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someone I loved once
gave me a box full of darkness.
it took me years to understand that
this, too, was a gift.
-mary oliver, the uses of sorrow
Six years and four days after the Battle of Hogwarts, Draco Malfoy happens upon Hermione Granger alone and wasted in the muggle bar below his flat.
“Granger?” he asks, though he doesn’t have to. He recognizes her immediately. “Is that you?”
Its been five years and seven months since she’d attempted to defend him at his trial.
“Of course you’re here,” she says, her head lolling to one side as she squints up at him through a curtain of unmanageable hair.
Five years, six months, and two weeks since he’d been sentenced.
“I happen to live here.”
“At this bar?”
“Nearly.” It’s not a lie. The music from this place is loud enough to permeate his floorboards; he ends up here until close most nights. There’s a lot he misses about his old life, but nothing so much as easy access to Dreamless Sleep. The muggle alternatives are abysmal, useless.
“That’s almost as embarrassing as me .” The fact seems to delight her.
She’s not the first to find solace in his imagined suffering.
He should walk away, then. He knows this. Instead, he asks, “Are you embarrassed?”
War hero, Golden Girl. Ministry rising star, from what he’s heard over the years. He finds it hard to believe she can match his shame.
She looks around worriedly, then leans in until her chin rests on his shoulder. “Constantly,” she says. It’s an answer delivered with the sanctity of a confession.
He should, by all rights and reason, leave her there. He owes her as much as he owes the rest of the wizarding world. Which is to say he owes her his life, and also he owes her nothing.
But this is not the Hermione Granger of his memory.
This girl is sad where she’d been stubborn, fragile where she’d always seemed fierce. And above all, she is tired and she is entirely too drunk. So instead, he spends two hours plying her with water. She talks the entire time, pausing only briefly whenever he lifts the glass to her lips and tilts it back, forcing her to swallow.
He’s so used to the dull hum of being just outside of other people’s conversations, he keeps forgetting she’s actually talking to him, rather than near him. He keeps forgetting to respond.
He finds he likes the sound of her voice.
When she begins to yawn, he stands, so she does too. She’s too drunk to apparate, and the nearest apparition point is miles away anyways. She doesn’t ask questions as he leads her, stumbling over the cracks in the poorly maintained sidewalk, to the parking lot behind the building.
She watches him type her address into his muggle phone with wide eyes.
He drives her home in a pre-owned Honda Civic he’s long since stopped feeling self-conscious about. When they arrive, she doesn’t exit immediately the way he expects her to.
“He has people over,” she says, after they sit in fragile silence long enough he’d never have had the will to break it. “I just need a minute, you know? I’m not ready yet.”
He nods, though of course he doesn’t, not really.
After a few more minutes pass, he turns the car back on, runs the heater. She presses the button that activates the noise machine built into the vehicle, the one he hasn’t ever bothered to figure out. She spins a dial until she finds something she must like. She hums the melody softly to herself.
When she finally exits thirty minutes later, he keeps the noise on, decides he doesn’t hate it. He’s also not entirely sure how to turn it off.
He leaves her on the front step, waits until she’s fumbled through unlocking the wards before he drives away.
It’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to him in years.
She’s not always a fun drunk.
The next time he sees her, she throws a pint at him.
She’s feral, driven by an anger at something larger than him, something she isn’t willing (or able) to articulate. He doesn’t hold it against her. Merlin knows, he can relate.
Her actions soak his best work shirt in cheap beer.
He reaches for his pocket, for a wand that isn’t there. It’s an instinct the past six years have yet to cure him of.
Maybe the next six will take care of it, maybe they won’t.
He sees her notice and then pretend not to. Sees the pity flash in her eyes, and instead of the usual impulse to flee or to punish, he takes it, accepts it. What you deal with is hard, she seems to say as warm liquid and the scent of hops saturate his undershirt.
And she’s right. It is.
When he drops her off at home later, she thanks him. “Next one’s on me,” she says, the rage and then the pity from earlier replaced with someone cheekier. Familiar, friendly, and maybe a little flirtatious.
“No apology?” he asks as the door closes behind her.
She doesn’t hear him, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a joke.
People don’t apologize to Draco Malfoy.
One day, right as he’s started to get too comfortable with their strange new dynamic, she tells him that they are friends.
“I don’t have friends.”
He doesn’t mean it, not really. He has Blaise, who visits consistently, and Theo, who visits on occasion. But he wants to know what she’ll say. She’s unpredictable in a way that thrills him, a way he finds refreshing. She’s a breath of crisp air into a life gone stale with predictability.
“I don’t have friends, either.”
He wants to tell her that it can’t be true, that he doesn’t believe her.
Except, he doesn’t know that at all.
Why does she come here by herself? He’s never asked, hasn’t thought to question it. Their conversations are marked more by what they don’t say than what they do.
He doesn’t know what she does at her job all day, but he knows that she hates pickles. She never talks about Weasley, or Potter, but she outlines in depth the reasons she’s afraid of technological singularity and also flamingos. He knows she sings when she’s happy, that she’s terrible at it. That she wants to live a life she deems worthwhile, and that she’s still working out what that means to her, exactly.
They have firm, unspoken boundaries. If they don’t bring it up, it’s off limits. And she’s never brought this up before. But now he can’t stop wondering. Why does she drink so much, alone, without her circle of heroic idiots?
So he says, “I’d be honored to be your friend,” because it’s true, and because it sounds silly enough it doesn’t feel as vulnerable as maybe it should.
In response, she begins to cry. A loud, hysterical sound that repeats again and again. It’s the skipping of the needle on the record player he bought at the secondhand store down the street when the silence of his flat during the day began to haunt him. The claustrophobic tone of scratched records that are still better than the eerie quiet.
This sound, her sound, he thinks, will haunt him too.
When he pats her back with an awkward, outstretched arm, she amplifies. The sobs that wrack her body seem to take a physical toll.
But when he pulls back, she lifts her head to look at him, eyes wide and pleading. “Please don’t stop,” she whispers, so he doesn’t. He rubs the palm of his hand in steady circles over the soft thread of her sweater as she convulses beneath it, until the bartender asks them politely to leave.
She quiets as they drive. The heartbreaking noises have abated completely by the time they turn onto her street. When he parks along the curb in front of her flat, she pulls down the mirror behind the passenger seat visor and wipes her hands across her face.
He must look confused, or perhaps she’s used to justifying her behavior, because even though he doesn’t ask, she says, “Ron doesn’t like it when I cry.” It’s a toneless explanation thrown casually over her shoulder as she exits his banged up car.
As she turns away, her eyes are mostly dry. Only a thin rim of red remains, painting anguish over her expression with careful strokes, all shades and shadows. The implication of despair. He thinks she looks strange, like her face wasn’t meant to hold this kind of emotion.
He thinks she looks beautiful.
“I don’t mind,” he says, because he doesn’t.
She doesn’t hear him, or pretends not to. And that’s okay, he hadn’t said it to elicit a response. He’s not sure why he’d said it, really, except that he’d wanted to.
Draco knows how easy it is to hide things from those who don’t see you.
He loses track, eventually. Loses count of how often he sees her, she’s there so frequently.
He drinks with her sometimes, but mostly he doesn’t. Mostly he just helps her get home.
He doesn’t know what it says about him, but it’s exactly what he needs. She brings novelty into his life. She establishes a routine. He wakes up looking forward to seeing her, where before he’d woken up counting down the hours until he could return to bed.
He hadn’t ever expected have anything to look forward to. He’d sat in his four poster bed at Hogwarts sixth year, and in his childhood bedroom while death eaters roamed outside his door, and in the holding cell in Azkaban while he awaited sentencing, unable to picture a future beyond the hopeless haze of his present moment.
He still can’t see a future for himself, but the haze has cleared a bit. If not hope, there’s a lack of hopelessness now that he’s not sure he deserves. But he likes the way he feels when he’s with her, and he hates himself less than he used to. And whatever it is they’re doing seems to help her, some, too.
He learns to talk a little more, she starts to drink a little less, and one day it occurs to Draco that they might actually be friends.
He doesn’t tell anyone about her, keeps her like a secret. But these things have a way of making themselves known.
“Did you know Hermione Granger is sitting at the bar downstairs?” Blaise kicks off his shoes in consideration of the muggle means Draco now uses to keep his space clean.
“No.” He hadn’t been down today, so it isn’t technically a lie. Still, he’d assumed she’d be there. He’d planned to join her once Blaise left.
“I saw her through the window on my way up.” Blaise removes his cloak, hangs it on the rack Draco had found while wandering the crowded aisles of an antique store that first year post-war. “Strange coincidence.”
“Is it?” Draco’s tone, he hopes, is casual.
“...It is.” There’s a question in it, something less casual.
It has never been easy to hide things from Blaise.
It takes an hour and an entire bottle of whiskey, but eventually the Zabini touch for unearthing information prevails.
“I love her.”
“I know you do.”
“You can’t know that,” Draco slurs, accusingly. “I barely know that.”
“Yes, but you’re an idiot. Always have been.”
Draco hates that it’s true. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you , Malfoy. You clearly want to talk about it. So talk about it.”
“I can’t have her, and it’s making me miserable.”
“So do something about it!”
“There’s nothing to do. If I tell her, she’ll never speak to me again. She doesn’t belong to me.”
“You should tell her that. Let me know what she says, if you survive it.”
“Fuck off.”
“Who do you think she belongs to?”
Her boyfriend.
The Wizarding World.
Then, after a longer delay than is reasonable, he realizes what Blaise means.
“Herself.”
“So she gets to make her own decisions.”
“Yeah, but there’s no world in which she decides on me.”
“Even if you’re right, then what?”
He ponders this, and Blaise refills both their glasses. “Then I’ll be miserable.”
“You’re already miserable. You said so yourself.”
“Is this meant to be helping me?”
Blaise places a hand on each of Draco’s cheeks, gripping tightly to what he once called the ‘thickest skull in human history.’ “Your options are: continue in your current state, or own up to how you feel and risk a different kind of misery.”
“And?”
“If you respect her, you have to believe she deserves to know how you feel.”
Zabini’s right, he realizes. There’s so much he wants, if he lets himself think about it. To know the silk of her curls knotted in his fingers, or the answer to how she smells when she steps out of the shower before work. How she sounds when she’s tired, sleepy, eyes closed but brain still whirring. How she looks when she’s truly, fully, entirely relaxed.
But more than any of that, what he wants is to make her happy. She deserves to be happy.
“What if it doesn’t matter? What if I tell her, and she walks away?”
“Then you learn to live with it.”
He’s learned to live with worse, he supposes.
Draco heaves out a sigh. “I’m worried you’re right.”
Blaise’s smile lacks any real humor. “I know.”
He leaves Blaise alone upstairs and heads down to meet her.
It’s the usual, but worse–eyes glazed, two empty glasses in front of her while she makes quick work of a third. It’s more than she’s drank with him in a long time.
“What’s the rush?” he asks, and she jumps.
“I didn’t know if I’d see you.” She looks guilty.
“You always see me.”
At this she looks, somehow, even guiltier.
“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” she says, entirely derailing the speech he’d planned in the time it’d taken to walk down the stairs.
“Oh?”
“I don’t think I should come here. I don’t think you should drive me home.”
“Oh.”
Silence stretches, long and painful. Her unwillingness to meet his eyes leaves him free to peruse her body. Shoulders hunched, tense, like the first time he’d seen her here. Hair frizzy, fighting to escape the claw of her clip. And there, on her left hand, a ring he’d never seen before.
“Do you love him?” he asks, breaking their unspoken rules. This is one topic she’d been careful never to broach.
She still won’t look at him.
“You have to know it’s not about that. It never has been.”
The edges of his vision swim, blur, the walls of the bar he knows as well as his own apartment soften and warp as surely as the reality he’d believed himself to live in until this moment.
“Congratulations, then.”
He won’t give her the satisfaction of an emotional response. That, he’ll save for himself. For when he has the time and the space and the ability to process.
“I’m sorry, Draco,” she says, pulling muggle bills out of her pocket and tossing them on the bar. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
And in that moment she proves two things.
First, he was wrong: people do apologize to Draco Malfoy. Hermione Granger—war hero, lightweight, victim of circumstance—apologized to Draco Malfoy.
And also, he was right: Hermione Granger is not his friend.