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The task was simple, laid out by a red-faced Weasley across the Azkaban interrogation room table. Draco would trade his remaining prison sentence for having found Hermione Granger and returning her to Wizarding London where she belonged. He’d agreed, the shackles on his wrist vanished, and the guards had dumped him at a bus stop in Muggle London with nothing more than the clothes he’d arrived with and a hundred galleons to fund the search and rescue mission.
Two weeks later, Draco successfully tracked her to Australia where she lived in a small cottage near the coast. When the Ministry owl arrived a few hours later for an update on the mission, something stopped his quill before it reached the parchment.
Draco watched her through the blinds of his rental unit, busying herself with tending to the small garden in front of her cottage. Hermione had been missing for a little over a year, disappearing into the night a few days after the final battle never to be seen or heard from again. But, there she was, a soft smile on her face as she pulled weeds from the garden bed by hand.
Her cheeks were fuller than the last time he’d seen her, and her skin had turned a lovely shade of caramel in the Australian sun. Draco wrote that he hadn’t found her yet, but he was close, and sent the owl away so that he could watch her properly.
It took him only a week to learn her routine. Hermione woke with the sun each morning, and had her tea on a rocking chair beside her front door. She’d read a book while the waves crashed onto the shoreline, and after a chapter or two she’d get up to tend to her garden. Around noon, Hermione traveled into town, shopping or stopping by the home of a middle aged couple whom Draco quickly discovered were her parents. They didn’t greet her like one would greet their child, and that realization kept him up for a couple of days.
A month later, Draco sent a communication back to the Ministry that he still hadn’t found her. After dismissing the owl, he looked himself in the mirror and began casting various glamours to change his appearance. Black hair instead of blond, green eyes instead of grey – the scars on his chest replaced by lightly tanned skin. And he waited at the small cafe Hermione visited on the weekends, sitting at a corner table and watching as she ordered her tea.
Their first conversation on the sidewalk in front of the cafe was brief, but it made his heart beat faster than the promise of freedom. Several days later, they spoke again, this time after he timed a morning jog on the beach with her morning tea. When Hermione asked for his name, Draco panicked, offering up the first name he could think of.
“I’m Aiden,” he told her, reaching out a hand to shake hers. Hermione smiled warmly at him, her palm fitting perfectly against his.
“Little fire,” she appraised him with glittering amber eyes. “You remind me of someone I knew once.”
“In a good way, I hope.”
Draco’s chest tightened and he did his best to keep his expression neutral, open. Could she see through the glamour that easily?
“I think of him often,” Hermione said, turning her attention to the ocean several hundred meters away. “He could have been good, I think. If only someone had given him the chance.”
Weeks turned into months, and Draco felt himself drawn to a witch who only used magic when she thought no one was looking. But he was always looking, always watching – committing every movement of her fingertips and laugh that escaped her lips to memory. Meetings at the cafe turned into dinners at her house, and drinks at the pub on the Main Street. The previous life Hermione had crafted for herself sounded like a dream she’d had as a child that never fully left. And the life he crafted for himself would have made any other Malfoy shrink away in horror.
But, as the days passed, Draco found himself wishing he really was a bloke named Aiden, born in London who moved to Australia for a life by the sea. He wanted to be nothing more than a Muggle author who penned fiction novels in the study of his rental, preferring the solitude of the coast over the bustle of a large city.
Once, he’d been about to tell her the truth. But, she’d rested her head on his shoulder as they sat on her couch with some Muggle film playing, and Draco realized an unsettling truth. In the year he’d been in Australia, he’d fallen in love with her. And he didn’t want to send her back to cloud-covered London if that wasn’t where she wanted to be.
So, he did what any criminal would do. Draco lied. He put quill to parchment, detailing the journey he’d taken across Australia to find her. Months of setbacks and being turned around had led him to a city on the other side of the country, where he found her wand, satchel, and a note resting beneath a tree that stood guard over a sharp cliff edge. The note, written in plagiarized scrawl, detailed the sadness he’d come to know so intimately in the edges of her eyes.
She jumped , Draco wrote as he watched Hermione – his Hermione – kneel beside her garden bed and humm songs to her flowers as she tossed weeds over her shoulder. Her belongings have been buried beneath the tree as her note requested. She’s free now, and so am I.
“You’re late,” Hermione remarked as he approached the front steps of her cottage, his hands in his pockets and his heart racing with the beat of the owl’s wings as it flew back to London.
“On the contrary,” Draco winked at her as he knelt down beside her, reaching for a weed. “For once, I’m right on time.”