Work Text:
i.
The summer after the war is very unlike the others.
She analyzes it from inside the stillness of the entryway of her childhood home, grazes the edges of it, gets as close as she dares. Perhaps it is because her parents are still gone, or because Ron and Harry have diverged from her path. Dust floats around in sunbeams that pass through the stained glass window in the front door, and she waits for sounds that do not come.
It is a kind of strength that she can't always tell when things hurt. She's not like Harry; she doesn't feel it all at once. She can postpone the big event, break it up into pieces for analysis. It's a more effective method, she is quite certain. Put anything murky in a box in her mind, seal it, file it away for later to take its measurements.
She uses that strength now, in her home that no longer quite feels like one; her home that looks the same, but that is also fundamentally altered. This disorientation gets filed away in its box, with a slight nod, because Granger, you've been in stranger houses than this.
She gets to work raising the wards, so instinctual a compulsion that she doesn't realize she's doing it until halfway through.
July passes hazily, like a dream some days. There are many mornings she wakes up expecting to see the canvas tent around her and is shocked to instead see a window, a yard. She tries to welcome this hard-won solitude, this time to rest, like returning to the embrace of an old cocoon. It is better this way, she tells herself. This is how one moves forward.
She tends her mothers garden and watches Hugh Grant films and cooks breakfast in her cotton white knickers. She tells herself that she is healing. But there is a restlessness under her skin sometimes, that never seems to fade. It is in the circles under her eyes and it is in the way her fingers itch for her wand. She continues to ward the house but always she is straining her ears for the crack of apparition—visitors in the night, real or imagined.
It is difficult to sleep now, you see, with no one else around to keep watch.
By August she is antsy for movement. She has been in one place for too long, so she drinks kettle after kettle of tea and reads and rereads her course books. Before dinner she stares out the window above the kitchen sink, perfectly still, a hand wrapped around her own throat, feeling her steady pulse and anticipating the arrival of the head girl badge.
It finally comes late one evening right before the start of term. She expected the badge, of course. What she didn't expect was the numbness that fills her as she watches the owl approaching, a parcel clutched in its talons and her arms crossed tightly over her chest. And she didn't expect its alienness, as if it was carved and made and offered for some other person entirely. Or how heavy the thing feels in her palm, just cold silver, bloodless, like holding something dead.
She didn't expect it to feel like wistfulness, or like promises broken.
Even as she grasps it, it feels very far away. In another life, it would have meant something to her.
There was even a time, perhaps, when it would have meant everything.
ii.
Learning about Malfoy's co-Head appointment does rattle her, briefly, when she arrives at Hogwarts. It shouldn't. Nothing about this should be surprising anymore. Besides, she has faced far worse. It's simply another battlefield to cross, another pile of rubble in a wounded castle. It can be distilled down to its execution—dividing conflicts into their familiar and unfamiliar designations. She must sever them like this. Put them in their boxes piece by piece.
Maintaining sovereignty of the internal and external requires an ability to will the dust into settling.
In the Headmistress's office, McGonagall waxes on about inter-house unity, forgiveness, reconciliation; by all measures a perfectly reasonable position, and another Hermione in another life may have passionately advocated for the same. But things are different now. She is different, too.
The difference is written on her arm, the price she had paid in blood, her pound of flesh. A permanent reminder of The Way Things Had Changed.
It is almost comforting that in one way—politics—nothing has.
The beast must be fed, appeased, rocked back into complacency. McGonagall trudges on about the Malfoy's donations to the school, the pressure from the ministry, furrowed brows in the Wizengamot, and A Mother Only Concerned For Her Son's Wellbeing And Safety.
Hermione hears but doesn't hear, has already mapped out this mycelium, observed all the systems connecting this world. A special world once, a different world that she once gazed at with bright young eyes, thinking it was new. She knows better now—sees it clearly. This is a renegotiation of expectations. A small easement that must be made for the sake of maintenance, but nothing to worry about, carry on.
It looks like important people grinning for camera flashes with big white teeth, and expensive manors on ancient ley lines. It looks like desperation, a frantic decrepit creature putting things back where they belong. This is the Old Ways, the Before Men, clinging to a decaying rusting machine, and the grease of it all getting back into the gears where it has always lived. An unchanged kingdom with its fundamentally unalterable status quo.
It feels like exhaustion.
It strikes her suddenly, distantly, that maybe nothing they did really changed much of anything at all.
The beast was hungry, and it would be fed.
And that is the banality of evil, she thinks—the mundaneness even magic cannot escape.
"I know the situation isn't ideal, Miss Granger," McGonagall prompts from across the desk, fingers steepled. "But I had hoped you would be...understanding." Her eyes are severe over her spectacles. She looks older than Hermione's ever seen her.
"Yes," Hermione replies, wooden and nearly vacant. "The optics. Of course, Professor."
But something hard with rounded edges blooms in her chest, like cynicism or resentment or bitterness, that she can't decide what to do with or how to sort. She will need a new box for these.
More weights she should put down simply because they are heavy—but can't.
iii.
By October she and Malfoy have developed a shaky system, forged through some extrasensory spatial awareness of one another. As little as they interact through pointed silences they manage to communicate enough basic information to keep the harder truths shut away.
Closed doors locked and silencing charms performed in private spaces. Their common room remains dark save for the shadows under their doors and the fire blazing in the hearth. It exists barren, merely a passageway that leads to somewhere else.
Still Harry and Ron do not write. In this way, slowly, like a guttering candle, solitude becomes loneliness.
She takes patrols every weekend, when Malfoy is away from the castle visiting his mother in her lavish Wiltshire prison, and they are so quiet and uneventful she feels more specter than girl. So many students did not return. There are no parties in dusky classrooms or couples paired off in evening corners.
Even the ghosts don't come out to play. Maybe they feel it, too—the heavy absence, the weight of lost things. Can ghosts see the echoes of memory, ricocheting between empty hallways? Are there moments even the dead mourn?
The stillness comes on quickly, settling over her like rain on soil. She looks down at her badge, and then down the barren hallway. Feels herself begin to drift away.
If she drifted away then, she'd be standing in smoke and dust over a girl's body, trying to make out a face torn apart by feral claws. She would be watching Harry across a destroyed courtyard, limp in Hagrid's arms, all hope extinguished beneath her ribs and a coldness racing through her blood.
She turns, runs from the tidal wave, her footfalls reverberating through familiar, unfamiliar corridors.
This place belonged to her once, didn't it? She swears she can remember it, the way the stone walls felt on her chewed-up fingers as she rounded the corners. A library piled high with ancient tomes, so many books they may as well have been infinite. Picking apart each smell in the Potions classroom in the dungeons, identifying their sources with a practiced mind, and all of it real and also not, so deep in her memory, so far from what she has become.
But these are the moments that it becomes clear that it does not, has never, belonged to her. No, she is not from this world. Molded by it perhaps, but forged elsewhere—by the stained glass window and the dust in its sunbeams, by the feeling of her mothers hands on her face, the tearful look in her eyes as they stand on a platform before a scarlet red train.
She is not from this world. The proof is all around her, in this stillness, like the warning pull of a portkey in her belly. She is not from this world. And this place will never let her forget it.
She is somewhere near the astronomy tower when she spots him, her polished loafers skidding to a halt.
There he is. Malfoy, leaning against the wall, hair shining in the silver moonlight. He looks off into the distance, over the grounds toward the Forbidden Forest. He smokes a long thin cigarette and the smoke curls into the soft wind around them. She freezes, so shocked is she to find him here when he should be back at the manor.
He glances at her, his mouth pursed around the cigarette as he slowly inhales. He doesn't seem surprised; in fact, his eyes look quite empty of any recognizable emotion. She opens her mouth to speak out of habit, but when she reaches for the words there are none.
"Remember that time—" he begins, exhaling the drag into the night. "First year. We all got detention. You and I, Potter and Longbottom, wasn't it? We were, what, eleven? And that idiot Hagrid made us walk into those bloody woods with just a dog and a lantern for protection."
He snorts and sort of shakes his head, gently, an air of disbelief about him. She feels a simultaneous irritation at his rudeness about the beloved groundskeeper and a guilty acknowledgement that sending a group of completely inexperienced wizards into the Forbidden Forest without a proper chaperone had been, upon recollection, terribly dangerous and ridiculously irresponsible.
She takes a step closer without realizing she is doing it, and then she is next to him, leaning her arms over the stone window, eyes on the sprawling grounds, traveling to all the places she was back then, all the places she had been and still was, in some dimension of space and time.
"Hagrid is not an idiot," she mutters, crossing her arms.
From Malfoy, a soft snort. "Right, Granger."
"But yes. It is probably a miracle we survived that evening. And many others besides."
He makes a soft, surprised sound of agreement, almost a hum, and taps the ash from his cigarette.
"I fucking hate this place," he says under his breath, and when she turns to his face, his expression is very far away, teetering on a distant sea of memory all his own.
She wonders if he means the school in its entirety, a place made of eggshells for him now, of sneering contempt, where once it had been another stage to act out his own privilege with abandon.
She also wonders if he means this tower where they now stand, where he had disarmed a sick old wizard and rejected an offer of help. She wonders if he regrets that moment. She thinks he must—and curses her own empathy when she imagines how many other regrets there might be.
She says in a small voice, "Why don't you just leave, then? Go home?"
And he smirks, in that that cruel mocking way of is, but somehow, here, it is smaller, less threatening. All bark and no bite; a shadow of a shadow.
"I fucking hate it there, too."
He flicks the cigarette over the tower's edge, and they silently watch it fall toward the ground below until it explodes into a tiny shower of red sparks.
iv.
On a weekend evening in November, she walks into their common room from patrol and is shocked to see the back of Malfoy's head from her view of the sofa. It's the first time she has seen him in here, at rest like this, and not just heading to and from his bedroom. The fire roars in front of him, illuminating the white blonde of his hair, and the whole scene is arresting, somehow. It is...cozy.
A sort of twisted relief blooms inside her at the sight of him, at the scratching sound of his quill on the parchment in his lap.
"You're home early again this time."
The words are out before she considers the weight of them. Home, she had said—implying that home is this quiet, fragile space he shares with her, and not the grand estate he had just returned from.
He briefly glances up, his eyes moving over her before returning to his parchment. "Yes."
She hesitates, unsure if there is more to be said or if that had been a dismissal, and she's considering whether to simply scurry around him and retire behind another locked door when—
"I've brought—" He clears his throat. "I've brought some things back from my kitchens. If you're hungry."
She doesn't even consider saying no. Simply walks over to the plush chair opposite him and sits down. "Alright," she tells him, trying to ignore the controlled raise of his eyebrows. She gazes intently at the basket on the table, overflowing with small handpies dusted with powdered sugar.
She chances a look at his face, his expression unreadable and his fingers tight around his quill, and she catches it, then—the moment his eyes dart to her arm, and the bobbing of his adam's apple as he attempts to swallow.
With that one look she could drift away. And if she drifted away, here, now, she'd be in an opulent room with high ceilings. There would be a witch with dark wild eyes and a cruel laugh. There would be a boy with hair so white it gleamed in the low light, and seeing it as if through a kaleidoscope, almost angelic, shining, his pointed face terrified and repulsed as she writhed on a cherrywood floor.
She could drift away, but she doesn't. She holds tight to this moment in this strange new kingdom. And she could say any number of things. What she chooses is so unlike her that his eyebrows threaten to meet his hairline.
"I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Her eyes gleam with mischief as she pulls up her sleeve, the words carved and red in the flickering shadows of the fire.
There is a pause, a moment where something widens, something without name or description.
And then Draco Malfoy laughs. She has never heard it like this—not a laugh at the expense of someone else or shaped like malice. This is not a snicker or a chuckle but a laugh, so full, delighted, a kingdom all its own, broad enough she could climb inside it. He throws his head back against the couch and she lets it wash over her, watches as the tension in his body seeps into the air and out through the walls, away from them, across this sacred territory.
Her smile is shy—and inexplicably her eyes fill with warm, tired tears. She looks back at the basket of pies, biting her lip.
"How very dark of you, Granger," he sputters as his laughter slowly dies away. And she reaches for one of the pies, quietly smug. She doesn't consider that sweets are bad for her teeth or that Harry and Ron would be furious to see her sharing communion with Draco Malfoy.
She only considers that it's nice to be sitting in someone's presence again, even his—someone who was there, someone who understands. Someone who maybe doesn't need to talk about it but who also feels its presence between and around them.
She only considers the sprawling isolation; that she, and perhaps he as well, have been like wraiths wandering this castle, trapped in an endless stream of remembering, lonely people in a lonely place. Two wraiths in a cracked kingdom; fading away as another kingdom takes its place.
Perhaps this could be theirs, in this room that connects them. A small kingdom opening its gates, that they made and are making, all theirs, a secret place with an unlikely population of two.
She supposes she has a box of him in her mind, large and full to overflowing, that she will now have to pull from storage, to be re-examined and re-sorted with great care. Tomorrow's work; nothing for it but time.
She is still smiling, as is he, mouth twitching, shaking his head. And suddenly she knows without a shadow of a doubt that Malfoy has been just as lonely as she was, all these months. Must've been.
She does not see it now, not yet—how loneliness is merely a reflection of lacking, of yearning.
How loneliness is just another word for desire.
But as with all things, Hermione would learn.