Chapter Text
Halsey - Finally // beautiful stranger
Hermione couldn't remember the last time she had felt this light. Truly light, not because she had no problems—those were always there, piling up on the Ministry desks, in the files left open, in the letters waiting for a reply, in the problems within the political world that continued to grow—but as if, somewhere along the way, the weight had stopped pressing solely on her shoulders.
She noticed it in ridiculous ways: in the fact that she smiled to herself while walking down the street, that she stopped in front of shop windows for no reason at all, simply to look at her reflection and think, with almost childish astonishment, that she looked happy. Even her colleagues had noticed.
And then Hermione Granger was wasting time. She stayed in bed for a few extra minutes in the morning, even when she should have been getting up, reread the little messages Draco left her about work—and only work, because Draco hardly ever wrote to ask her to meet him; he simply appeared. She caught herself choosing what to wear while wondering whether he would notice, combing her hair and then messing it up again because perhaps it looked better that way.
She felt like a girl, looked completely like a girl. She felt the way she should have felt at fifteen, not at this point in her life, when she had a proper adult job and the women her age were having children. She felt as though she had skipped an entire age and was living it belatedly.
The anticipation.
The embarrassment.
The foolish exhilaration.
The pounding of her heart whenever she heard someone knock on the door and knew it might be him.
And the most inexplicable thing was that all of it bore the name Draco Malfoy. If someone had told her that at Hogwarts, she would have laughed in their face. At fifteen, Draco had been nothing but a name spoken with annoyance, a presence to avoid in the corridors, a poisonous voice behind her back. He was the boy who called her Mudblood with the contempt of someone born convinced he was worth more. The boy who made her tense the moment she saw him approaching.
There had been nothing, back then, to suggest this. Not in Potions class. Not in the hateful looks. Not in the duels. Not in the corridors of Hogwarts. And certainly not during the war.
During the war, Draco had been something even more incomprehensible. Neither truly an enemy nor truly an ally. He had been a shadowy figure suspended in a grey area that Hermione had hated, because to her things had always been either right or wrong. And yet now, in hindsight, details came back to her that she hadn't known how to read at the time.
His pale face at Malfoy Manor. The hesitation. The terror in his eyes, which she had mistaken for nothing more than cowardice.
Sometimes she wondered if something had begun even there. Not love—that would have been absurd—but perhaps the beginning of that strange, stubborn attention that had kept them clashing for years instead of simply ignoring each other, as would have been much easier.
Even Crookshanks seemed to have understood, because he had stopped looking at Draco like an intruder and had begun to tolerate him with the same acceptance he reserved for permanent presences.
Hermione, on the other hand, tolerated nothing. She was hopelessly in love. And every time she thought about it, she almost felt like laughing.
Her. Hermione Granger, hopelessly in love with Draco Malfoy. With the most spiteful, cold, spoiled, icy bastard she had ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on.
And the most humiliating thing was that it wasn't just physical desire. It wasn't only the way her heart sped up when Draco came near her, or how her body recognised his before her mind did.
She had started imagining small, ridiculous, domestic things, things that could be connected to the concept of "home", things she had always felt distant from. Draco sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea growing cold while he read the newspaper and criticised the world, her books mixed in with his, a shirt forgotten on a chair and not taken away, the sound of his footsteps through the house, his voice calling for her from another room.
Sometimes she even caught herself thinking of him in the future, and that frightened her enough to stop the thought immediately, as though it were some form of superstition, because the future was a dangerous word. She knew how foolish it was; they had only been seeing each other for a few weeks, and she was even afraid to call what they had "dating".
And yet she kept doing it, imagining him beside her in ways that had nothing to do with the bed, and that was the most serious sign of all. It wasn't just passion, it wasn't infatuation; it was something that had worked its way into the very structure of her days. Draco had begun to exist in her thoughts like work, like books, like air, and that was ridiculous, because for years she had built herself around the idea that she didn't need anyone.
She had lost friends, had erased her parents from her memory to save them, had survived a war convinced that love was, at best, a distraction, and now she found herself wondering whether Draco had eaten, whether he was sleeping, whether he had had a bad day. She worried about him, about Draco Malfoy, and sometimes it almost made her angry, because it should have been simple to push him away, it should have been simple to remember who he had been, the words he had spoken, the wounds, the blood, the war. And yet none of it disappeared; it had simply transformed into something else, as though they had taken everything that had destroyed them and built something alive on top of it.
Perhaps that was what made her so happy. Not the fact that she was loved—because she still didn't know whether Draco would ever use that word—but the almost miraculous fact that she no longer felt alone. And that, perhaps, was what astonished her more than anything, because Hermione Granger had never imagined that happiness could come to her in such an improbable form, with blond hair and poisonous sarcasm.
❦ ──── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ── ✦ ✧ ☾ ○ ☽ ✧ ✦ ── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──── ❦
The day of her parents' wedding arrived with an agitation Hermione had unsuccessfully tried to ignore all week, and that morning she had finally stopped pretending she could control it.
She had been awake since before dawn and had already checked the table arrangements three times, the menu twice, verified that the flowers matched exactly the ones they had chosen months earlier, and still managed to find at least four possible catastrophes that, according to her, could yet occur.
She paced back and forth without ever really stopping.
From the garden to the hall. From the hall to the entrance. From the entrance back to the tables.
She checked ribbons, candles, chairs, cutlery, the placement of the place cards as though the stability of the universe depended on it. Every now and then she would stop, stare at something in horror, and call someone over to fix a detail that probably no living creature would have noticed.
Draco had been watching her for at least ten minutes without intervening, calmly leaning against a column, perfectly dressed, his arms crossed over his chest, fully aware that he could not impose himself on the event.
“Granger.”
She didn't even turn around. “Table seven is too close to the window.”
“Table seven is where I put it.”
“Exactly.”
Draco let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a suppressed laugh and approached her as Hermione was already heading towards another imaginary emergency. He gently took hold of her arm, enough to make her stop and turn towards him.
“Breathe.”
“I am breathing.”
“You're hyperventilating.”
Hermione shot him an exasperated look. “My parents are getting married in a few hours and everything could go wrong.”
“No,” he said with certainty. “It couldn't.”
She stared at him. “How can you say that?”
Draco tilted his head slightly, as though the answer were obvious. “Because I organised it.”
His tone was so serious, so utterly convinced, that Hermione remained silent for a second. Then he lifted a hand and brushed his fingers over her hair, fixing a loose curl near her temple.
Hermione immediately went still and looked at him. “Are you fixing my hair?”
Draco raised one eyebrow slightly. “Yes.”
Hermione immediately brought a hand to her head. “Does it look bad?”
He looked at her for a second as though deciding whether to tease her. “Granger.”
“Draco, does it look bad?”
“I moved a curl.”
“Why?”
He kissed her before she could argue or ask anything else, tightening his grip on the beautiful dress she had chosen from that ridiculous fashion magazine he had so carefully left behind. “Because it was in the way when I wanted to kiss you.”
Hermione remained still for a moment, as though the kiss had interrupted the thread of her thoughts halfway through and left them scattered somewhere on the floor. When she pulled back slightly, she looked at him, blinking rapidly. “You can't distract me like that when I'm panicking.”
Draco tilted his head slightly. “Apparently, I can.”
Hermione opened her mouth to reply, but automatically turned towards the hall, as though summoned by an instinct stronger than herself. “The candles are too close to the flowers.”
Draco caught her around the waist before she could escape again. “The candles are exactly where they need to be.”
“They could catch fire.”
“They're enchanted.”
Hermione stared at him. “I said no magic.”
“Then let the flowers catch fire.”
Her eyes widened and she pointed a finger at his chest. “Then I'm right!” she said, almost happily. “The candles are too close to the flowers, we absolutely have to change—”
“Granger,” he interrupted her, with his usual calmness, which at that moment had something almost sensual about it. “Your parents are going to have the perfect wedding. The guests will eat, drink, cry during the vows, someone will get far too drunk, your mother will be convinced the flowers are more beautiful than she imagined, and your father will pretend not to get emotional before finally giving in in front of everyone.”
Hermione looked at him and, despite herself, her breathing had begun to slow. “How do you know it'll go like that?”
Draco paused as though he were genuinely thinking about it.
“Because I know events,” he said. Then he lowered his voice slightly. “And I know your parents. They'll give their displays of affection plenty of room to make most people cry. They'll put out the flames with their tears.”
Hermione lowered her gaze for only a moment, and it was a mistake, because she saw the almost nonexistent distance between their bodies and, for one tiny, fleeting second, thought that they could slip away somewhere and let the anxiety melt away in more pleasant ways. “You're unbearably confident in yourself,” she murmured.
“It's one of the reasons you want me here.”
Hermione was about to reply with something biting when a woman walked behind them, asking where to place the last floral arrangements. Hermione immediately stiffened, trying to take a step back. “The hydrangeas were supposed to be—”
“On the left,” Draco said before she could finish.
The woman nodded and disappeared.
Hermione slowly turned towards him.
“How do you manage to carry the weight of all these arrangements?”
He smiled faintly. “Granger, you've had the fate of the entire wizarding world on your shoulders.”
“Yes, but…” The sentence disappeared into nothing when he began stroking her bare back. Draco looked at her silently for a moment, and the way he looked at her was almost more destabilising than the kiss. She slipped her arms around his neck and smiled at him as he tucked another curl behind her ear.
This time, Hermione didn't protest. “If you keep touching my hair, I'm going to think you've developed an obsession with it.”
“My obsession is talking too much.”
Hermione smiled shyly, feeling warmth spread across her face. She had no chance to reply because she heard her mother's voice calling her from the other side of the hall.
She instinctively turned to see the astonishment on her mother's face, then looked back at him.
❦ ──── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ── ✦ ✧ ☾ ○ ☽ ✧ ✦ ── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──── ❦
The wedding continued almost without Hermione truly noticing the transition from one moment to the next. One moment she was still standing beside Draco, and the next she was sitting in the front row, her hands clasped in her lap, Harry and Ginny a short distance away, Draco at her side. The afternoon light filtered softly through the windows and fell across everyone's faces with such gentleness, as though even time itself were an actor who had been paid to play its part.
For the first time in hours, Hermione stopped thinking. She watched her parents standing before the officiant and tried to commit everything to memory: the way her mother smiled as though she were thirty years younger, the way her father kept looking at her as though he were still astonished to have her truly standing before him.
Her mother spoke first, and only a few words were enough to make Hermione's chest tighten. She spoke of an entire life built together, of mistakes, journeys, silly arguments, reconciliations, of that strange and resilient form of love.
“I never thought…” she said, looking at her husband. “That I would marry a man who leaves books open face-down and insists on believing he's always right.”
Someone among the guests laughed, and her father shook his head as though that were nothing more than a serious slander.
Then it was his turn to speak, and it was worse, because his voice trembled slightly when he mentioned Hermione.
“The best thing we've ever done,” he said, and Hermione had to lower her eyes for a moment.
Her father spoke about the future, about the beauty of being able to choose each other, about reaching an age when loving someone didn't mean promising that nothing would ever change, but promising to stay even while everything changed.
And that was when Hermione made the mistake of thinking about Draco. She couldn't stop herself.
Every word seemed inevitably to drift towards him—I'll be here tomorrow too—and suddenly Hermione wasn't listening only to her parents' vows anymore. She was imagining. Again. And she hated herself for it, for the fact that on the day dedicated to her parents' love, her heart was making room for another man.
Then she felt something brush against her hand. She lowered her gaze slightly.
Draco.
His fingers had sought out hers with an almost disarming naturalness and, when they found them, he gave them a gentle squeeze. Hermione held her breath and turned her face towards him. Draco continued looking straight ahead as though he weren't doing anything extraordinary.
She stared at him for a second.
“Are you holding my hand?” she whispered, almost incredulously.
The corner of Draco's mouth twitched slightly. “No, Granger. I'm checking your pulse.”
Hermione smiled despite everything. “You're an idiot.”
He didn't answer. He simply tightened his fingers around hers.
❦ ──── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ── ✦ ✧ ☾ ○ ☽ ✧ ✦ ── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──── ❦
After the vows, after the applause, after the hugs and that all-encompassing emotion, the reception settled into a lighter rhythm. There was music, glasses overflowing with alcohol, her relatives laughing loudly, Harry arguing with Hermione's father as though they had known each other for years, and Ginny, who had already decided to have fun at someone else's expense. Naturally, that someone was Hermione.
When her mother announced the bouquet toss, a small, almost ritualistic chaos immediately formed as the women gathered laughing in the middle of the room, some embarrassingly competitive, others there purely out of tradition. Hermione had every intention of staying out of it.
“Oh no,” she murmured as soon as she saw Ginny turn towards her with that look.
“Oh yes,” Ginny replied, grabbing her by the wrist. “You're coming.”
“Not a chance.”
“Hermione, for Merlin's sake, your mother is about to throw the bouquet. We're not going into battle.”
“With some women, I don't see a substantial difference.”
Ginny laughed and practically shoved her into the small crowd. “Stand there.”
“Ginny—”
“And try to catch it.”
“I don't want to catch it.”
“Lies.”
She gave her a hard pinch on the side and disappeared.
Hermione huffed but ended up in the middle of the others, surrounded by elbows and giggles, and suddenly felt ridiculous. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, lifted her gaze almost instinctively, and that was when she saw him. Draco was standing a short distance away, apart from the other men, a glass in his hand, watching her.
He wasn't really smiling, but he had that expression, the one that Hermione was beginning to recognise as carrying the unmistakable taste of danger.
Her mother turned her back to them, someone improvised a countdown—three, two, one—and the bouquet flew through the air amid screams and laughter. Hermione, in all honesty, didn't even move her hands to catch it.
She didn't even try. She didn't jump or push her way through the crowd. And yet, in an almost absurd twist of fate, the bouquet came down directly towards her. Hermione caught it purely by reflex and stood perfectly still, eyes wide, while for one second the room seemed to erupt. Ginny screamed as she hugged her, repeating something along the lines of, “I knew it, I knew it!”
Her mother pressed a hand to her chest as though she had just witnessed a prophecy, then immediately hugged her.
“No,” Hermione said, staring at the bouquet as though it were a cursed object. “No, this didn't happen.”
“Oh, it absolutely did!” Ginny exclaimed, shaking her by the shoulders.
Hermione lifted her gaze and looked at Draco. He was still there, perfectly still, watching her.
And for a moment—just a moment—there was something in the way he looked at her that gave her the completely irrational thought that he had altered the trajectory, somehow controlling even that.
Ridiculous.
And yet the way he raised one eyebrow slightly, almost with satisfaction, did absolutely nothing to help.
Hermione hugged the bouquet to her chest and burst out laughing as everyone gathered around her, happy as though the gesture meant something inevitable.
She raised the bouquet of flowers towards Draco, and he raised his glass.