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Of all the people Hermione had ever expected to see on the streets of New York, Draco Malfoy might very well have been last on the list.
She also would never have expected him to incline his head in recognition when he spotted her across the lobby of Steen National Bank, nor raise his hand in awkward, but genuine, greeting.
He was still tall and poncy looking, aristocratic in his suit and tie, but he’d put on a healthy bit of weight since she’d seen him last, and there was colour in his cheeks where they’d once been grey and wan. His white-blonde hair hung loose over his brow, and it wasn’t until he awkwardly dropped the hand he’d used to wave and ran it through the tousled locks that Hermione realised she’d been staring.
She blushed, shaking her head to regather her wits. He only raised his brows, and the tiniest of smiles began to form on his lips.
Even then, she knew.
They shared a pint at a Muggle pub around the corner from her NYU flat. He seemed just as eager to escape Wizarding New York as she was, though no one seemed to recognize him the way they always did her.
Hermione was hailed as a war hero, even in New York, even by people who’d never seen the war, who didn’t know what a Death Eater was, and certainly didn’t seem bothered that she was standing right next to one as they hounded her for an autograph.
“You should see what they do to Potter back home,” he said, watching her suck down the first half of her drink with vigour. “People ask him to hold their babies.”
“People ask me to have their babies.”
He grimaced and took a long swig himself.
She took the opportunity to study him up close. He looked like a slightly older, slightly softer version of the boy from Hogwarts. He’d loosened his tie when they sat down, and his cheeks were still red from their brisk walk through the city, but what really caught her eye were the three numbers etched into the skin of his neck in fresh black ink, just barely peeking out from his collar, a haunted memory from Azkaban.
621. Her fingers drifted to the letters on her own arm. Between them, three permanent brands.
Draco shrugged his shoulders until the tattoo disappeared beneath the fabric. “Not exactly my lucky number.”
“I’d heard you’d been released,” she said. “Congratulations.”
“Potter testified at my trial.”
“I’d heard that as well.”
Finally, he turned to face her. “Granger, I know you wrote his speech.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to. You expect me to believe he knows what exculpatory means?”
“I tried to use layman’s terms,” she grumbled.
He snorted, but then sobered, circling his finger atop his glass, rolling his tongue along the inside of his cheek, deep in thought. He was quite beautiful, she thought, with the evening light spilling in through the window by the door, washing the entire bar in rays of gold.
Tentatively, he reached out, his long, deft fingers sliding under hers where they rested on her thigh, squeezing once, then lingering for a second, maybe two.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and right before he tried to pull his hand away, she squeezed back, holding on.
“How long are you in New York?” she asked him. Their shoulders bumped as they walked aimlessly through the night.
“I have a very, very hot portkey in my pocket right now.”
She spun, nearly knocking into his chest as she tried, and likely failed, to level him with her glare. “Isn’t there a fine for that? What is it, three a.m. in London right now?”
He shrugged, an unconcerned smirk stretching at his lips.
“You’re going to get in trouble,” she said, hating the way she sounded exactly like her eleven-year-old self.
“I have the funds to pay the fine, Granger, relax.” He sidestepped her, watching over his shoulder with a cocked brow until she huffed and caught up. “They can’t arrest me for being a few hours late on a portkey.”
“I’m sure they’ll write up a new law just for you.”
“Once I let them know I was here to provide assistance to their beloved Golden Girl, I’m sure they’ll let me go with just the fine.”
“Assistance, huh?”
“I bought you three beers tonight, plus that hideous slice of cheese you insisted on.”
“The pizza?” she sputtered. “Also, I bought your beers, and your pretentious little salad, thank you.”
She could tell he was fighting a smile when he fished into his pocket, producing a handful of galleons. “Here. By the transitive property, I have now paid for your beers.”
“Wait—Malfoy, this is way too much,” she said, even as he peeled open her fingers, forcing her to accept the coins.
“Doesn’t matter.” At her sceptical look, he shrugged. “All the Malfoy vaults are mine now. That’s why I was here in the first place. Might as well spend it while my father’s reprimands come only in the form of pre-screened letters.”
Hermione tried to shove the coins back into his hands. “Take it back or I’ll donate it all to a house elf freedom project.”
“Please do.” He grinned. “Send me the address and I’ll double it.”
She tried to look irritated, but his grin was infectious. Who was this man? Certainly not the Draco Malfoy from her youth. This new version was a reformed mosaic of the boy from Hogwarts, haunted in all the pieces he used to be haughty, confident in his stride but cautious with his words, thoughtful and funny where he’d once been cruel and crass.
He wasn’t her friend, not then and not now, but maybe he could be, or maybe he would’ve been, if only things had been different.
In the heart of the city, surrounded by Muggles, no one stopped them. No one asked for autographs or babies or gasped at her present company. Even Draco seemed at ease, sceptical of, but not repulsed by, the non-magical surroundings.
She could, however, feel the heat radiating from his pocket.
“Malfoy,” she said, sweeping him into the darkness of an alley by his elbow. “If you don’t go home now, that portkey is going to burn a hole through your pocket and whisk you away in the middle of Muggle New York. And then you’ll be dealing with way more than a fine.”
“I’m offended you think a portkey could damage my trousers, Granger. These are made of the finest Acromantula silk money can buy.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. She had a hundred questions, and at least one derogatory remark, but she bit her tongue instead.
“I just…” he started, shifting nervously, raking his hand through his hair like he had at the bank. “I haven’t had fun like this in…since…” He trailed off, avoiding her gaze.
“Me either,” she said honestly. “You know you can always come back, right?” She gestured to where his pocket was emitting smoke. “Since you can apparently afford all kinds of portkeys and their associated fines.”
“You want me to come back?”
She nodded. “Of course. You still haven’t seen the Statue of Liberty.”
“What about the arcade?”
“That too,” she laughed.
With a dramatic sigh, he reached into his pocket, pulling out a singed and smouldering handkerchief. “Would you do the honours?”
Hermione peered into the darkness of the alley to ensure they were alone.
“Quickly, Granger. It’s burning my hand.”
Maybe it was impulse, or maybe she was a little more drunk than she thought, but before she knew it she was pressing up onto her toes, brushing her lips against his cheek. He was warm and soft against her skin, and she felt him turn his head into her cheek, felt his mouth open in question—but then she was sliding the handkerchief out from between his fingers, pulling back just as the portkey landed in his palm, and then he was gone.
Draco came back the next weekend. And the next, and then the one after that.
They shopped and dined and watched movies sandwiched on the tiny couch in her tiny flat. They debated literature and art and what little they knew of American politics. They walked Manhattan top to bottom, saw every sight and took every cheesy tourist photo, and when she was shaking like a leaf on top of the Empire State Building, he held her hand.
He started sleeping in her bed. It seemed silly for him to curl up on her little loveseat every weekend when her bed was plenty big for them both. She always woke with him curled around her, and even when it was far too hot to touch, neither of them ever complained.
It wasn’t a dance. It wasn’t something they were skirting around. It was a slow walk down a path carved through the trees, peaceful and easy. They both knew what lay ahead, but there was no urge to rush there, just the peeling back of layers and armour, uncovering each other in gentle, lazy strokes.
“You look beautiful,” he murmured once. Another step. Another layer.
He was reclined on her bed, one hand tucked behind his head in her sea of pillows, the other stroking Crookshanks from head to tail where he sat on his chest. He looked beautiful, loose and casual and mussed.
Hermione looked down at herself and snorted, extending her arms like a scarecrow. Her old, holey cardigan hung off her frame, frayed at the edges, lopsided and missing a button. Her hair stuck out in all directions from where it was pinned haphazardly to the back of her head, her makeup had shifted significantly since the morning, and her socks were mismatched.
“I’m covered in cat hair,” she said. “And I’m dressed like a librarian.”
“You look beautiful,” he said again. He pressed his socked foot to the bare skin of her thigh, right beneath the hem of her shorts. “You are beautiful.”
When she only shrugged, he took the opportunity to sit up and pull her thighs flush to the edge of the bed, his hands searing fingerprints into her skin.
She was standing between his open legs, grasping at his shoulders for balance. It was intimate and unfamiliar and still, she wanted to melt into his embrace, wanted his fingertips to slide up the backs of her thighs, wanted to taste the lingering bit of whiskey on his lips from their long night out.
The loss of his hands left her feeling cold. She released his shoulders but didn’t back away. With a tiny, lopsided smile, he adjusted the cardigan on her shoulders, shifting it until it hung even over her hips, and then reached up behind her head, loosing her hair from its clip and letting it fall in a mess of curls down her back.
“There,” he said, almost as if she wasn’t even there to hear him. “My favourite.”
And so Hermione Granger came to know Draco Malfoy.
She knew him in the drawer of Muggle clothes she kept for him in her apartment. In Levi’s and NYU hoodies and vintage tees. She knew him sober and quiet and still, and she knew him drunk and dancing under a streetlight.
She knew him in the first time he kissed her, soft and sweet and mid-laugh. When he arrived one Friday with the flu and they spent the entire weekend in her bed, his hands warm under her sweatshirt.
He was a snake that shed its skin, freed from the cage of his family name, of his past mistakes, of the permanent marks left on him by hatred and ignorance. With her, he was happy and carefree and normal. She wasn’t a war hero, and he wasn’t her enemy. She knew him, and he knew her.
To know Draco was to love him, it seemed.
She told him as much, the words tumbling out without much preamble one evening when they were sitting on the fire escape, cloaked in darkness and cigarette smoke. He didn’t need to say it back—she already knew—but he did anyway.
When she dragged him inside and into her bed, she knew every inch of his skin, every dip and valley and scar. She knew every sound, every movement, every heartbeat. The shape of his smile. The taste of his tears.
And more than anything, she knew it was all going downhill from there.
At the beginning of spring, they walked slowly along the High Line, Draco’s arm thrown over her shoulders. The weeds were slightly overgrown, but she liked it, this rare green patch deep in the throes of the city.
He released her as she moved to pluck a wildflower from the fray, his footsteps pausing behind her. When she turned, flower in hand, his face was grey and guarded, so unlike the bright, open smiles she’d become accustomed to since the beginning of their weekend trysts.
His shoulders were rigid, his jaw was set, and if it weren’t for the jeans and t-shirt he was wearing, Hermione would have sworn they were back in Wizarding London, or even back at Hogwarts, the impossibility of his history holding him up by marionette strings.
She braced herself. “What is it?”
He sighed and kicked at a rock, and for a moment the only sound was the plink as it ricocheted off the old tracks.
“I’m engaged to be married,” he said.
Hermione blinked. Her first instinct was to question him, to demand an explanation for how this could possibly make any sense—but she knew exactly what was happening. Lucius Malfoy was a powerful man, even from behind bars, and the Malfoy name still held weight, no matter their previous transgressions.
She was naïve to think he could ever truly be hers. All she ever had were weekends. There were five other days in a week where he was across the sea, where he was still an heir to a fortune and she was still an unsuitable Muggleborn witch.
The reality of it hurt—a knife in her gut, cruelly twisted. He stood stock still, hands in his pockets, eyes trained down.
She chewed on her lip as she searched for something to say, but the only words she found were, “Are you going to go through with it?”
He looked at her then, and she watched him melt into the man she knew. “I’m trying to find a way out.”
She nodded, and he took a half step towards her.
“It’s ironclad, Granger.”
She closed her eyes, and then he was enveloping her in his arms. She breathed in the familiar scent of him as she counted his heartbeats, fast and erratic against her ear.
“Tell me you’ll fight it,” she whispered.
“I will,” he promised, but Hermione knew.
She knew.
They continued as normal, even after that frightful evening on the High Line.
Hermione clung to every moment, treasured every new bit of Draco Malfoy she managed to uncover. Small moments, like a first slice of pizza or a treasured silver dollar found on the sidewalk or how once some girl in a bar called his Dark Mark a sick tattoo he was somehow able to toss his head back and laugh.
Together, they covered their past in ink, flowers for Draco’s Mark, and stars for Hermione’s scars. If the flowers were some of her favourites, she certainly didn’t say so, and if her stars connected in the shape of a celestial dragon, neither did he.
Every time he left for London, every time another day was knocked off their ticking time bomb, she knew he went home to a prison. Ironic, considering his father was the one behind bars, but he was the one pulling the strings, and Draco just took it. She imagined him sitting in the darkness of Malfoy Manor, sharing a silent meal with his morose mother and some pretty pureblood witch.
But then he’d return to her every Friday, always with a smile, always taking her hand in the middle of Grand Central with a grip so steady and firm that the weekdays would be immediately forgotten.
Summer approached rapidly, as did the scheduled date of his wedding. The heat in her apartment did little to ease the slow growing tension growing between them, and in her frustration, she found herself stoking the flames, hacking at the truce they’d silently agreed to. She picked fights and started arguments out of nothing, taking out every bit of her caustic rage on him until he’d coax her into bed, holding her close despite the temperature, whispering apologies into her ear.
They were running out of time, and it frightened her. With only two weekends left, she’d exhausted her knowledge of contract law with very little to show for it. The betrothal agreement was ironclad, just like he’d said.
There was another option, she knew, but Draco wouldn’t take it.
“You promised me you’d fight this,” she said. Her voice was quiet. She was tired, and she’d already shouted so much.
He sat silently on the edge of her bed with his head in his hands. He’d shouted plenty himself.
“You could just stay here. With me,” she whispered. It was the first time she’d found the courage to suggest it.
It didn’t matter. She already knew she’d lost.
“You could give it all up,” she continued. Once, she’d promised herself she’d never ask that of him, but here he was, slipping through her fingers. She was desperate. “You could tell them you won’t do it. You could walk away, and you and I could be together.”
“Hermione.” It fell softly off his lips. The first time and the last. “We don’t have much time left. Don’t—don’t let it end like this.”
The difference between them was she didn’t want it to end at all.
She turned away from him to hide her tears. “You should go,” she said.
He did.
Hermione sat vigil in Grand Central Station the following Friday. She had no idea if he would come. She had no idea if she wanted him to come.
Each train came and went with no white-blonde head of hair weaving through the crowd. She could barely focus on the textbooks in front of her, peeking up every minute or so, her leg bouncing under the table even long after dusk.
When he finally stepped off the last train, she thought she was hallucinating him. He stood only a few yards away, looking unsure and afraid and so, so perfect. His tie was loose around his neck, his hair dishevelled, and when he opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out.
She leapt up and grabbed his hand before he could flee, and his grip was steady and sure, just like always. She broke her own rules, pulling him into an empty bathroom to apparate them directly into her apartment.
It was slow and quiet, laced with a thread of melancholy, but still, she knew every inch of his skin, every dip, valley, and scar. His smile was sad, as were his tears.
“Don’t go,” she said after, however foolish. “Stay,” she begged.
His exhale was a stuttered breath.
“I know you think you’re serving your family,” she said, shivering as his fingers traced the pattern of his namesake across her arm. “But you don’t owe them this.”
“You don’t know anything about it,” he said softly, even though his words stung.
Hermione did know. She knew he was stuck chasing his family’s approval while she existed just out of reach. She knew he’d lose no matter what he chose.
“I know what we have,” she told him. “I know it’s special. Magic special. Once in twenty lifetimes special.”
She knew nothing had changed. She knew she couldn’t convince him. She knew it was goodbye.
“Aren’t you worried,” she murmured, tracing over the line of his jaw with one finger, “that one day, you’ll be thirty-five, stuck in a loveless marriage with one, maybe two heirs, with nothing to do and no one to challenge you? Aren’t you worried you’ve made the wrong choice?”
His tears pooled on the pillow. “I was never given a choice.”
She knew that, too.
Draco Malfoy married Astoria Greengrass on a sunny day in August. The bride was resplendent in the photos plastered all over The Prophet. The groom could only be described as gaunt.
He’d tried to change the ending, Hermione knew. If there had been a loophole in the contract, he would have taken it. But he simply could not turn his back on his father, on his mother, on his name, all he had fought to protect during the war.
Still, he ran. He left. And he lingered.
The drawer of his things in her dresser, even long after she moved. The silver dollar she kept in her wallet. The stars on her arm, connected in his own constellation.
He haunted her long after he was gone—every corner she turned, every whiff of smoke on her fire escape, every what-if she ever imagined.
Even years later, coming back to London was like stretching a wound that had barely healed over. Seeing him for the first time had her split open and bleeding all over Diagon Alley, her heart stopped in her chest. Their eyes met, and in the span of a single blink, their entire relationship flashed in front of her.
Laughing their way out of bars, kissing in the back of a taxi, dancing and holding hands and a cardigan covered in cat hair. Her fire escape, shrouded in smoke. Leaping into his arms at the train station. Stumbling across cobblestones. Whispering in the dark.
Was his father’s approval enough, or had the thrill of acceptance finally expired? She saw his face for only an instant before he passed, but it was enough. A flash of hurt, of longing. He missed her. He’d haunted her, left her marked, but she’d cursed him all the same.
She’d been right—she’d always been right, but still, a hollowness settled inside her as she continued walking, the knife in her gut twisting twice for good measure.
Hermione moved into a brand new London townhome six weeks after her return to England. Some of her furniture was old, worn and weathered from her years in New York. There was a drawer of vintage tees and Levi’s jeans in her dresser. There was a silver dollar tucked in her jewellery box.
There were still lightly faded stars on her arm.
She spent the entire day making her house a home. She hung photos of her family and friends on the walls and on the mantle—a moving portrait from Ron’s wedding, a Muggle photograph of her with Harry’s three children. A photo of herself on top of the Empire State Building, smiling, but gripping the railing for dear life.
In a box under her bed, she kept an old, fraying cardigan, covered in hair from a cat she’d lost years before. She slipped it on, revelling in the warmth and familiarity of it as she moved through the mostly empty, foreign space.
Long after dark, a light, tentative knock sounded on her door. Biting back a smile, she peeked out the window, and something long-dormant stirred inside her when she flipped on the front porch light.