said. For possibly the first time she could remember, she wished to be paged to the receiving area to attend to a disgustingly feculent and smoking heap of Wizard burping up turds, suffering from an unknown but obviously not life-threatening curse or potion.

“If you don’t want to talk about it anymore, we won’t. I wanted you to trust me and that won’t happen if you feel like I’m grilling you or prying. I’ll try to keep doing whatever it is that makes me being here make St. Mungo’s worth it to you,” he said.

He was a Slytherin but he’d spoken as directly as an Gryffindor, as thoughtfully as any Ravenclaw, as kindly as any Hufflepuff.

“I like you,” she said.

She was not going to mention lust, her own for his face, his shoulders and his hands, the nape of his neck, the line of his thigh when he crouched down to talk to some patient on the Thickey Ward who thought they were a mole. His lips when he smiled. His eyes when he had a new idea that she was going to hate at first. She was courageous, not foolhardy.

“I like you too. Very much,” he said. “Exceedingly. I don’t want you to worry, having said it first, that your feelings are unrequited. They are very, very requited. Maximally requited.”

“I only said I like you,” she replied.

“I know. You don’t make grand declarations. I do. When they are called for,” he said.

“And it’s called for now?”

“We’ve worked together for seven years. We’ve known each other since we were eleven. You just admitted you like me. I’m not risking waiting another decade for you to understand how I feel about you,” he said. “Wizards have long lives but I’d hate to have this conversation with a white beard down to my navel.”

“You will never have a white beard down to your navel. You’d never do something so cliché,” Hermione said.

“You’re probably right. But I still prefer telling you tonight,” he said. “It means that when I ask you if you’d like a cup of tea and a biscuit in the canteen, you’ll know I don’t just mean a cup of tea and a biscuit.”

“But we’d still have those, right?” Hermione said. “Because I skipped lunch today.”

“I will buy you every biscuit in the canteen,” he said. “And breakfast tomorrow morning. Somewhere where you can get a decent omelet.”

“So, someplace Muggle,” Hermione said.

“Most assuredly so. At least until we both have a weekend off,” he said.

“Then what?”

“Then I take you to Paris.”

Five hexes, three Dark-adjacent curses, nine (nine!) misbrewed Potions causing inflammation, exudation, and one case of rapid-fire recitation in Norn, an unlicensed researcher’s run-in with a surly matagot, and a family suffering from mazy measles, meant that no biscuits, chocolate, ginger or lemon, were consumed and the tea in the canteen’s urn remained untasted by either of them.

They did, however, make quick work of a passable cheese omelet at a very nice café once they’d given sign-out to the day’s team.

And Draco Side-alonged her home, giving her a kiss on the cheek at the door.

Hermione kissed him back. Not on the cheek.

She wasn’t about to wait for Paris for a French kiss, not when they had so little say over the on-call schedule.

Not when he looked at her with those sleepy grey eyes.

Not when he murmured her name against her lips.

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jomiddlemarch · 4 months

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Sunt Leones

The first time Draco saw her, he didn’t recognize her.

Hermione Granger, whose face had haunted him for over thirty-five years.

The first time, he only saw a middle-aged brunette woman with her hair in a tidy bun, a plain smock with a badge over a jersey, a nameless volunteer at St. Mungo’s.

On the Janus Thickey ward.

The second time, he wasn’t sure.

It was her again, the same woman, but was it Hermione? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her properly since the Battle of Hogwarts, he had, quite often in fact, since she’d risen in the Ministry to become a senior-level civil servant and he’d managed to rehabilitate himself with the help of ample donations to good causes, Astoria’s refusal to live at the Manor, Scorpius’s Sorting into Ravenclaw. His platinum blond hair fading to a non-descript pale grey hadn’t hurt, nor the rumpled, academic air he’d picked up during the year he spent teaching at Ilvermorny.

He was familiar with Hermione Granger, senior liaison to the Wizengamot, her neatly braided coronet a far cry from the riotous curls of her girlhood, the Golden Girl Maenad of his youth now entirely discreet, circumspect, so well-respected her divorce from Ron Weasley hadn’t made a scarlet woman of her, the author of a dozen consequential bills, the mother of two highly competent adults, both pursuing advanced studies, her son doing something like a Potions Mastery at Oxbridge without requiring any Muggles to be Confunded.

She wore opal earrings and tailored robes in navy or charcoal. She held your gaze without flinching. She carried her wand in her ringless left hand and cast wandless with her right. She smelled of bergamot, orris root, vetiver. She was resolute, poised, the epitome of competence.

He’d never seen her at St. Mungo’s. He’d never seen her crouching beside a patient to offer a plate of ginger biscuits. He’d never seen her pause and look across the room, her eyes unfocused, one hand balled into a fist.

He’d never seen her begin to cast a spell, the darkness collecting near the ceiling, and then pull it back.

He’d never seen the bright streak of silver in her hair like a Goblin-wrought filet.

Astoria would have told him to approach her and simply ask.

Astoria would have said he was being a bit silly, that she wouldn’t bite and if he were wrong, the woman would likely take it as a compliment.

Astoria would have smiled at him, but she’d been dead for over three years and he couldn’t bear to talk to her portrait, even if it hadn’t been hanging in their son’s suite.

He asked Mizzy for lemon biscuits and ate a plateful, brooding.

He considered Owling Neville, but it was end-of-term and the latest batch of venomous tenaculas were especially fractious.

He waited. He knew how these things went. He’d find out, if there were a third time.

There’d be a third time.

“Madam Granger?” he said, using the workplace honorific because it seemed far too presumptuous to use her first name, even though at arm’s length he was sure he was right. It was her.

“Not here,” she said. He thought she meant outside the day room on the Thickey ward, from whence the tinkling of the enchanted piano drifted, the spell too heavy on the bass clef, though he supposed that might make it easier to dance to, if one struggled to dance to a waltz in the first place. The witches and wizards he could see were all settled on sofas and armchairs, engrossed with dust motes or discussions, sometimes with others. Their conventional robes were cleverly modified to keep from tangling or tripping, easily secured by shaking hands, in the soft pastels one associated with the very elderly though half the people in the room were obviously under forty and half of those had scars no Healer could remove.

“The canteen?” he offered. St. Mungo’s wasn’t known for their cuisine, but the tea was passable as long as you didn’t rely on the cart, and he didn’t imagine either of them was hungry.

“I’m Jean here,” she said, tapping the badge above her heart with her finger. “No surname, no title.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s easier,” she explained. “To be no one of consequence. For those who’d remember. For those who wouldn’t, one name is simpler.”

He wanted to say she could call herself Nobody and she’d still be someone of consequence, that it was in her bearing and her expression, but he wouldn’t argue, because she might expect that and because it would be rude, even if he meant it to be praise.

“I see,” he replied.

“You want to talk, I gather,” she said. “The canteen will do for me, though I warn you the cakes are almost horrid.”

“Almost horrid?” he asked.

“They’re too bland to merit actual revulsion,” she said. “You probably aren’t familiar with something like that.”

“On the contrary,” Draco said. “I’ve been striving to achieve that status for the past thirty-odd years. But if you’re willing to sit down and talk with me, I would appreciate it.”

“Why are you here?” he said once two cups of tea sat between them, charmed to stay warm however long they sat. He didn’t expect it to be necessary.

“You asked me, if you recall,” she said. Her eyes were darker than he remembered, perhaps because of the shadows that lay beneath them. The drab volunteer smock she still wore did her no favors, while only inciting more questions.

“I meant, why are you here at St. Mungo’s? Why are you spending your precious free time volunteering on the Janus Thickey ward?”

Draco heard himself as she must have, his confusion masked by his drawl. She would assume he meant to be snide, had asked her to tea only to sneer at her.

“You don’t really want to know,” she said, gently enough given his provocation. “You think you do know, you think I’ve got some sort of martyr or savior complex. Or you think I’ve nothing better to do with my time, since my marriage ended, a pathetic divorcée filling the empty hours—”

“You think I am still a cruel boy who cannot bear your success,” he retorted, keeping his voice even, but the damage was done and hadn’t he done enough to this witch? She pressed her lips together and he took a breath. This wasn’t what he’d wanted, for her to withdraw from him, to expect him to try and hurt her. He began again. “I was curious, seeing you here. Healthcare hasn’t been one of your areas of reform, I didn’t know it was an interest of yours. It never occurred to me you would be here. Virtually incognito.”

“I’m not incognito. I’m Jean, I volunteer on Tuesday and Friday evenings, a dab hand at knitting charms, terribly fond of Kneazles. That’s true, even if it isn’t all I am. It’s enough here,” she said. “I’m not here because I’m lonely. Alone. Because I’ve no better offers—”

“I didn’t mean to suggest that,” he said. He’d wondered though, whether she wanted anyone in her life. Whether he might ever be someone she considered in that way. Draco could hear Astoria’s voice, amused, fond, repeating in that way and then reminding him she hadn’t wanted him to mourn for her for the rest of his life and oughtn’t he get back on the broom as it were. Astoria had only been clumsy when it came to Quidditch metaphors. “I saw you, from the hallway and I couldn’t believe my eyes—"

“I belong here,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” he replied.

“I spent three months here, right after the War ended, with my parents. Here, the Janus Thickey ward. I’d Obliviated them, to keep them safe,” she said.

“You did what?” he said, the realization dawning even as he spoke. She’d undertaken something he would never have dared, to keep her family safe.

“I Obliviated them. I removed every trace of myself from their memories, from their lives. Riddle would have had them killed, tortured first, to get to me. To get to Harry. I broke them first,” she said. “I always meant to bring them back. Casting the spell was difficult. Undoing it was harder. I couldn’t do it alone without killing them. It wasn’t clear anyone could.”

“Did they survive?” he asked.

She looked down at her hands, the ones that had done the work. Draco had often wished to cut off the arm with the Dark Mark emblazoned on it. He suddenly knew she felt the same about her right hand but it didn’t seem like Harry or her husband had ever talked to her about it the way Astoria had spoken to him. Quietly, patiently, without any determination towards success. There would have been nothing for Hermione’s parents to say to her, once they had been resurrected. She had to live with what she’d done; his brand had faded, but the weight of the casting could not be washed from her palm.

“Yes. They did. And they forgave me. But they still left Britain and won’t come back,” she said. “I thought, when they left here, St. Mungo’s, I’d never come back.”

“But you did,” Draco said.

“I was wrong. I thought I’d survived the War,” she said. “I didn’t understand right away I was another casualty. That I could leave this ward but I really wouldn’t.”

“Trauma, the Muggle Healers call it I think,” Draco said, very carefully, seeing now how vulnerable Hermione was.

“I mean the girl I was died in the War. The woman, the witch I could become, was murdered,” she said. “I’m what’s left, worse than a ghost or maybe less than one—”

“Hermione—”

“Jean,” she corrected. “It was already too late the first day I came to Hogwarts. When I thought everything was possible. When I thought there was a whole new world for me. That I was welcome.”

She shrugged. The boxy cut of the canvas smock emphasized how slender she was. She’d always been slight, likely hadn’t grown as she was meant to, the War stunting them all in myriad ways. She’d spent a year on the run in the woods with Harry and Ron, returning pale, a belt cinched tight around her waist, too slim, drawn too fine. He’d never seen anything as delicate as her wrist when Bellatrix tortured her. A parent now, he could see how she’d starved, how she’d held a burden too great, Ron supported by his clan, Harry by his two best friends and Dumbledore’s confidence. What had she had besides her own will?

“You might have been,” Draco said. “If you’d been Sorted otherwise, maybe along with Neville, if bloody Dumbledore had listened to McGonagall as much as Trelawney, if I—"

If I—what? If he’d had a spine? If he’d asked questions, listened to the portraits stuck in the far corners of the Slytherin common room, sought out his Aunt Andromeda, his cousin Tonks? He’d only been a boy as she’d only been a girl. Both of them had been set firmly on their paths by the adults around them, whether or not they were seen as pawns.

“I was going to die, the girl who had such infinite hopes, so many wishes, for the fact of my birth. She couldn’t survive if we were going to have a chance,” she said. She spoke as if the words carried a bitterness she was used to tasting. “Harry doesn’t understand. He says we won and look at what a wonderful life I have, such bright, beautiful, accomplished children, my career, all the good work I do—”

“It’s not what you wanted,” Draco said and that, of all things, made her lips curve, ever so slightly, into something like a smile. That, of all things, made him want her, ever so much. That she would admit it and to him, an intimacy he hadn’t anticipated. Couldn’t have let himself long for and yet, once again, had found himself given his heart’s desire.

“I can’t have regrets like that, can I? I can’t regret my children, nor my marriage. But I married the wrong man for all that I loved him. I can’t regret my children, but I regret I had them when I was barely older than a child. If I weren’t a witch, I wouldn’t have had a baby when I was at university. I would’ve gone to university and then to work, maybe an advanced degree, I would have chosen—”

“What?” Draco said. It had taken him the past thirty years to comprehend that the Muggleborn witches and wizards lost something when they crossed over. Over thirty years, he’d learned a little about what it was. But Hermione would have known something about it when she was eighteen. It had taken her until now to feel the full impact of that life she hadn’t lived in either England.

“I don’t know what I would have done. Studied, worked at, where I would have wanted to travel to. Discover. Here or there,” Hermione said. “I can’t say I ever had a chance to really figure out what I was most interested in, only what was most necessary for Harry’s survival. For my own. I don’t have a secret passion. It was all taken from me and I can’t ever get it back. Too late.”

Too late, she’d said, a witch who could live for another hundred years. Had anyone told her, reminded her? Had any of her friends noticed how she was suffering? Had she let them? She had not had to agree to talk to him, to sit with enchanted tea between them, she had not had to tell him about Jean and her parents, had not had to let him hear how angry she was and how despairing. Like calls to like, the Astoria of his memory said, and you’ve liked her for so long.

“D’you know, the divorce was Ron’s idea. He thought, if I wasn’t bound to him, it would be a gift. I could become myself. He loved me enough to give me that.”

“He’s more astute than I’d given him credit for,” Draco remarked.

Hermione laughed.

“You’d never given him a knut’s credit. Nor a ha’penny,” she said. “I don’t know why you thought I’d marry someone stupid. He’s very bright, it’s only that we’ve no interests in common beyond our children and he decided that wasn’t enough for me.”

“Why do you come here?” Draco asked again, after there’d been a long silence between them, long enough for the tea to grow cold if that had been possible. Hermione was looking down into her cup as if she’d divine something in the leaves. As if she’d ever given Divination the least credence.

“Because I need to see how much worse it could have been to bear how it is,” she said. “Who is cruel now, Draco?”

He looked at her, Hermione and also Jean, the grey in her hair evident, the grey she must glamour when she was not here, and he wondered about the other scars she carried. He knew about what his aunt had done, he’d heard rumors about how Dolohov had cursed her, and he knew what had been expected of her: an endless competence, an infinite hope, a gratitude for it all, the wand she’d killed with, the world that required her to mend it. What could he give her, not as a debt repaid, but as an alternative, the choice that had always been denied her?

They were old enough for him to get it right. He was not as brilliant a strategist as her husband had been, but he could play one final gambit.

“I haven’t heard you use my first name in over thirty years,” he said. “It’s a kindness I don’t deserve.”

“Haven’t you learned yet kindness isn’t deserved. Or earned?” she said.

“Haven’t you, Jean?” he said softly and reached out a hand to cover hers, except that she turned it over and grasped his, palm to palm. It was the old way of handfasting, but she wouldn’t know it.

(Though she’d been married to a Pureblood for twenty years and Draco had heard what store Molly Weasley put on the old ceremonies.)

“Hermione,” she said. “If we are beginning again, I’d like to be Hermione, I think.”

She kept going to St. Mungo’s every Tuesday night. After three months, she’d stopped going on Fridays and let him give her dinner at his flat, usually takeaway curry. After six months, she left the Ministry.

She dropped the glamour, learned Bactrian and Saka, bloodied her hands on thorns grafting roses for Neville. She wrote letters. So many letters. She only sent half of them and none by owl. She started writing a novel. Draco wasn’t supposed to be able to tell, but it was about Snape and somehow, also the Silk Road.

She invited their children to dinner. Rose shook Draco’s hand, Hugo hugged him, Scorpius brought Hermione an enormous bouquet of camellias. After the meal, they played Exploding Snap and Draco learned Rose was short for Rosemary.

She fell in love. Draco had been willing to wait but she caught up.

A year and a day later, after their friends and family witnessed the handfasting, Draco made the first toast.

To Jean.

#dramione fic #draco malfoy #hermione granger #take a lot of unresolved trauma and add one midlife crisis #middle-aged wizards #angst #fluff #rose weasley #hugo weasley #scorpius malfoy #astoria malfoy #canon au #no ron or astoria bashing #happy ending #artielu #st mungo's #in no way is this an endorsement of TERF JK

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