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Hermione Granger was a year and a half into her war the first time that she saw the face of someone she had known staring up at her from a hospital bed. Neville Longbottom, who had spent hours kneeling in the rich soil of his garden and gone on expeditions collecting botanical samples before the war, had lost most of his leg in the trenches. He had smiled upon seeing her, despite the grimace that crossed his face when she changed the dressings on his leg. Later on in his convalescence, she had taken him out for long walks in the garden when the weather was good. They had talked determinedly of everything but the war and when he had finally left, bound for his grandmother's home in Devon, she had silently thanked whatever powers she could think of that he had come through it. She hadn't known anyone that had died then.
A year later, Ron's brother Fred had died during the Battle of the Somme. Little Colin Creevey too, who had taken photographs of all of them in those hazy golden days before the war, with his massive camera that had emitted alarming puffs of white smoke. Remus Lupin, who had spent long evenings drinking brandy and telling stories at Grimmauld Place with Harry's godfather Sirius and whose wife had just given birth to their first child a few months before. And a week later Lavender Brown, who she had been at school with, caught in shelling while driving an ambulance in France. After a while, she had begun to almost hope to see a familiar face being carried on a stretcher up the steps of Hogwarts Castle and into the great stone halls that had been requisitioned and turned into an infirmary, far removed from the horrors of the Western Front.
She had never hoped to see Draco Malfoy.
It was Ginny who told her that he had been sent to Hogwarts to recuperate. “His wounds weren't that bad,” Ginny told her, attacking her sandwich with gusto during the half hour the VADs had been set for their lunch break. “At least not according to Nurse McGonagall. But the men under his command died at Passchendaele and he hasn't been right since. The army wanted to send him to an asylum but his mother pulled some strings so he'd be sent here instead.”
Hermione wasn't surprised. The Draco Malfoys of the world had always had strings pulled for them.
She managed to avoid the ward that he was on for three whole days, through a combination of pure luck, detours during the course of the day that conveniently took her to the opposite side of the castle, and a willingness to trade shifts with the other VADs. Because Draco Malfoy had sneered at her and mocked her and declared her not good enough with every word and look he sent her way. Because she had been furious at him for years for it and just the sound of his name was enough to set the old anger simmering up inside her again. Because she suspected that all her fury might slip away if she saw him lying there pale in a hospital bed and she wasn't sure what she would do then.
On the fourth day after Malfoy arrived in the hospital, she heard him screaming in the middle of the night.
“I'm fine, Granger,” he drawled when she finally arrived at his bedside, lantern swinging from one hand.
“You don't sound it.” She eyed him carefully. He'd managed to prop himself up in the bed, head thrown back casually against the pillows, but his hands still clutched the edges of the sheets until they were white around the knuckles. “Almost everyone has nightmares here. It's nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I'm not ashamed of the nightmares. Just of everything else. Did you know,” he said casually, like they were talking in a drawing room over sherry instead of in a darkened hospital room. “I led an entire platoon of men to their deaths. Fifty five of them. I had to write all the letters to their mothers and wives afterward. But I went mad halfway through just to get out of writing them.”
“You're not mad,” she said. “Mad people never think they are.”
“I was for a while. Screaming, thrashing, staring into nothing. Now I'm a much more civilized type of mad.”
“I can give you medicine to help you sleep,” she offered, straining to keep her voice even and impersonal. Measured. She'd never been like the other VADs who got attached to every wounded soldier who passed through, writing long letters to the ones who survived and weeping over the ones who didn't. When she'd started out, she'd raged and cried over the madness of it all, of course, reading the dispatches from the front with shaky hands. But somehow she'd known from the very beginning that she couldn't survive unless she sealed some part of herself off. She'd bricked up the little girl who'd wept over every skinny dog in the streets of London and the sixteen year old who'd burned with righteous fury at every injustice she could find and the twenty year-old who'd been convinced she could heal every man who passed through her ward with scientific principles and pure determination. And now Draco Malfoy, with his rumpled pale hair and tremor in his left hand that he was trying to hide beneath the sheets, had called out to them from behind that supposedly impermeable wall. She felt sorry for him. She didn't want to.
He shrugged and somehow managed to make it look elegant. “I don't like the way it makes me feel.”
“I said I was fine, Granger,” he added when she turned to go, hesitating in the doorway. “Take your Florence Nightingale impression to some other poor bastard.”
She wasn't going to go the next time that she heard him screaming on her night shift. Someone else could likely do a much better job of it than her—someone capable and professional, who would give him medicine and change his sweaty sheets instead of engaging in debates about what sorts of behavior qualified as madness. But no one did and after she finished checking the second floor supply closet, she found her feet moving towards his room instead of to the third floor supply closet she was meant to be restocking. When she swung open his door, he was sitting up as if he'd been watching for her all along.
“I didn't think you'd come after last time.” His eyes were a curious shade of gray and fixed intently on her. Pansy Parkinson had sighed over those eyes for all of their years at Madame Trelawney's Academy for Young Ladies and Hermione had scoffed at it but now she was forced to admit that the color was quite striking.
“It's my job,” she said stiffly, hovering in his doorway.
“But you hate me. You slapped me once, do you remember? Right here.” He held a hand up to his right cheek, tracing the place where her hand had made stinging contact with his perfect cheekbones.
“You deserved it.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you want, Malfoy?”
“I was rather hoping I could bask in your hate for a little while. All the other nurses fuss and try to make me comfortable.” He waved an imperious hand at her. “Just sit there and ignore me for a while.”
“Right, then. I'll start ignoring you right away.” Hermione took a seat by his bedside, her starched skirts billowing out around her, and perched herself primly on the hard wood. He settled back against the pillows with a sigh, staring up at the ceiling, his blond hair fanning out across the fabric. She wondered for a moment if it was as soft as it looked and then promptly batted the thought away.
She expected him to fall back asleep within minutes but he kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling and his hands folded on top of the sheets like a marble knight on a tomb. The quiet hung between them and she tried to resist the urge to fidget. Hermione Granger was comfortable with a great many things: blood, bile, Russian literature...Silence had never been one of them.
“You're reading Pride and Prejudice.” She reached out and fingered the rich red leather of the book resting on his night table.
“My mother sent it to me. Thought it might cheer me up. Darcy's a moody git, though.” He frowned over at the book. “I don't see how she's supposed to marry him.”
“He gets better. How far have you read?” She flipped the book open, a thick red ribbon slotted about a third of the way through, and drank in the smell of ink and paper. She hadn't had a new book in ages. They'd been rare treats in her childhood, reserved for birthdays and Christmas, and the first time she'd seen the library at the Potter estate, with its shelves of books climbing up toward heaven, she'd wanted to live there forever.
“Only the first few chapters. I might like it better if you read it aloud,” he suggested slyly.
“I thought you wanted me to ignore you.”
“We aristocrats can only take being ignored for so long.” Malfoy looked at her expectantly and sat up straighter against the headboard. “Surely this is better than bandaging wounds and wiping out bedpans, Granger.”
“Only marginally. Very marginally. Right,” she said, clearing her throat. “We're going to start properly, from the beginning.”
Hermione read until his breathing evened out and he finally relaxed into sleep. She pulled the covers up over him before she left, covering his hands where they'd finally unknotted from the edges of the blanket. Draco Malfoy looked very old and very young at the same time, curled into himself at the edge of the bed, and he shouldn't be cold.
“I suppose I owe you an apology, Granger,” he said the next night. He hadn't been screaming this time but she'd gone to see him all the same. Better that he bother her than someone else. “I was rotten to you when we were children and I shouldn't have called you the kinds of things that I did.”
“You owe me several apologies, actually. Go on.” She nodded towards him.
“I shouldn't have dropped slugs on your skirt either. Or taken your copy of Ivanhoe. Or made comments about your parents at that dance. I thought you were going to push me into the fountain then.” He sounded almost wistful as he said it and for a moment, she was too, remembering the pale blue dress she'd worn and the waltzes the orchestra had played, newly brought over from Vienna. She had nearly pushed him into the fountain when she'd overheard him sneering at her father's profession. She'd blazed then, everything striking deep at the heart of her, and she'd thought she could burn that bright forever. “Anyway, I was cruel to you and I apologize.”
“What brought this on?” Hermione turned towards him and folded her arms across her chest. Since they'd met at the age of eleven, she'd never heard Draco Malfoy apologize for anything. Harry claimed it had happened once when they were both seven and Malfoy had broken his toy train but only because Narcissa and Sirius had made him do it. Hermione still doubted it.
“I thought that it was something I ought to do. Very little mattered in the trenches,” he finally added. “Certainly not what your parents did or whether you knew how to correctly use a fish fork. And titles aren't worth a damn against gas and tanks.”
“I'm sorry,” she whispered.
“Don't be. You're the only person in this place who doesn't pity me. Don't ruin it now.” His eyes only met hers for a second before he looked away, muttering something under his breath about the poor quality of hospital sheets, but it was long enough for her to catch the plea in his face.
She reached for Pride and Prejudice, opened it to where they'd left off, and began to read.
Hermione came back on her next shift, and the one after that. They'd reached an agreement without ever discussing it: she would read to him and he would keep his comments to a minimum. She would keep him company and he would be on what passed for his best behavior. She would not be the daughter of people who had clawed their way out of poverty a mere generation ago and he would not be the son of people who had had their names set down in the Domesday book. She would make few, if any, attempts to nurse him and he would deny any need for being nursed.
Malfoy wanted very little from her, when it came down to it—he had no wounds to bandage or letters to a sweetheart to proofread or war stories to tell over and over again as if for the first time. Apart from those first nights, he almost never spoke about the war, in fact, and when he did, it was never in detail. The war had changed him, wrecked him and cast him up adrift on a distant shore. But she suspected that he was entirely too proud to tell her how it had destroyed all his defenses. The bits and pieces of the war that surfaced were rogue agents: a half-said remark about the mud of the trenches or a jerk of his head when a song came on the phonograph that one of his men had liked to whistle. Hermione found herself collecting everything he let slip, cataloging it in her head and clutching it tight. It wasn't that she wanted him to confide in her, exactly. But perversely, she found herself wanting him to think of her as someone worth confiding in.
“You read to him?” Ginny stared at her, mouth agape. “I thought you hated him.”
“I don't like him. But I don't think it's possible to hate anyone who's been through what he has,” Hermione said quietly. “There's not much else to do during the night shifts anyway. McGonagall says I've rolled enough bandages for five hospitals and if I do any more, she'll take the kits away from me.”
“You read to him,” Ginny repeated. “You read Jane Austen to him.”
“Should I be reading something else to him? He complains about the amount of description in Dickens and isn't particularly fond of Hardy. I might try the Brontes next but he's sure to complain about Mr. Rochester and I...” Hermione trailed off when Ginny broke into laughter.
“You're friends with Draco Malfoy. I thought that nothing could surprise me anymore and yet this does.” Ginny shook her head, grinning.
“We're not friends. Friendship implies that we enjoy each other's company. He only tolerates my company slightly more than anyone else's. The other day, he irritated Hannah Abbott until she left without even changing his bed linens.” Hermione frowned. She'd scolded him about it and he'd looked slightly ashamed, but not nearly as much as he should have. “It's an arrangement of mutual convenience.”
Ginny looked at Hermione like she'd begun speaking in tongues. “Just make sure that he doesn't start acting beastly to you again. Or I'll get some of the bats from that cave on the downs and release them into his room.”
“Not every problem can be solved with bats, you know,” Hermione informed her. When they were young, Ginny had unleashed the bats that roosted in the attic of the Burrow, the Weasleys' cheerfully ramshackle family home, upon two boys who had laughed at Hermione's hair and knocked down the elaborate paper castles they liked to build. The boys' parents had never let them come back.
“More than you think, though.” Ginny said with a strong tinge of satisfaction. “Many more than you think.”
The night that things changed between them was by all appearances an ordinary one. They had just read the bit where Mr. Darcy proposed to Elizabeth Bennet for the first time and Malfoy had fallen asleep. She lingered for more than a few minutes, still holding the book in her hands, and watched him toss and turn about in the narrow bed. The screaming didn't come as a surprise but this time, instead of the hoarse shouts of terror that he usually uttered, it was the names of men. His men, she realized, the ones he had led to their doom at Passchendaele.
“Do you see them every night?” she asked when he jerked awake, glancing wildly about the room before catching sight of her and sinking back into the bed.
“Most nights. It's different each time, though. Only commoners dream the same nightmare over and over again.” He tried to scoff but the sound caught in his throat and the self-mocking smile on his face faded away almost as soon as he attempted to put it on. “Just say you weren't watching me sleep, Granger. I'd like to think my case isn't quite that desperate.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?” The words dropped like a stone in the space between them. She didn't know what possessed her to make such an offer. Malfoy wasn't the sort of person who shared things, much less any of the things that weighed heavy upon him—it had taken endless coaxing and the bribery of a jam tart to get him to tell her stories about his childhood with Harry. Now, he was just looking at her, two flags of red burning high in his cheeks, utterly still except for the hand that shook beneath the blankets, and Hermione very nearly felt her spine shrink a little under that gaze. She'd upset the delicate balance of their arrangement, somehow, and stepped so far out of bounds she couldn't begin to see her way back. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have...I'll go. Call for me if you need anything else.”
She rose in a rustle of skirts, only to be stopped by the grip of a hand around her wrist. He let her go almost immediately but the imprint lingered on. It was the first time he'd ever touched her and his hand had been so warm that she half expected to look down and see a band of skin flushed pink where it had been. He curled his hand in on itself, rubbing his fingers as if she'd burned him too and he wanted to memorize the feeling of it, and then carefully laid his palm flat against the bed.
“It rained that entire August,” he finally said. “I thought I was never going to be dry again.”
That was the way he told her about it, detail after detail like he was narrating a story from long ago. Each one a simple fact, nothing that could be refuted. The thick smell of the mud in the trenches, the glare of the lights that searched No Man's Land, the never-ending rattle of machine guns from both sides. The women his men wrote letters to, friends and sweethearts and sisters and mothers and elderly great aunts, and the letters the women sent back, full of mundane details that the men announced to the whole of the trench like front-page news. The endless card games with cigarettes for stakes and the smell of tobacco that only amplified the rot of the trench. His voice was quiet and even and when he finally came to the months of the battle, it got even quieter. It had been madness, blood and mud and smoke, and he had seen his men fall not one by one but in heart-rending bursts, their bodies pierced by German fire or dragged down into the swamps.
“I don't think I ever really left,” he said. “I close my eyes and I'm back in that muddy field in Flanders and men are dying all around me.”
“I'm sorry.” It wasn't nearly enough but it was all she had to offer. “Sorry that you—that anyone—had to live through that. I'll—I'll be there with you in that field, if you'll let me. We can make our way out together.”
“It's not a nice place, you know. Even in my head.”
“I think that sometimes one's own head can be the very worst place to be,” she said softly. “It's better to have someone else there with you.”
Hermione reached out to take his hands in hers and he let her. She stayed, her hands going numb where he gripped on to them, until his grasp finally slackened and he let her go with a sigh. It may have been her imagination but he seemed to sleep a little easier this time.
He was Draco instead of Malfoy after that, even if she only called him that in her head.
There had been one name he'd mentioned, a friend who had been taken back to England to recover from his injuries as well and who he'd never heard of again: Theo Nott. Draco had assumed that he was dead but had never received any official confirmation. Hermione started searching for him. She had a contact—or rather, Harry had a contact—in the War Office named Kingsley Shacklebolt who promised to take a look through the records of the wounded as a favor after she had sent him three long, impassioned letters. Nothing was guaranteed, of course. It was very likely that Nott had died and no one had thought to inform Draco. There was a chance, however, that he might still be alive and Hermione thought that it might be a chance worth taking. So, when Kingsley Shacklebolt wrote back to confirm that Nott was indeed alive and well, she wrote to him too and asked him to come visit Draco. It would cheer him up, she reasoned, and that might be a nice thing. She refused to think very hard about how she had gotten to the point of doing nice things for Draco Malfoy.
When he arrived, Theo Nott was strangely cheerful for a man with his sort of war wounds, including a permanent limp and a scar that cut across half his face. Almost dementedly cheerful, one might say.
“I think I look dashing with this,” he told Hermione as soon as he arrived, pointing to his cheek and giving a dramatic flourish of his forest green coat. “Piratical even.”
“Quite piratical,” she agreed. “Draco's in the garden, if you'll--”
“So you're the nurse who's been carrying on a torrid affair with Draco, then?” Theo interrupted. “Or are you still pining away sadly from afar?”
“Just a nurse, I'm afraid,” Hermione said, striving for her best brisk professional tone and cursing the flush that seemed to be already spreading up her cheeks. “I thought it might be nice for him to see a friend.”
Theo waggled his eyebrows up and down at her. “Women used to pine for Draco all the time. It's nice to see that he hasn't quite lost all his charms.”
“Unfortunately, he lost all his charm for me at the age of eight when he dropped slugs on my favorite summer dress. Then again at ten when he ripped out the last page of my book.” And again when she'd been sixteen, in a blue chiffon dress that had floated about her like a dream, and she'd danced with every gentlemen in the room except for him. He'd looked her way often enough though, doubtless to make sure that she was aware of his snubbing her.
“So you're that Hermione Granger.” Theo stopped and turned to examine her. “I thought you'd have slightly more hair. Something more Rapunzel-like.”
“There aren't that many Hermione Grangers, so I suppose I must be.” Hermione half brought a hand up to her hair, its unruly curls still trying to make their escape from the white linen covering it, and then brought it down again. “I expect he had an excellent time complaining about me and my hair when we were all children.”
“It wasn't all bad.” Theo shrugged. “He had some very inspired metaphors for it. If he ever becomes a celebrated poet, he'll have you to thank for it.”
Draco went very still when he saw Theo. He'd been walking across the great lawn and he froze almost mid-step, one hand shading his eyes, the other dangling uselessly at his side. Then he sprang into motion, sprinting across the lawn and colliding into Theo, and for those few seconds, Hermione saw him as he must have once been, strong and at ease with every inch of himself and whooping with the kind of boyish joy that all the boys she had known had left behind. They were holding on tight to each other and exclaiming and laughing for no reason at all. Some more dramatic swirling of the cape was practically required. There was a lightness in Draco's face that she hardly recognized and that transformed his features completely, softening all the lines she'd once thought to be far too sharp and angular. The whole thing was completely undignified and somehow...charming. Hermione blinked, realizing that she was still watching from the edge of the lawn and that Theo was now waving her over.
“Don't be shy, Miss Granger!” he shouted cheerfully. “I brought cake for tea and I've got horribly embarrassing stories from Draco's childhood to share as well.”
Well. She was much too weak to say no to cake and embarrassing childhood tales.
“Thank you,” Draco said sleepily when she went to see him that night. She wasn't on shift, not technically, but she had told the nurse in charge that she'd forgotten a book of hers she'd been reading to one of the patients. “Theo told me that you were the one who arranged for him to come here. It—it was one of the best things that's happened to me in quite some time.”
“I'm glad.”
“What did you tell Theo about my hair?” she asked after a minute. She'd been wanting to ask all evening and fighting back the impulse for as long as she'd had it.
“Just that it was pretty. It shouldn't be,” he grumbled. “It's a veritable force of chaos. But a very lovely one.”
He fell asleep soon after that but she lingered before rising to her feet and leaving, absently fingering one curl where it hung near her cheek. Her hair had proven itself to be a force of chaos, many times over. It had a way of bursting free from whatever hairstyle she attempted and swinging wildly about whenever she got too excited about something—it had broken a vase after one particularly vigorous shake. But it was nice to think that someone thought it lovely. Even if (or maybe because) that someone happened to be Draco Malfoy.
'You're engaged.” Draco was looking at her left hand, where a thin band with a tiny chip of diamond rested. “You've never worn that before.”
“I take it off sometimes to avoid getting blood on it.” Truthfully, she took it off sometimes because it never felt quite right on her hand. She'd exclaimed over it when Ron proposed, of course, and turned her hand to and fro to admire the way the diamond glittered in the light but she'd gotten it resized two or three times now and the band still felt either too loose or too tight. Once it had rolled all the way under her dresser and nearly been lost and she hadn't been nearly as distraught as she ought to have been. Ron would get her a new ring once the war was over, she used to remind herself. Something better suited to the both of them. And they'd get a little house somewhere together, with space for flower boxes in the windows and books in the living room, and without the war constantly looming over them, they'd be the Ron and Hermione she'd always imagined they could be. (Less bickering, for one thing.)
“To Weasley, I assume? You haven't gotten married on one of his leaves then? I thought everyone was getting married as quickly as they could so they wouldn't die virgins.” He shot a glance sideways at her, probably waiting to see if she'd blush.
“We haven't. We're waiting until after the war ends to do it properly with all his family. His brothers are all in the army and it's impossible for them to get leave together.” Hermione stubbornly tilted her chin up and hoped that would be the final word on the matter. Plenty of girls she knew had gotten married to their sweethearts on leave but she had never suggested it. Neither had Ron.
“It's a tiny ring,” Draco said skeptically. “And the diamond's much too cloudy.”
“It's a good thing you don't have to wear it, then. I quite like it,” Hermione lied and twisted the band back around so the stone faced out properly. It would be just her luck to have the ring slip right off in front of him.
“The Malfoy family ring is absolutely massive,” he said with satisfaction. “An emerald in the center with diamonds on either side. It takes a woman with a great deal of character to wear it.”
“And I'm sure it takes a woman with a great deal of character to be married to a Malfoy,” Hermione muttered.
Hermione wasn't wearing her ring when the letter came. She'd left it in a dish on her dresser while she was helping with the laundry. In retrospect, it had been quite good timing. She and Ron were never going to get married or have their little house together or figure out a way to argue affectionately rather than bitterly. Because, while he had been recovering from some minor wounds in a field hospital, he had fallen in love with and married Pansy Parkinson. (She had driven the ambulance that had taken him to the hospital in the first place and the whole thing would have been dreadfully romantic if it hadn't happened to her fiancee and another woman.)
“I am going to murder my brother,” Ginny announced. “I'm going to take the next boat over to France, march straight to the front lines, and murder him with his own rifle.”
“It's all right.” Hermione stared steadfastly down at her shoes and tugged at a loose thread on her dress until it snapped off in her fingers. It was an unusually lovely day—blue skies, uninterrupted sunshine, blossoms swaying in the lane—and she found herself wishing that at the very least she might have been jilted on some suitably blustery and rainy day, when all the birds that were mockingly chirping away in the trees would be huddled miserably inside their nests instead. The English summer was not in the least conducive to sulking.
“It's not all right! I can't believe he would do this to you,” Ginny seethed. “He's an idiot if he thinks he can throw you over for Pansy Bloody Parkinson.”
“She's actually not too bad. Sometimes terrifying, but I do think she cares deep down. Very deep down.”
Ginny turned to stare at her. “Why aren't you furious? You should be swearing and throwing things and setting birds on unsuspecting bystanders.”
“I was. But now I'm...” She shrugged her shoulders and wrapped her arms around her knees like the schoolgirl she had been a million years ago. “Resigned to it, I suppose. Things haven't been right for a while. I just thought that we would...iron things out eventually, I suppose? And now I know we won't. And it's better to know that than to go on pretending...”
She trailed off, feeling the lump rise up in her throat, and Ginny leaned over to wrap an arm around her, letting Hermione rest her head on her shoulder. She would allow herself just the smallest bit of wallowing and then...then at least she could finally let that ring disappear into the depths of the floorboards.
“You have my permission to tell Weasley that we've been engaged in a torrid affair if you like,” Draco announced the next time she went to see him. “I'm happy to supply the scandalous details.”
“I'm glad to see that men confined to their beds can still gossip.” The speed with which news spread through the wards was truly astonishing. “Now, I've managed to get a copy of the new Forster novel and I might be persuaded to loan it to you if you promise to not get jam on it.”
“Are you all right? About the engagement?” It almost sounded as if he cared.
“Quite all right,” she said, attempting to sound breezy and carefree. It came out rather high-pitched and shrill instead. “And you do not have my permission to make up any stories about torrid affairs.”
“Are you sure? I have an excellent mind for scandalous details. We could have had midnight trysts in the Grand Hall...”
“Where there's currently half a dozen camp beds?”
“I could have written you poetry—I write very good poetry, by the way. Most of the flowers have gone from the garden so I would have had to bring you cabbages or carrots instead or I could have gone hunting for wildflowers...”
“You don't like the outdoors,” she pointed out. “You're always complaining about the mud.”
“I'm trying to write the story of our great romance, Granger.” He raised one eyebrow at her. “I'll thank you not to interrupt my creative flow.”
It was ridiculous, objectively speaking. And it became even more so as he went on and on, detailing how he would have begged for a lock of her hair to wear around his neck and bribed the other nurses to carry messages between them, despite the fact that they saw each other at least twice a day. Yet strangely, she found that it was making her feel better. He even made her laugh once or twice. The sound felt rusty in her throat but easier than it had the day before. There was something comforting about the sound of his upper-class consonants, about the lazy aristocratic drawl whose sound had used to set all her teeth on edge, and that was strange too.
“He's an idiot for letting you go,” Draco said just when she was about to leave. “Any man would be.”
Even stranger, that made her feel better too.
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, they signed a cease-fire. Hermione cried when she heard and then she let Ginny pick her up and spin her around the room and then she collapsed on her narrow nurse's bed and tried to imagine what a world without the war might look like.
That night, Hermione stole a bottle of champagne from the kitchens and smuggled it out to a darkened corner of the grounds. Draco was waiting there, as she'd known he would be, wrapped in a coat and scarf against the winter chill and clutching the key to the greenhouse that he'd charmed out of one of the nurses. He swung the door open and they slipped inside into a miniature jungle, the windows thick with steam and green vines brushing the tops of their heads.
“You didn't want to celebrate with the other nurses?” he asked.
“They've already drunk all the champagne,” she said and pulled out the cork with a soft pop, taking a long drink from the bottle. “More for me this way.”
She passed the bottle over to him and he drank, the moonlight sliding along the lines of his , throat as he tipped his head back and swallowed and she tried not to let her eyes linger there.
“What are you going to do now that the war's over?” he asked after they'd drunk half the bottle in less than ten minutes, tapping out a drumbeat with his hands against his thigh. It would have irked her any other night but tonight she just watched the motions of his long, slender hands, somehow mesmerized.
“Go to Oxford and get as many degrees as they'll give me, if I can find a way to pay for it. I'm going to read so many books and write papers and have arguments with people who aren't with you,” she said dreamily.
“You might actually have a chance of winning then.”
She mock-scowled at him. “I've won all of our arguments. I've been keeping score.”
He scoffed. “Nonsense. I have decided to drown myself in wine and women. Finally lead a life of well-deserved debauchery. I think I'll do quite well at it.”
“I don't think you'd know what to do with that many women,” she teased.
“I know how to do all sorts of things with women. Things you've never even dreamed of.”
It would have been different if he had sounded seductive. If his voice had dipped soft and low and he had dragged his eyes over the length of her, she could have scoffed and rolled her eyes and brushed the moment away. But he said it with the careless confidence he must have possessed before the war, laughing at himself a little, and Hermione felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the champagne unfurl in her stomach.
“Maybe you're underestimating me. I have quite the overactive imagination.”
He was the one who leaned in first so technically, it was his fault. But she was the one who met him halfway.
Hermione Granger had been kissed before, of course. Nice kisses from nice boys that skirted around the edge of decorum but never crossed it. There was nothing nice about the way that Draco Malfoy kissed. Certainly not about the way he bit at her lower lip or pulled the pins out of her hair or let his hands stray dangerously low. But there was nothing nice about the way she bit him back or undid the buttons of his shirt or guided his hands to the places where she wanted them either. And she hadn't known it could be like this—fierce and uncivilized and a little bit desperate, like she might die if she couldn't feel his skin underneath her hands. And she thought that perhaps she understood all the foolish things that people did just to feel this again because only for a minute, as he caught her sighs with his mouth and their hearts seemed to beat in unison, she would have done them too.
They didn't speak about it, afterward. They went on much the same as before. She read to him at night--they were on to Emma now and had had quite a few lively arguments about it. They walked in long slow loops around the Hogwarts grounds and if their arms occasionally brushed, neither of them mentioned it. He still woke up screaming sometimes and she sat with him until he fell asleep, even when it wasn't her shift, and all of the other nurses knew better than to comment on it. He slowly prepared to go back home to Malfoy Manor, with its absurd snow white peacocks that had somehow survived the war and a thousand responsibilities waiting for him, and she prepared for the Oxford interviews, reviewing long-ago wars and long-dead kings and painfully thick Victorian novels. Sometimes, she wondered if that night in the greenhouse had been nothing more than an especially vivid dream. Then he would reach out for her in his sleep or the winter light would fall across a certain angle of his face and that same jolt would pass through her and she would find herself unable to breathe all over again.
The day that he left, she walked with him down the long graveled drive to the car his family had sent. Neither of them said anything until they were nearly to the car and he turned to face her, green army duffel slung over his shoulder.
“Goodbye, then,” she said, a thousand other words trapped in her throat. “I—I'll miss reading with you at night. No one argues with me about Austen quite like you do. But I'm glad that you're better and I...”
She trailed off, shoving her hands into the pockets of her apron, and looked at him helplessly. He looked a little like a Greek statue in the morning light. It was absurd that anyone was allowed to have cheekbones like that or a gaze that made something clench in her chest despite her best efforts to ruthlessly suppress it.
“I think you saved my life, Granger,” he said. “So thank you.”
Then he climbed into the car, his blond head through the window all she could see as the car took off in a spray of gravel, and she stood there in the driveway until he vanished in the distance. The tears, when they came, were both a surprise and something she should have expected all along.
Hermione received a scholarship to Oxford. A shockingly generous scholarship that she had neither applied for nor even heard of, from an influential aristocratic family who preferred to remain anonymous. A scholarship that, had she not known better, she might have suspected had been created especially for her. (The strangely familiar elaborate family crest on the letters she received detailing the administration of her scholarship was certainly enough to make anyone suspicious. As was the beautifully bound edition of Pride and Prejudice that came along with the letter informing her of the scholarship.)
Three weeks into the term, her guilt got the better of her. She had been brought up properly, after all, even if it had been by a dentist. So she wrote him a letter to say thank you and she enclosed her address in Oxford in case he might like to write her back. In her weaker moments, she checked her mailbox twice a day.
He didn't write her back. Instead, he appeared there one rainy October night, lounging against the double doors to her hall, his pale hair glinting in the lamplight. For a moment, she just stood there and gaped at him. Then she stepped forward and peered more closely, one hand reaching out to brush the fabric of his impeccably tailored coat. He looked quite amused at that. He was real, then.
“How did you get the porter to let you in?” she finally managed.
He shrugged. “The Malfoy charm works wonders. As does the Malfoy fortune.”
“You invented a scholarship so I could go here,” she blurted out.
“I did.”
“Was it meant as a thank you? For what you said before you left?” Hermione could almost have understood that. Saving someone's life—if that was really what she'd done—could perhaps be the kind of thing that merited Oxford scholarships if you were an eccentric aristocrat.
“Not as a thank you, although I will always be grateful. I meant what I said that day.” He paused and took a breath, throwing his shoulders back as if preparing for a blow. “I did it because I'm quite madly in love with you.”
“You love me?” The words echoed a little off the Oxford stones and she tested them out in her mouth, marveling at how natural the feel of them was.
“It's a dreadful affliction. I suspect incurable. But I find that I don't mind it.” He smiled weakly at that and shoved his hands into his pockets, the left one trembling slightly. “It's not as if I expect you to love me back. I know I haven't got a chance with you but you wrote and sent me your address and I thought that maybe...I thought I should at least tell you.”
“I'm well aware that I'm damaged goods,” he went on. “I can't hold so much as a fork with my left hand half the time and I still have the nightmares, I'll likely have them for the rest of my life--”
“If you're damaged goods, then so am I. None of us who went through the war came out of it whole. But we came through it anyway. I promised I'd be with you in that field, remember?” She remembered every moment of that night perfectly. Perhaps she had begun to love him then, long before she'd had any inkling of it and long before she should have, holding his hand in the dark as he fell asleep. “And I will be, for as long as you'll have me there.”
“Are you sure? That might be an awfully long time, Granger.”
“Hermione,” she said. “If you love me, you ought to call me Hermione.”
“Hermione,” he repeated and his face as he said it was something marvelous, like he was seeing the sun rise for the very first time.
“And it's not such a dreadful affliction, not if it's shared.” She took a step towards him and then another, until the hems of her skirts were brushing up against the fine tweed of his trousers.
“So you intend to share it with me then?” He said the words as if he couldn't quite believe them but he was smiling as she tilted her face up towards his.
“I do. I love you,” she said and nearly laughed with the joy of saying it. “It took me the longest time to realize what it was and then I did and it's—it's extraordinary. Unlike anything I've ever felt before.”
He was grinning now, ear to ear, and his hands still trembled when he reached for her but his arm was steady when it went around the curve of his waist and his face was lit with something brighter than the lamplight.
“Absolutely extraordinary,” he agreed and brought her mouth to his. There was still nothing nice about the way Draco Malfoy kissed. Certainly nothing proper about it at all either, as he pressed her up against the stones of the college, tracing kisses along the line of her neck, and she melted against him. But there was something that felt like hope in it, in the way he whispered her name and the steady beat of his heart, and that, Hermione Granger thought, was the best thing of all.