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She could have had an easy love, Hermione tells herself. Easy is not a bad thing. It’s not less than. It’s not compromise. It’s not settling. To deny herself an easy love is a choice followed by a decision. There cannot be any falter in her step. No way back to ‘easy’ when you’ve come this far.
What is an easy love, then? She’s had a long time to think about it.
An easy love is not the tension that blooms when she walks into a room with Draco. It’s not the conversation dying, the mean little looks, and snickering stifled behind covered mouths. It’s not Harry making a show of walking up to them and welcoming them to the wedding, the party, the birthday, the funeral, to the ribbon-cutting or whatever it is they decided to attend that day, in the hopes that he can head off the inevitable unpleasantness.
Harry would not need to do such things if Hermione had an easy love.
Sometimes, this unpleasantness appears in the form of a wizard who is deep in his cups and has wandered too far away from the watchful eye of his more diplomatic spouse.
“You bastard,” he sneers at Draco. He is a swaying, red-faced, belligerent accident about to happen. “Bloody cheek…showing your face here.”
Hermione knows the steps to this dance. She is quite expert. She tries to step between the men, but Draco has moved already and there is no space to create a buffer. Her hands wrap around Draco’s arm, but he pulls away. For all their play fighting, when she pins him down in their bed and they forget the world outside long enough to reap the rewards of a love that is not easy, Hermione knows there is nothing stronger than a man who is absolutely determined to fight another. She has ripped shirts in her attempts to stop some of the men in her life from coming to blows.
A minute later, the drunk wizard crashes into the dessert table. It is a pudding massacre.
“Please, just leave,” says the hostess, embarrassed. This, Hermione can handle. She is used to causing scenes. Harry’s annoying affability and his pity, on the other hand, is another matter. He says something commiserating to Draco as he thumps him on the back. Something like, “Can always count on you to liven up the festivities, eh, Malfoy!”
Draco is livid and when he’s this angry, there’s collateral damage. The manifestation of a love that is not easy sweeps the length and breadth of Malfoy Manor when they shed their cloaks later that night. It is dense, dark, and sometimes, it frightens her. Draco Malfoy is not an easy love. He is a love that keeps her up at night for all the nice and not so nice reasons.
An easy love is not what happens on the street, as they walk through Wizarding London. A stone is thrown. A woman spits. A young man is denied a duel and screams, “Coward! Coward! Coward!” in their wake, as Hermione pulls Draco away.
To his credit, he has learned to walk away, though this experience has cost him dearly. Draco has walked away from his family, from his name, and from his Dark Lord. He walked away, survived, and as the Fates would have it, he walked into her life. He is unrecognisable from the boy she knew at Hogwarts. Oh, there were some legacy traits, she supposed. His pride, for example. That survived the war intact.
An easy love does not require spending days trying to find a good time to tell him. When she finally does tell him they’re pregnant, it is definitely not an easy love that hurts her when he responds with shock and then anger. Neither of them is surprised when he accuses her of botching her contraception charm. He says it with a straight face, too, as if Hermione Granger could make a mess of anything so ordinary. Easy is trivial. She has easy for breakfast. Simple meals do serve a purpose. They stave off hunger. But Hermione Granger is the smartest witch of her generation and a war hero. Her hunger is not so easily satisfied. She did not botch the contraception charm and an easy love is nothing but empty calories.
It is not an easy love that finds her much later that night, crying her eyes out on a stone bench in the conservatory where difficult flowers bloom in impossible conditions. They remind her of her husband. He comes for her, as she knew he would once the shock wore off and reason overcame pride. There is nothing easy about hearing his apology and trying not to cry even harder when he explains, with great emotion, that it’s not that he’s unhappy.
He says he is afraid.
He is frightened for her, for them, for the baby, because it won’t be easy. Their baby is not the product of an easy love. She tells him, just as emphatic, how fortuitous it is that they are so experienced at difficult.
An easy love might not be a well-heeled love, so there is that, Hermione supposes. A small boon.
Though he has paid dearly—both in blood and coin—Draco is still wealthy. When it came down to it, during the war, he would have died with them or for them. But even though he fought alongside them, some evils are not so easily forgiven when the dust settles, and you still own shoes that cost more than a month’s wages for the average wizard.
Even Hermione can admit that sometimes, gold can sweeten the sour. The sour is a relentless pursuer, however. It even follows them right down to the depths of Gringotts’ dark, icy vaults. In her seventh month of pregnancy and in the height of a sticky, buzzing summer, Hermione is glad for the cold and the quiet. The Malfoy Family Vault is cavernous. There are piles as tall as Draco.
He makes a large withdrawal, something about new nursery furniture. Hermione hums, enjoying the gentle yellow light and the acoustics of the room. Still speaking to the goblin manager, her husband takes her hand, absently, she thinks, but maybe not, because she feels his long fingers curl and tickle her ticklish palm. She smothers a giggle and is rewarded with a sideways smile.
An easy love could not do this to her heart. It cannot make her blush like they’re still eighteen and idiots. It is incapable of giving her a look that recalls the very night the baby was conceived. It does not have the depth or range to communicate pride, love and joy.
It’s not the goblins. No, the goblins of Gringotts are consummate professionals. No issues there. They would have served Voldemort no differently than Harry Potter himself. Gold goes in. Gold goes out. Service is paid and Draco pays well.
Hermione is glad for their cool indifference. The human clerks are something else. Alone, they are merely rude. In groups, they are malicious and daring. An easy love would not have Hermione recoiling in shock when one of them leans in and hisses, “Filthy Death Eater whore,” into her face. She flinches. From the sharp breath and spittle, but mostly, from the loathing. Her hands instinctively cover her belly and Hermione curses at her foolishness, hoping, praying that her husband did not hear or notice.
Draco’s face is made of marble. But he forgets that they are still holding hands and he is squeezing hers so hard it hurts. Even here, surrounded by the most powerful things he owns, in one of the most secure places in all of England, it finds him.
It is not an easy love that breaks the clerk’s jaw so badly that a specialist from Germany has to be Flooed into St Mungos, at great expense. That summer, Draco donates sixty-thousand galleons to the emergency ward, only to have it returned with a handwritten, anonymous note saying, “You cannot buy forgiveness.”
“Idiots,” Harry spat. He was on the Hospital Board and had argued vehemently for the money to be used on much needed equipment and supplies. But wizards live long lives and he was overruled by very, very long memories.
An easy love does not prefer to live a hermit’s existence. It is not melancholy. It does not possess a tongue so sharp, the recipients of its lashing don’t realise they’ve been cut until they’ve walked away and suddenly, they’re bleeding.
Hermione is tired of being reasonable. Tired of sitting down to debrief after another thing that has gone wrong, another encounter. Tired of tight smiles, tight fists and a heavy, aching heart. She is a wreck of nerves every time they leave their home. She jumps at shadows, worried that they harbour strangers who mean to hurt her husband or their child. She has nightmares about it. Family and friends rush to reassure her that it is not her that’s the issue, not her that makes it an uneasy love. Of course, it’s not her fault. Whether a product of nature or nurture, a lack of self-esteem has never been Hermione’s problem. Which is part of the problem, really. Hermione feels like she has earned Draco. They fought hard and long and won the right to have a chance at love, even if it wasn’t going to be easy.
On very bad days, Hermione might almost admit that easy would be, well, easier.
Almost.
But easy love is not the way she feels when she opens her eyes in the morning, and the first thing she sees is his sleeping face. She could watch him for hours. Her mother smiles knowingly at this, and says that when the baby comes, this will change. She says Hermione will love their child more than she loves its father. “You might feel like you’ll die for him now,” says Mrs Granger, “But my darling, you’ll kill for your children.”
Hermione cannot imagine this to be the case. Her capacity to love is not like Sherlock Holmes’ attic mind analogy. It is not a finite space where something can only live if something else moves out. It is boundless. She will have more than enough love to go around.
An easy love has nothing to do with the first time they fuck. Or the second or third or fourth, even. Long after the fighting stopped, there was still a war going on inside her husband. A violence and rage that Draco distilled and locked away. It leaks out when he loses his temper or when he makes love to her. Sometimes, both things happen simultaneously, because loving Hermione is not exactly easy either.
In their most intimate moments, her love is a balm and she applies it liberally. He takes it from her through her words and from her body, both of which she gives freely. This aspect of their relationship is never discussed because of the observer effect. It feels so fragile and ephemeral that putting words to it or applying analysis might cause it to disappear. All Hermione knows is that intimacy is where their healing happens.
The nursery supplies arrive at the Manor and the crates are stacked in the room that used to be Draco’s nursery. It looks like a Victorian ghost story, she tells him, which is why they purchased new furnishings. After the decorating is complete, Hermione stands in the middle of the room and gawks at the undeniable evidence of their nesting instincts.
They really are having a baby. There is fresh paint, beautiful wallpaper. Heavy velvet drapes are replaced with fresh linen. The change table came in one piece. As did the dressers. An old rocking chair that belonged to a Black ancestor is rendered comfortable with the application of cushioning charms.
The cot is another matter entirely. Oddly, Draco says he will not use magic to construct it. He wants to do it manually, just to make sure every screw, every dowel, every rail, hinge, slot and joint is where it needs to be. He wants to put it together with his hands.
“Magic is much easier,” Hermione says to him, squinting down at the small encyclopedia of instructions that come with the cot.
Draco is attempting to intuit the purpose of an Allen Key. The rare, warm smile he gives her is another heart-stopper. “Yes, but where’s the fun in that?”