Work Text:
“Father.”
“What is it, Scorpius?” he says distractedly, absorbed in the papers on his desk.
“I have to tell you something,” his young son says, and Draco hears his voice quaver. He looks up, and sees his son standing pale and shaking by his study door, and rushes over, as worry curls around his heart.
“Are you all right? What's happened?” he says, as his heart races. The Manor is old and layered with magic, and while Malfoy blood keeps him and Scorpius safe from most harm, there are still objects which maim or kill indiscriminately. As a child, Draco was barred from more than one room containing his father's Dark Artefacts. If Scorpius has stumbled across something that his grandfather hid and left behind—
Scorpius swallows and looks up, trusting Draco to fix whatever has occurred. “The lady. The lady in the cellar. She wants me to tell you that the wards are broken.”
—but this particular darkness is not from Lucius' time.
“I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't have been there, but she said—she said that I had to tell you. She said that you'd forgive me, but that she wouldn't, and that she'd know if I didn't tell you and that she knows where I sleep at night and—” Scorpius is babbling, almost hysterical, and shaking. Draco kneels and wraps his arms around his only son, holding him tightly. His mind works quickly, trying to chart a path through the peril at hand.
“Are you hurt?” he asks. Scorpius shakes his head. “Did she touch you, try to cast anything, get you to do something for her?” Scorpius shakes his head again, and Draco pulls back far enough from his son to cast a few diagnostic charms. To his relief, Scorpius appears unharmed, albeit terrified.
“All right.” He hugs his son again, and Scorpius seems to be calming down. He needs to go to the cellar quickly, but he doesn't want to leave his son, and Astoria is away, visiting her mother. He stands and pats him on the head.
“Go and sit at my desk, I need to summon your mother.” Scorpius nods and smiles, distracted by the treat of getting to play at being the head of the Malfoy family. Draco smiles back, and he hopes that Scorpius doesn't notice that his smile is forced. Draco raises his wand and prepares to cast the spell, the one that he cannot work without thinking of her.
“Expecto Patronum,” he says, and a thin silvery animal erupts from the end of his wand. “A message for Astoria Malfoy. Return home immediately. Scorpius is safe, but I need you to watch over him. Apparate directly to my study, do not enter the Manor elsewhere. Have your wand at the ready.” His message is born away on silver paws, and Draco turns to ward the door of his study. Scorpius is playing with the quills and paperweights on his desk, and Astoria will be here soon enough.
Astoria returns exactly as he'd asked. She rushes over to Scorpius, checking him with her hands and wand.
“What's happened?” she asks over her shoulder, never turning away from her son.
Draco can only hope that she'll forgive him. “The cellar wards are broken. Scorpius found her, and she told him to inform me.”
Astoria turns to him, furious. “I told you that this would—” She cuts herself off, only because Scorpius is looking back and forth between his parents with worried eyes. She draws herself up and speaks in even tones. “We'll talk about this later.” She looks down at her son. “Scorpius, would you like to go to Grandmother's? Aunt Daphne is also visiting, and you can play with your cousins.” Scorpius nods eagerly and stands, even as Astoria takes his hand.
Her voice is soft when she speaks to her son, but when she addresses Draco, he can hear the steel beneath. “You will take care of this tonight. Tonight. Scorpius and I will be staying with my mother until it is over.”
Draco wants to argue, just like he's done so many times before. This has always been a bone of contention between them, but she's right. This time it wasn't him in the cellar, but Scorpius. If there is one thing that he and Astoria always agree upon, it is never to place Scorpius in peril.
After his wife and son vanish, Draco turns and walks toward his study door. He should take down the wards, go through the door, and down to the cellar to do his duty. He hesitates, because even after all this time he wants—
Draco draws a shaky breath. He wants impossible things. He wants more time, but that's not quite right. He wants time, but from a slightly different life. He wants what he can't have, what no one can give, and his delaying this moment will not alter that in the slightest. Draco unseals the door, pushes it open and walks down the familiar corridors that always bring him back to his choices that night, over a decade ago.
When he steps down into the cellar, his shields are firmly in place, and his wand is at the ready.
“How did you break the wards?” he asks softly. He knows that she can hear him. She's not near the foot of the stairs, so he lights the cellar's torches with a flick of his wand. As they flare to life, he can just barely see her standing in the shadows, over by the far wall, beside the rows of bookshelves.
“I didn't. They fell on their own.” She steps into the light, and Draco's breath catches in his throat. All this time, and it still hurts to look at her. So many years have passed, but Hermione still looks as young as she was on the day she died. She's paler than she was back then—no blood moves beneath her skin—but she's otherwise untouched by the hand of time.
“How?” he asks.
“I don't know. I wasn't aware that they were down until he came down the stairs.”
It could very well be true. There is something about her now that corrodes anything magical, a corruption which has only increased with time. He should have been more careful, checked his wards more frequently.
“There was no need to scare him,” he says.
She shrugs and looks idly at the books surrounding her. Draco hasn't seen her read one in years. “Children learn better with a touch of fear. It worked. He went running to you.”
Draco frowns and grips his wand tighter. “He was hysterical. This isn't like you, to scare a child.”
She slowly turns and looks at him, as if he's only now drawn her full attention. “I'm not her. Or don't you remember?”
He says nothing, because he's learned that it's useless to argue. This is the latest disagreement between them, something that's sprung up only in the last few years. This insistence that she's not Hermione, that's she's someone else entirely. He's argued with her for hours, conjuring mirrors and showing her photographs, bringing up memories both pleasant and painful. Nothing he's done has changed her mind.
“You could have fixed the wards from upstairs. Why are you here?” she says distantly, as if the answer doesn't matter.
“I thought I might spend some time with you,” he says carefully. “I haven't visited you for a while.” This might be his final visit, if he does what his wife has wanted ever since they married. To give in to what he's fought against for twelve long years, ever since Bellatrix's curse opened up Hermione's chest and heart. He wouldn't do it, not for Potter or Weasley or even Astoria, but for Scorpius—for Scorpius, he will do anything, whatever the cost to himself.
“I asked you not to any more. She's not here, the person that you're looking for.”
He watches the woman standing in front of him, looking for the woman that he loved. In the beginning, it was easy. It was like Hermione was still there, albeit cold and pale. The changes came slowly at first, then in quick succession. These days he goes down to the cellar rarely, and then only if he's prepared to raise his wand in self-defence.
She's never made any overt moves to harm him, or even voiced a threat, but there's a coldness to her gaze which eats at his calm. He's kept her nearby, all the same. She's been dead for twelve years, and he still can't let her go.
His life has taken so many twists and turns, but Hermione was the most unexpected. He’d joined the Order begrudgingly, paying the price for saving his and his mother's life. When he’d found himself partnered with Hermione, he’d made it painfully clear that he considered her beneath him. Within a year, he'd been forced to take back everything he'd said to her, and more. Being in love with Hermione Granger was the most exquisitely painful and thrilling thing that had ever befallen him in his entire life.
They’d spent the last years of the war as lovers, making promises they didn't know they could keep. They’d been so close to making good on everything they'd said, and then she’d died, three months before the end.
When it had happened, he’d wanted to follow her. Potter and Weasley had kept him from turning his wand on himself. All of his hopes for the future had been wrapped up in her, and without her, he'd seen no way forward. He’d always assumed that he was the one who might not make it, but her—she had seemed untouchable. She had saved them so many times.
He’d been willing to do anything to bring her back. Anything at all. The very night she’d died, he’d worked a Dark spell that he hadn't fully understood, only understanding that it promised to bring back the newly dead with their minds and will intact. It worked only on wizards and witches, and Draco had hoped that it would mean that he wasn't creating an Inferius. In retrospect, though, even if he had created one, he wasn't sure that he would have cared. As long as Hermione had come back and spoken to him again.
When she’d opened her eyes, Draco had been ecstatic. After a week of hiding with her, he’d told her friends what he'd done. They needed her, he’d pleaded. He’d begged on his knees for her to be allowed to live her half-life. She was their planner, the mind behind their operations, their tactical battlefield genius. No one could replace her. He’d given logical reasons, rattled off lists, ranted, and railed when it had seemed that nothing else would work. In the end, Weasley and Potter hadn't had the heart to say no. The three of them had agreed to hide her from the others, and she had helped them win the war.
For the first few years, it was easy to pretend. She was mostly the same in her actions and behaviour. Then came the years when she broached the subject of her final death. At first it was simple: “I think you should let me go, Draco” or “I wouldn't have wanted to live like this.” These days when she speaks, it's as though she's referring to someone else called Hermione, who has long been dead.
They look at each other, Draco warily and her with uncanny calm, and then she makes her usual request.
“She wouldn't have wanted this,” she says, just like she has every other time. Unspoken is the other half of her request, for chains of fire to take her to a final death. Casting such a spell on Hermione is unthinkable, unbearable even to contemplate, but whoever is looking at him with feral intelligence in her eyes is far removed from the woman he once loved.
Over the years, he's studied the spell he used, and learned a number of things. It's her magic that keeps her walking and talking, animating her limbs. It feeds on itself continuously, eroding anything else magical around her. It also keeps her from casting spells because there's no scrap of power left to spare.
Even now, after twelve long years, there's so much left that he wants to say: about how much he loved her, how he wishes that his aunt's curse had hit him instead, and how he hates that he can no longer remember what it felt like to have her in his arms.
She hasn't let him touch her since the day she died.
“Astoria is worried, and Scorpius was scared,” he says, and watches her reaction.
“She should be, as should he,” she says, without a flicker of self-recrimination.
Draco wants to be angry, knows that he should be angry, but all he can feel is painful resignation. Everything she says is tipping him towards a decision that he could have—should have—made long ago. Barring his initial desperate choice, the truly damning part was what he did after the war. When he'd lied to Weasley and Potter, taking his choice even further than he'd initially dared. Both men had been there when he'd scattered an urn of ash into the North Sea, believing that they were witnessing the final burial of their friend.
In truth, he’d led her to the ruins of Malfoy Manor and kept her there with the best of his attention and care. The cellar had been cleaned and renovated, as sunlight hurt her eyes. She’d resided there quietly, not objecting to his care. In the years afterwards, she’d never made any attempt to escape, and he’d taken it as a sign that he'd made the right decision.
These days, he's not so sure what keeps her here, other than his wards and her own startling indifference. Even if she did leave, Draco is almost certain that she'd only seek her final death. She'd asked him for it often enough at his own hands.
“Astoria has informed me that she and Scorpius will not be returning as long as you're here,” he says, hedging around the words that he does not wish to speak. The fact is that there is nowhere else for her to go, no safe place for her to stay. They both know this; they've known it for years.
“I find that acceptable. It is dangerous to house an undead so close to a small child.”
If Draco were to close his eyes, he could almost imagine how she would have spoken if were she alive. She'd have said those words teasingly, mimicking her old lecturing tone of voice. He keeps his eyes trained on her instead. He wants to say something, some form of closure, something to sum up all those years before and since. They have meant something to him, something he still can't quite let go, even if he knows that the woman she was would never forgive him. The reckoning for what he's done will haunt him until his death.
“Hermione, I—”
“You and I have nothing to discuss.” Her words are cold and final. “Cast your spell and let me go.”
“I love you,” he says, as much to the memory of the young woman that he loved as to her. He slowly raises his wand, as the words of the spell form in his mind.
She looks at him with dull eyes. “She loved you. I do not.”
He casts the spell, and the cellar erupts with chains of fire. He stands behind his shields and watches, until there is nothing left but ash and bone. In the morning, he will go to his son and wife.
Until then, he will remain with her.