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Merlin, Morgana, and Hecate.
Whoever had come up with the grand idea to have a house party, with alcohol, and then test out experimental charms on one another deserved a special place in hell. And Hermione wanted to be the one to send them there.
“I know you’re finding it hard to stop caressing my face, Padma, but I really need to be able to see in order to end the enchantment.”
One thing was certain—this was doing wonders for exercising her patience and bedside manner.
The normally quiet Tuesday night shift in the Hospital Wing, during which she should have been able to complete her Arithmancy essay, had turned into an almost literal zoo, what with all the screaming, singing, dancing, and animal-sound-making eighth years.
Madame Pomfrey just happened to be off, so Hermione, a mere apprentice (though she was more than up to the task, of course), was stuck trying to reverse engineer and fix all of them.
And it seemed like all of the eighth year students, minus herself, were there.
“Of course,” she gritted out, “this batch of reckless, advanced practitioners and child warriors would come up with spells that couldn’t be solved by a simple Finite.” Hermione ground her teeth as she moved onto Neville and the striptease he was performing for an all-too-giddy group of girls.
Pansy was actually howling in response. (Whether this was her particular ailment or not awaited to be seen.)
“Let’s just get you sorted, Neville, before you get too far!” Hermione considered what options might bypass the spell and bring back his sense of control and propriety—and she worked quickly, what with Neville down to his boxers and all.
“Party pooper!” slurred Blaise Zabini, who was achieving an amazing feat of walking around on his hands.
Cheeks aflame, but fully cured, Neville gathered what clothes he had on the floor and bolted. Pansy ran after him on all fours, howling all the way, but Hermione stopped her before she reached the hall. Her enchantment took just two minutes to work out.
Hermione slowly whittled down the patient count until only one was left.
A twirling, pirouetting Draco Malfoy, who was showing off what could only be described as shockingly impressive ballet skills.
He had just finished a second grand jeté when Hermione, beleaguered from her efforts, decided she had to take a small break from trying.
“It’s a special one I came up with,” said Theo Nott from behind her.
“Theo!” Hermione clutched at her chest. “I sorted your hysterical crying fit out ages ago. What are you still doing here?”
“Oh that? I was just pretending. Or, rather,” he amended, “just tapping into my constant but deeply buried sorrow. Broken childhood, the state of the world, an ever-present recognition of the futility of life as I creep toward the grave, et cetera, et cetera.”
Hermione looked at him, startled, but he ignored her and just continued from this distressingly personal admission as nonchalantly as usual.
“I didn’t get cursed, but I did do a fair bit of the casting. I just came here to watch the chaos.”
Malfoy was humming to himself and, as Hermione looked more closely, performing half of a dance intended to have a partner.
“He’s doing the Swan Lake pas de deux—the Love Duet.” Theo sighed melodramatically.
“Oh, that ballet is so depressing,” Hermione said. “My mother took me to it once.”
“How interesting!”
“Really?”
“No.”
Hermione huffed.
“Though,” Theo began, “it is interesting that you’re more taken up with chatting to me than curing our infamous friend, here.”
Immediately bristling at the accusation of unprofessionalism, Hermione sputtered, “I never—how dare you insinuate—I am not avoiding curing Malfoy! I’ve been working nonstop for nearly two hours—no thanks, it seems, to you—and I just spent twenty minutes on him, alone! After having already tried several times when everyone else was still here!”
Her hair was crackling, and she took a deep breath. “Look at my hands!” She thrust them forward. “They’re shaking.”
Theo—tall, aristocratic, and devilishly attractive (perhaps just “devilish”)—let out an incongruous giggle. “Yes, it was rather funny to see you try. But only one thing can cure this particular brand of Tarantallegra.”
So Hermione was right. Ha! She knew it was a variant of that charm.
“Someone has to dance the dance with him.”
Oh, bloody hell.
“Well, go on then.” She gestured for Theo to get on with it. “We all know you two are meant for one another.”
“Alas, Granger,” he sighed again. “Try as I did at one point, my libidinous presence doesn’t cut it when it comes to Draco. A very certain person has to dance with him, and I am not her.”
They stood in silence: Theo, giving Hermione a meaningful look, and she, trying with all earnestness to stave off the truth.
“Theodore Cantankerous Nott, did you hex Malfoy to have to perform a ballet duet with me?” That amount of specificity was nigh impossible.
“Absolutely not!”
She gave him her glariest glare.
“Charmed,” he clarified, looking innocently pedagogical regarding the branch of magic used. “I charmed him to perform a ballet duet with . . . someone who happened to be you.”
Hermione mentally reordered her hit list. First she would throttle Theo. Then it would be whoever had come up with this inane idea of a party. In all probability, it meant she would be offing Theo twice over.
The absolute last thing she wanted was to be at Malfoy’s mercy. Inside the shelter of his arms and against the plane of his chest.
Hermione’s heart stuttered. It had been years since she’d danced.
“You are the worst,” she said to her tormentor.
“I do try to live up to my middle name.”
“Why me?” It wasn’t so much a question as a whine.
Theo picked invisible lint off his jumper. “Well, I suppose part of the reason is that I’ve heard time and again what a brilliant ballerina you supposedly are—or perhaps were, before the war.”
“Who told you that?”
“A gentleman delinquent never reveals his sources,” he said with unabated serenity.
Perhaps she could shove the bottle of Skele-Gro down Theo’s throat. It would certainly have the favorable effect of wiping the smug smile off his face, and perhaps even terminating the insufferably creative man-child. There was some debate among scholars as to the endurance of spells after death, and early demise might very well nullify Theo’s casting, thus helping her avoid touching Malfoy. A very favorable outcome, all things considered.
But no, even some light murder would wreak havoc on her five-year plan, not to mention it was decidedly looked down upon for a Healer’s CV. So even if she believed the law might be on her side when it came to Theodore Nott, she must restrain her homicidal tendencies.
With a huff, Hermione stepped forward. The sooner done, the sooner she could put it out of her mind with work. Keep to her plan. Arithmancy and apprenticing and potions and . . .
“Ah ah ah—you must look the part, Miss Granger!” Theo waved his wand, transfiguring her clothes and outfitting Hermione in a properly floofy costume, complete with tutu and feathers just like Swan Lake’s Odette. Then he placed a vinyl on the gramophone in the corner (from where had he pulled that record? And when had he wheeled in a player?) Hermione vaguely wondered how much planning had gone into this.
The horns and harp of Tchaikovsky’s score rang through the wing.
Malfoy seemed to come back to himself slightly, dazed as he was with drink and bewitchment.
“Granger! Come, come! Dance with me! Isn’t the night lovely?” He looked out a window with overwrought melancholy, twirling as he kept his eyes fixed outside. “‘Looking up at the stars, I know quite well; That, for all they care, I can go to hell; But on earth indifference is the least; We have to dread from man or beast.’”
Malfoy quoting poetry?
She made her way to him hesitantly.
“Granger,” came Theo’s insistent voice, “do hurry. Your entrance is coming soon, and the poor man has been dancing for hours.”
A sheen of sweat was on Malfoy’s brow, and, Merlin, the veins popping in his forearms!
Hermione swallowed hard.
Malfoy hardly seemed to notice his own signs of fatigue, lost in stars and verse (and drink and curse) as he was.
“‘How should we like it were stars to burn; With a passion for us we could not return?; If equal affection cannot be,” here he turned toward her and, bowing, stretched forth his hand as for a dance, “'Let the more loving one be me.’”
In that moment, Theo cast a transfiguration spell on Malfoy’s clothes so they resembled the costume of Prince Siegfried.
Theo mumbled something else and Hermione shivered as all the necessary steps were fed into her brain.
That little shit. He’d cursed her, too! She turned back to him with all her qualms about murder newly swept aside. He seemed more and more to her as the evil Rothbart—though with a penchant for pranks instead of devilry.
“Don’t worry, Granger,” Theo said. “It’s just so you know what to perform. It will end when the dance is over.”
Hmph. The cheeky little snake.
“Granger, he’s waiting.” Theo skipped the record back several times as she hesitated.
Something in Hermione felt ready to snap. Far from the low-grade amusement that had been hiding under her frustration all night, she was now every bit on edge.
Adrenaline made her shaky, and she felt simultaneously weak and wound up. A tingling in her head and a pricking at the corners of her eyes told her there would be no coming back from this—from dancing with him and knowing what it was like to be held by him.
She hated going off course. And this very much threw her for a loop.
Still, her mind insistently told her the moves she should complete. What she needed to do.
Bugger it.
She took Malfoy’s hand and, far from a snapping sensation, felt as if she were scattering. Free falling. Like the tips of her fingers, toes, even the crown of her head no longer existed, and she was particulate energy dissipating into the cosmos.
It made her wobbly. Just her luck that she would finally take this chance to be close to Draco and end up on her bum.
“Careful there, Granger.” Malfoy’s hand on her side pulled her closer to him. “No partner of mine will stumble. One might think you’d been drinking on the job.”
“Wha–I would never!”
He smirked, and she realized he was just trying to get a rise out of her—but the familiar banter succeeded in allaying some of her fraying nerves.
“How are you even upright?” she said, sniffing.
“I’m quite sure-footed.” And indeed, as he walked beside her, his steps were precise.
“Besides,” his breath was close at her neck as he inhaled, “months spent withstanding the most potent drug at Hogwarts has heightened my ability to function normally while . . . inebriated.”
“Been doing some Alihotsy, hmm?” If she kept talking, she might not dwell on the sensation of her racing heart. Her mind was only half on the words; every place he touched was sensitive, like skin after a burn, and feeding into her dizziest daydreams: a reformed man, tender touches, and (it made her blush to think it) passion.
“Not doing anything—or anyone—no matter how much I’ve dreamed of it.” So he was thinking of dreams, too.
As Hermione stepped away in similitude of Odette’s trepidation, not unlike her own, she caught Malfoy’s burning stare.
He probably had indigestion—one shouldn’t drink and dance, after all. But his intensity—gastrointestinal in nature or not—made her insides swoop.
She pressed her hands to her chest as part of the dance, but it had the paired effect of making her feel more secure. A reminder for her to protect her heart. For no matter how much she tried to trivialize, tease, or skate along the surface, her thoughts went whirling to hypothetical and damnably hopeful places when it came to Draco Malfoy. And that way lay heartache.
They came into one another’s orbit again, and he moved to support her.
“You’re shaky, little swan.”
A shiver rippled down Hermione’s spine. Malfoy’s tone, which was disconcerting precisely because it was neutral, had unsettled her all year. Gone was the edge of scorn she’d grown accustomed to hearing from him for the past seven years, and his objective scrutiny was all the more discomfiting.
In similitude of Prince Siegfried and Odette, Malfoy pursued Hermione—always stood at her back to support her leg lifts and offer comforting warmth, even in her retreats.
“So light on your feet,” he whispered as he caught her gentle fall backward. “Even if I hadn’t known you were a dancer, I could have guessed it from the way you carry yourself.”
She began to come intermittently to him for support, even as she also turned away. This was a dance of trepidation and magnetism.
At last, she responded. “I could say the same for you.”
It wasn’t quite a match for his compliment, but she was still understandably wary.
Following an initial and awkward apology, his overtures to her this year had been of the “can you please pass the bubotuber pus” variety—distinctly lacking in any insult, but nothing overly warm, either.
Certainly nothing like the warmth of his hands at her sides as he raised her in a series of lifts—or the echoing warmth in her stomach as his fingers crept upward to cover her small breast. As a partner’s hands tend to do in lifts, she reminded herself, trying to remain dispassionate, though the pressure of his fingertips on her nipple made her core ache, and even the voice in her head was husky. He lifted her time and again like little more than a dried leaf.
“Well done,” she said. The breathiness in her voice was completely to do with the exertion. Nothing else. Perhaps, she thought, a well-placed backhanded compliment would disguise her embarrassing swooniness. “Who knew you were hiding such muscles under all those long sleeves?”
Immediately she wanted to smack her forehead. What the hell, brain? It had only come out as a compliment. Or maybe he would take it as a critique of his long sleeves—and what he was trying to hide.
So many ways for her words to go wrong. Why did she keep trying to not be weird? Just stop talking, Hermione.
“So you’ve been looking,” he said, which only made her flush. (But she definitely noticed a smirk.)
Gone was the carefully neutral tone Malfoy had taken with her all year. Whether it was from alcohol or fatigue, he was uncharacteristically soft.
His large hands spanned her torso as she performed a series of assisted pirouettes. Something in the way they slid over her, the pressure they provided as she twirled, made her throat constrict. Hermione was aware of each muscle as she willed herself to keep moving; physically, all she wanted was to fully collapse into his orbit. Mentally, it was impossible. The contrast between her physical and intellectual instincts brought a consistent heat to her cheeks, as if her internal battle, burning out of sight, insisted on manifesting itself in the real world. A thin layer of perspiration covered her skin, cooling her as they moved together and providing mild relief, but it was the only respite she felt.
The awkwardness of their proximity, the few tentative compliments they’d said, the fact that they’d been forced together while she nursed her ridiculous infatuation—it all lay over them like a thick blanket of lung-crushing heat.
Then he blew it all away.
“You’re breathtaking,” he whispered, fittingly, on an exhale. “I paid a pretty penny to one of the Patil girls to find out about your performances after fifth year. Before everything in my family went to shit. She even made me promise not to sabotage or hurt you. You were magnificent.”
Hermione’s heartbeat kicked up a notch. “You knew?”
“I was there.”
Her mind was too fast and too slow.
“But—” Hermione was moving away on pointe, only to return to him, as the dance demanded. “But why?”
His breath was on her neck again.
“I told myself it was curiosity,” he addressed her with a seriousness and honesty that drink sometimes brought out in a person. “I had to find some fault with you, and surely a Muggleborn couldn’t dance as well as all those pureblood ballerinas I’d seen.”
Hermione bent in half as Malfoy held her torso, and her leg wrapped around him, anchoring on his shoulder. He was the rock against which she balanced; she was the focal point around which he rotated.
Hermione knew in theory how this entire pas de deux was a metaphor for the progression from fear to trust. How Odette had been hurt in the past and wished to fly away to prevent more pain, but Siegfried remained steadfast at her back—bracing her with his devotion and persistently refusing to let her run.
But now, as she danced it with Draco, it was no longer just theoretical.
It’s just a dance, she mentally berated herself, and he’s merely a cursed patient. Don’t create parallels where they don’t exist.
Yet, Malfoy’s hands were strong and sure, supporting her firmly so she felt no risk of stumbling. Twirling, holding, lifting her.
As she extended her arms like wings, Hermione felt like her body could take flight.
Slowly, as the dance reached its climax, she came to be utterly tied up with him. She relied on him for her every move, and he was synchronized to help her in any way he could.
“Is that why Theo chose me? As a—” she hated the way her voice betrayed her with a small wobble, “As a joke to you?” A humiliation to me? Her nose tingled with the warning signs of overwhelming emotion.
Theo was observant. Or maybe someone had blabbed about Hermione’s fascination with Draco.
“Do you remember when we brewed Amortentia in sixth year?” Malfoy asked abruptly.
Hermione’s heart rate picked up. “Yes.”
“It wasn’t my first time smelling it. Slytherin house had done it in fourth as a joke, and I let some of my frankly bewildering scents slip to the boys. Loamy forest. Sleekeezy’s Hair Potion. Something tannic, like blood.”
She stayed silent as they danced, knowing there was more.
“But in sixth, a new scent came in—and Nott happened to see my reaction. He bullied me until I told him. He’s my best mate, so I knew he wouldn’t go blabbing—but he hasn’t let me live it down.”
“What was the new scent?”
Malfoy didn’t answer immediately—just used the proximity of an embrace to draw close to her neck again. “Rose.” His lips tickled the juncture to her shoulder, leaving goosebumps on her arms. “Vanilla. Jasmine. Orange blossom?”
Her heart was in her throat as she went into an arabesque and he turned her slowly to look into his intense eyes.
“J’adore,” he murmured.
The name of her perfume. And yet . . . something in the weight of his voice, its rough edges and rumbling timbre, suggested the name’s meaning.
I love.
She melted into him as he embraced and rocked her—only because it’s part of the dance.
“You feel magnificent in my hands,” Malfoy continued, seemingly deciding to sweep the last of his vagueness aside.
Were her feet still on the ground? She felt lighter than air as she pirouetted again with his hands never leaving her torso.
“God,” he breathed, “I’d give anything to go back in time and create some way for you to trust me.”
She was so caught up in the moment that she hardly registered the steps they were executing—only his proximity.
Hermione felt poised on a knife’s edge: cheeks flushed and fingers tingling, stomach seemingly gone, and something in her chest pulling her ever toward him. The magic crackling in the air had very little to do with the spells they were each experiencing.
Their pas de deux was nearing its end.
Eyes meeting, Hermione placed her hand in Malfoy’s and said, “You haven’t let me fall.”
He pulled her closer than was strictly necessary—out of step with what was next. “Does that mean I haven’t utterly bungled my chances?”
As she considered his words, she curled in on herself, physically and emotionally. Malfoy held her at his side; he twirled, dipped, and pulled her back to him.
What chance did they have?
The answer was, she didn’t know. How much of what she wanted—what had inadvertently stolen into her nightly dreams since that quiet day in November, when she started working side by side with him and saw just how attentive he was in potion making, with his furrowed eyebrows and hunched shoulders and long fingers. What she’d let slowly overtake her thoughts thereafter, with every quiet question from him, every half smile, every deferential "Granger?" in their group discussions.
How much of her desire was an impossibility? Could two people with a history like theirs, so separated by honor, magic, and family, bridge the chasm? Did they even have a chance with realities like those?
Resuming their progression of steps that told of Odette and Siegfried falling into doomed love, she said, “This story has many endings, you know, but almost none of them end well. For either of us.” As a child, after she’d seen the ballet with her mother, Hermione had desperately searched for versions where the lovers got to live happily ever after. And while there were many variations on the tragedy, only a couple ended in the triumph of love.
“‘Almost none’ is not none.” Malfoy looked at her lips.
And suddenly, as if she’d been plunged into a lake and surrounded on all sides by water, she was subsumed by the possibility of them.
As they moved together, she broke through the easy surface of their actions to the truth beneath their pretenses: His hands weren’t only sliding over her torso, but caressing her ribs, the small of her back, the sensitive skin below her navel. His eyes weren’t focused on hand positions, but roving over her body with care, hunting for her fragile places—vulnerabilities to protect and stabilize. Her synchronicity wasn’t technical observance, but acceptance of his eventuality and harmony between their hearts. She was not a performer, but a partner.
Everything was more than just their dance, here, tonight.
It ended softly—as she pivoted and looked over her shoulder; pivoted, and looked; again, and again, continually finding him there, his hands holding hers tenderly and her left foot fluttering like a quieting heartbeat against her right ankle.
Supported. Secure. Safe.
Had it only been ten minutes inside his arms? For all Hermione could tell, the world had shifted on its axis.
They were both breathing heavily as the music wound down and he dipped her a final time. And whether or not their hearts thundered from the exertion alone, it only served the dizziness of the moment when she lifted herself up and he coaxed her chin towards him.
Their lips met. His breath was warm against her cheek as he let out a relieved sort of exhale, and his lower lip was soft when she flicked her tongue forward to tentatively taste it. She brought her hands to his hair as he pulled her head closer to deepen the kiss.
It was all golden.
Until Malfoy’s exhausted legs gave out and they tumbled into a heap on the infirmary floor.
“Thus with a kiss, and a tumble, the spell is broken.”
Theo.
The gentleman prankster waved his wand, vanishing the illusory swans Hermione hadn’t even noticed flying around them. The vinyl floated up, the phonograph folded in on itself, and the two dancers were back in their regular clothes—still very much tangled up in one another.
“This was my variation on the poisoned apple for two supremely obtuse idiots,” Theo said as he sauntered to the doorway. “Godric’s soggy bottom, it took soooooo much planning,” he groaned, raising his head toward the ceiling as if in exasperation. “But even the possibility was worth it. I was ready to spoon out my eyeballs from all of Draco’s sighing and pining.” He snapped and the hospital wing’s shutters closed, the candles dimmed. “It seemed to me the only solution was to create a highly technical charm that forced him to dance until he partnered with the one he loved.”
Hermione looked quickly back to Malfoy. His cheeks were red, and he was glaring at Theo, but . . . . there was a ghost of a smile on his lips.
“You’re welcome!” Theo called out in final parting as he closed the heavy wooden doors.
Hermione was startled and anxious to find that the other spell, the one that drew her and Malfoy together from the beginning of the year, the magic as old as time that grew in places it shouldn't and Hermione had been afraid to put a name to, was still very much in effect.
He cleared his throat and scratched at his head. “Well, thank you for—uh—curing me." He moved to one knee as if to stand and walk away.
Hermione’s face was getting hot again. Surely this couldn’t be it?
The dance had done more than cure Malfoy of his spell. Hermione found her dismissiveness to her attraction and her fretting over his trustworthiness all but gone. She found herself willing—eager—to learn what kind of person he really was.
Faced with his imminent retreat, the reality crashed down on her suddenly: Dancing with him was always going to complicate things, but it had obliterated their barriers. She didn’t know if she could just sit by—
“You’re brilliant.”
His words brought her out of her spiral.
Malfoy was still on a knee, but leaning on it. Facing her. Smiling in earnest, hand extended.
Still looking for ways to stabilize me.
With a matching smile, Hermione took his hand. The warm, swooping, tingly feeling she got was familiar by now. And he didn’t let go when they were both standing.
“It’s nearly dawn,” his thumb grazed over her knuckles. “Perhaps we could . . .”
The possibilities in that pause were endless. Did he expect her to invite him to her room? Hermione wasn’t sure if she was ready for that, and she was wrung out from their dance, but she didn’t want him to feel put off. Maybe she could suggest finding a secluded spot by the Lake? A broom cupboard? Hogwarts seemed to have no short supply of discreet—
“Perhaps we could go nick some food from the kitchens?” he offered.
“Oh!” She laughed. Of course—he must be exhausted, too, and this was far less pressure. Her feet were tired from hours of running around, healing the delinquent masses, then an intense workout when she was well out of shape—and she couldn’t imagine what he was feeling, unexpected ballet skills and all.
“Um,” she bit down on an eager smile, pursing her lips. “Sure.”
“Thank Merlin.” He practically dragged her out. “Put a wiggle on, Granger. If I don’t get some sugar in my stomach soon, you’re going to have to heal my cracked head after I faint clean away.”
But then he paused at the threshold and looked back at the empty wing.
“Malfoy?”
He was mumbling. She thought she heard him reciting that poem again.
“Let the more loving one be me.”
With a rush, he turned back to her. She stepped into him and, quickly at first, then slowly, he lowered his lips to her neck. He nudged at the sensitive skin there, then peppered kisses at her collar bone and pulse point. “J’adore.”
Closing her eyes, Hermione wore the smile of one who could allow herself to try for something different. She deserved more than just what she planned, and for the first time, the unknown excited her.
Many endings were possible. Why shouldn’t she see what theirs could be?