Chapter Text
Hermione stumbles upon them in the restricted section - Draco Malfoy and Lavender Brown - just minutes before curfew. She can only watch for a stunned moment as they wrestle with each other’s necklines, pulling apart buttons as Draco kisses down her neck. Lavender tries without success to divest Draco of his shirt, leaving it open, one muscled shoulder emerging from a sea of white. Draco has had more luck. He tugs her blouse open, pulls her tie to the side, and yanks down the cups of her pale blue bra.
Hermione’s mouth falls open. Lavender Brown, DA member, Griffyndor to the bone, a survivor of a werewolf attack, with Draco Malfoy?
“Your tits are incredible,” he growls, taking a nipple in his mouth. Lavender moans low in her throat, burying her fingers in his golden hair.
Hermione swallows, cheeks burning. She needs to leave. Right now.
Draco falls to his knees.
Lavender is exquisite in her pleasure; supporting her weight with her hands on the shelf to either side, chin tipped back, eyes falling shut. Full, round breasts rise and fall as she gasps. The pink of her nipples is bright against her pale skin.
Hermione turns to leave, but she still has the book. Maybe she can just leave it on a nearby shelf? It’s against the rules to take it with her, and she doesn’t want to leave it in the main part of the library where an innocent might find it.
Draco pulls one shapely leg over his shoulder, and Hermione’s stomach twists. He pulls Lavender’s underwear aside with one finger, leans down, and covers her with his mouth. Lavender’s lips form an O of pleasure.
“Merlin, Draco,” Lavender says his name with conviction, almost reverence. The movement of Draco’s head is subtle and illicit. Hands clutching at Lavender’s hips, he bunches the fabric of her skirt in tight fists. Draco’s mouth on her seems loud in the quiet of the library.
Holding her breath, Hermione levitates her book to a nearby shelf. It’s not the right place, but it’s close enough. The book bobs through the air, and it's almost past the couple when Lavender's eyes open, widen in surprise, and flick to Hermione standing, wand drawn, in the doorway.
The glint in Lavender’s eye is amused. Hermione is frozen with horror.
Lavender’s hand goes to Draco’s shoulder, to warn him, or to steady herself - Hermione will never know, because he pushes two fingers inside Lavender and her eyes fall shut.
Hermione makes her escape.
*
She watches Draco the next day, in Charms, as he swings into his usual seat near the back of the room. She wonders if Lavender told him they’d been seen that night, but he’s as composed as ever as he sets his scrolls and quills out in his desk. He watches each student enter and take their seat with a flick of his eyes that Hermione can only discern because she’s watching him so intently. Nobody acknowledges his presence until Blaise Zabini enters. They share a look which sends a jolt of recognition through Hermione - it’s the look of comrades living through oppression, trying not to draw attention to themselves.
How the tables have turned since last year.
Draco doesn’t look at Hermione until the end of the lesson when they’ve received their grades and feedback on their assignment.
His parchment flops down to reveal what’s written across the top: “Outstanding - Top In Class,” in Professor Flitwick’s precise scrawl. He meets her eyes across the room, and his mouth moves into a brief smirk.
She looks down at the paper on her desk. “Exceeds Expectations: An ambitious concept that lacked cohesion. I look forward to future iterations of this artifact.”
She’s been off her game, and here is the definitive proof. Never before has she received anything less than Outstanding for an assignment (unless you count flying, which Hermione doesn’t). It’s not enough that she doesn’t sleep, that she doesn’t seem to be able to hold a normal conversation, or that she has no appetite or energy to step outside. She’s also being beaten in Charms by Draco Fucking Malfoy who has time to invent useful artifacts for his assignments around his commitments to the sexual satisfaction of the female population of Hogwarts.
“I’m shocked,” says Draco, when he notices Hermione looming over his desk after class. “I had resigned myself never to see Top in Class on any parchment of mine, now that you’re in every one of my classes.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Hermione bites out.
“I think I might cancel my evening plans,” muses Draco. “See if I can’t beat you in Transfiguration, too.” Is he teasing her right now? Hermione doesn’t think she’s seen him talk this much since he returned to school after Christmas, after his trial. “How is your meditation coming along?”
Hermione narrows her eyes. “Very well, thank you.” She stuffs her parchment in her satchel. “By all means, spend the night studying - it makes no difference to me.”
Her meditation has not been going well. She’s always unsuccessful in one of two ways: she can’t relax into a meditative state because of intrusive memories from the war, which leave her cold and shaking, or she succeeds at calming her heart sufficiently to fall into an exhausted sleep, usually propped against a wall, only to wake with a crick in her neck.
“I haven’t visualised my form, yet,” Draco says as he gets up and follows her from the room, shouldering his bag and falling into step beside her. “Maybe tonight is the night. Any advice for me, Granger?”
“Yes,” says Hermione, halting in the middle of the corridor. “If you used the library for its intended purpose, you might learn something there.”
Draco doesn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed, only intrigued. “Have you been spying? Naughty.”
“I was not spying,” she hisses. “You were blocking a shelf I needed.”
Draco’s smirk is accompanied by a twitch of one eyebrow. It seems to say, tell yourself whatever you need to, honey. “My apologies. I’ll take your advice under consideration.”
“Excellent. Now go and enjoy your O somewhere else.”
Draco laughs out loud at that, unrestrained. “Let me assure you, I will.”
*
“Malfoy.”
Hermione looks up from the book in her lap to see a tall, dark-haired sixth-year boy towering over Draco, who has been chopping up breakfast sausage and scowling into the middle distance a short way down the table from where she sits.
She hasn’t quite gotten over her embarrassment from their conversation yesterday. The worst of it is, every time she remembers his smirk and the reason for it, a vivid picture of Draco’s hands fisted in Lavender’s skirt, shifting to her underwear, bathed in the yellow light of the library, puts an edge of arousal on her embarrassment, which only deepens it. It’s not enough that she should be made to think of Draco in this way, or that he should be aware that she does. No, she also has to like it, on a carnal level. The whole thing is humiliating.
Draco pauses his chopping to scowl at the dark-haired boy.
“No need to hover, you’re not a footman.” His voice is quiet, but it carries.
“Step outside, would you?”
Draco casts a look around him, exasperated, like, can you believe this guy? “I haven’t finished my breakfast.” He enunciates each word.
“I’ve got something to say to you,” replies the dark-haired boy. There’s a tremor in his voice, and his fists are clenched. “And I think you’d like to hear it in private.”
“Right,” says Draco, looking around. He catches Hermione staring, raises a single brow when she looks away, flushing. “You see, I’m still finishing my break–”
The boy grabs him by the robes and hauls him out of his chair, sending his utensils scattering across the table. The Great Hall falls silent.
“YOU HAD SEX WITH MY GIRLFRIEND!” screams the dark-haired boy, and socks him across the jaw.
“Oh my God,” says Lavender, sitting to Hermione’s left. She’s looking pale, and dark circles hang beneath her eyes. Ginny is on her other side, and Neville is across the table from her.
“What the fuck? Who even are you?” whines Draco through his bloody nose.
“DRAW YOUR WAND!”
“You’ve knocked it out of my hand, you thick lout! Just because you can’t satisfy your witch doesn’t mean that I have!”
“Should someone help him…?” asks Lavender. She’s already half risen from her seat, as though she’s ready to spring to his defense.
“Help the ferret? Why on earth?” says Ginny, leaning forward to get a better look. Draco has taken several more hits and is now flat on his back between the two rows of tables. “Just a bit of poetic justice, I’d say.”
With an incoherent roar, the dark-haired boy draws his wand and launches a curse. For a second, it looks as though nothing has happened, until Draco coughs a spray of blood across the walkway.
“YOU WHORESON!” A swift kick to the ribs makes Draco yelp and roll to his side, holding his ribs. He reaches for his wand, but a nearby foot kicks it out of reach. There are snickers.
“YOU INBRED WANKER!” Kick, kick. Blood pools around his head as the student body watches.
“ Immobulus !” Lavendar is standing on her chair, wand pointed at the dark-haired boy, who freezes mid-incantation. “Nev, a little help?”
“Right you are,” he says, springing to his feet, just as Professors McGonagall and Sprout come rushing through the door.
It’s not until Draco has been helped to the infirmary and the dark-haired boy has been escorted away by McGonagall that Hermione notices that all her muscles have locked into place, like a full-body muscle spasm.
Neville has resumed his breakfast across the table. Lavender is frowning at hers. Ginny watches Lavender, chewing thoughtfully. “That was a handy immobulus ,” she says at last.
Lavender jolts out of her thoughts. “I guess you could say I owed him a favour,” she replies, glancing at Hermione quickly before looking away.
“Besides,” says Lavender, her voice rising with conviction, “it’s not right, how everyone treats him.”
Ginny lowers her fork. “It’s not right, how he treats everyone.”
“What, keeping his distance?”
Ginny shakes her head with a jerk. “He was hardly keeping his distance last year, was he?”
Lavender rolls her eyes. “Whatever. I don’t want to argue with you, I never win.”
“Too right. He should be grovelling on his knees.”
It makes Hermione blush when she thinks, maybe he is.
*
Dear Hermione,
I hope everything is going well at Hogwarts. I’m sure it is, it’s really your element, isn’t it? I bet you’re loving being able to focus on studying without me and Harry around to distract you.
Just wanted to let you know about something before it gets out and you hear another way - not that I think you would mind, I know our breakup didn’t bother you as much as it did me. Well I don’t mean that exactly, only that you’re so strong, you know.
Anyway, I’d better just say it. I’ve started seeing someone - Alicia Spinnet, actually. I’ve been getting to know her since I joined DMLE Quidditch, and I guess we sort of hit it off. It’s not serious at the moment or anything. But I don’t know, it could be. I like her.
That’s all for now. Harry says hi.
Ron.
Hermione blinks down at his untidy script, and a tear makes a damp circle on the page. Is this how people see her, even now? She’s been wading through depression since the war ended. She spends all her time pining for her best friends. It broke her heart clean in two to break up with Ron, but it’s all okay, and she must be enjoying herself, because she’s ‘strong’?
And that’s how Draco finds her, propped up against the wall of a deserted classroom late at night, tear-streaked, head tilted backwards, eyes shut, with the letter open on her lap.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
Hermione’s only answer is a bleary look. He’s looking as sharp and put-together as ever - his bruising from the beating he took is long healed now.
Draco sends a glance down the corridor behind him before he steps inside and closes the door behind him. Hermione tracks his progress with a bewildered frown. “What are you doing?”
He shrugs. “I’ll leave if you want.”
When she says nothing, he pulls out his books, parchment and quill, and starts writing.
“What are you doing?”
He pauses, turns to look at her. There’s a sconce on the wall behind his head which gives him a glowing halo, setting the spikes of his hair alight. “I took your advice,” he says. “Found some books at the library.”
He turns back to his notes. Hermione frowns at him for several long minutes, the only sound the scratch of his quill and the rustle of turning pages. It’s soothing.
She rests her head against the wall once more, closing her eyes, and focusing on her breathing. Her hands go to the ground on either side of her, palms facing downward. It’s better to do this outside, to make contact with dirt and the magic of the earth, but this will do for now.
Once her heart rate and breathing have slowed, and she feels that familiar detachment from her conscious thoughts, she starts her imagined walk down a familiar route - her walk to school, back before she knew she was a witch. Down her back yard and across the stream, following the winding path around the outskirts of the neighbouring park, through the shade of poplars reaching their branchy fingers across the sky. The scratch of Draco’s quill is the buzz of a busy hive. She looks up at the trees as she walks, yearning for that pull, that invitation, but all is still and remote.
Resigned, she pauses to dip her toes into the stream, and she can feel, just faintly, that second heartbeat; the fluttering thud-thud-thud of a much smaller animal.
Her imagined self brings her wand to her heart and whispers the incantation, Amato Animo Animato Animagus. The change is sudden. The sensation of shrinking is like falling, so forceful that she’s jarred out of visualisation into memory.
A Turkish rug cushions her cheek. Her arm is pinned to the ground beside her in a black-nailed, claw-like grasp. A searing, burning slice streaks inside her arm. There’s buzzing in her head, throat throbbing and catching on a scream. There’s a question, shrieked, a moment of relief, and then her stomach lurches as the knife digs in once more-
-and now she’s sitting at the opening of their tent, looking out over forested hills. She’s half her usual weight. Her hair is matted and full of forest debris. She is dull-eyed and itchy-skinned and framed with frown-wrinkles.
She’s wearing the locket. Her whole body is heavy with it.
This is how her inner monologue goes: It’s hilarious, really, that you thought your life would lead anywhere but here. Every path leads here. It’s what you deserve. It was what you were made for. You’re an outcast, right down to your bones. It’s in your blood. You might as well lie down on the floor of this lonely forest and perish.
Ron had left her then, too.
“Granger?”
In the space of a blink, she’s back in her body, sitting on the floor of an empty classroom. Draco is watching her from his desk.
“I’m fine,” she says, but her voice cracks, and her cheeks are wet. She tries again. “I’m fine.”
“Right.”
Hermione sniffs and looks away to rummage through her satchel. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. She just needs not to be looking at his stupid knowing face.
Draco sighs and goes back to writing.
“Have you felt the second heartbeat?” she asks.
He stops writing. “No.”
It really shouldn’t, but a small part of her brain opens up at this, satisfied and smug.
“Do you have your route mapped out?”
“Yes.” The word is drawn out with false patience.
After a beat of silence, he resumes writing.
“And have you got the incanta-”
Draco twists to face her. “Of course I have the bloody incantation right. I’m not a fucking idiot.”
She purses her lips. “Why are you studying here if you don’t want my help?”
Draco’s breath escapes him with a hiss through his teeth. “I don’t know, Granger, maybe because you were crying here on the floor all by yourself like a total nutcase?”
“Ha,” she says, bitter. “That’s rich.”
He snaps his book shut and rolls up his scroll. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” He shoves his stuff into his bag. “Temporary insanity, I guess.”
“Temporary? Really?”
He’s at the door now, but he stops to glare at her. “Yes. Okay. I’ve cried in classrooms like a nutcase. Maybe I am a little insane. Thanks for reminding me - heaven forbid I should ever forget who I was, or try to move on from this shitshow.”
He wrenches open the door.
“Wait,” she says, so quietly that she hopes he might not hear her and she might not have to say what she needs to say.
But he halts midstep, frozen in place.
They stay like that, suspended in time, for three long breaths.
The problem is that it’s too late now. This thing that she doesn’t know: why Draco saw her crying in a classroom and stayed, is a mystery in her brain that grows with each half-answer. Her tendency toward curiosity has latched on to it, and she knows from experience it will nag her until she has answers.
“I know you’re not an idiot, or insane,” she says, finally. His head turns slightly toward her in acknowledgement. His lashes look dark against his cheek from this angle, a boyish contrast to the sharp line of his jaw. “I just don’t understand why you would care if I was crying alone in a classroom.” The like a nutcase is implied.
He shrugs.
“I’m having trouble with my meditation,” she says.
Draco considers her for a moment before closing the door. He turns to lean against it. “I gathered.”
“Memories from the war are… intrusive.”
He nods, his eyes on the ceiling. “My patronus is a snake.” He swallows and sinks to the floor. “I can’t be a snake. Not anymore.”
Hermione thinks of Nagini exploding from Bathilda Bagshot’s body and represses a shudder. “What do you want to be?”
His voice is quiet. “I wish I knew.” He rolls his head toward her, considering her through low-lidded eyes. “Is yours an otter?”
She nods. “I always feel the second heartbeat when I touch water in the meditation, so I think it must be. It’s not what I would have chosen, but I can’t seem to connect with anything else.”
Draco turns this over in his mind, saying nothing for a long time. Hermione is warm under her school robes, and it’s getting late. The quiet of the classroom lulls her half way to sleep when Draco says, “Maybe you just need to get laid.”
Hermione’s eyes snap open. “Excuse me?”
“I said, maybe you just need to get laid.”
“I heard you. I’m trying to understand why you would say something like that.”
Draco shrugs. “It helps. With the war memories.”
He turns back to study the ceiling with supreme unbotheredness. Hermione watches him, fighting for the fiftieth time that day, images of Draco with Lavender in the library. She is so extremely bothered by this suggestion, by those images, and most of all, by Draco’s unbotheredness, that she’s forced to consider the merit of his suggestion. She’s depressed, frustrated, and low on confidence. Maybe an orgasm would help.
She laughs a little half-suppressed snort of incredulous amusement, and Draco shoots her a concerned look.
“Are you offering?”
He frowns, defensive. “Of course not. I just thought it might help.”
Sobering, Hermione stuffs her letter into her bag and stands to leave. “Ah, well. Too bad.”
She opens the door.
“Wait.” Draco’s eyes are sharp and assessing. “Did you mean that?”
Hermione shrugs. “Having sex is not going to cure my PTSD. But it probably won’t hurt it either, and it’s just so… normal. I could do with normal.”
She moves again to leave.
“What if I were offering?”
Hermione catalogues Draco, from his expensive dragon leather shoes to the tips of his manicured fingers. He is one of those boys who have suddenly grown into a man’s body, and despite the suddenness of the change, already seems so at home in his skin. His arrogance draws the eye as much as it irritates. Even though Hermione has always assumed he’s far out of her league (physically, if not morally), she can’t say that she hasn’t had a day-dream or two about touching, and being touched by him, even before she saw him in the library.
Here’s the question then, what it all comes down to: is the opportunity to make those fantasies a reality worth the chance of ridicule that could come from confessing them?
Then again, she’s already cried in front of him, been beaten by him in class, and walked in on him en flagrante.
“I would say we might be able to come to an arrangement.”
The corner of Draco’s mouth lifts into a smirk.