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Blaise is fondling their selection of tomatoes when Draco comes whirling in, kicking Luna’s Juniper Jocky Orb, which she says is meant to prevent evil forces from entering through the front door.
Blaise supposes it might have its merit, if Draco had felt the need to kick it aside before crossing the threshold.
Hermione comes in next, a few minutes later, looking resigned and helpless, her hair positively enormous from a day of stress. Luna attaches herself to her brunette counterpart like a very blonde starfish and Hermione drags the pair of them over to the kitchen to make polite conversation about dinner like she always does on days when Draco’s request for appeal to get his wand back go particularly poorly. Her expression is vaguely pinched, and Blaise thinks she’s been crying.
“We could try and do an interview for The Quibbler,” Luna offers mildly, still clinging to Hermione’s side like she’s hoping to leech out all of the negative emotions through aggressive cuddling. “Like we did for Harry.”
“Draco would never be up for some sort of article that paints him as a helpless victim,” Blaise says, not unkindly, because he’s certain that Hermione won’t admit to knowing that. “I think I have to go all out for dinner tonight. We could get him roaring drunk. Lace his food with some calming draught.”
Hermione doesn’t even bother to spout off a list of all the ways that could go wrong. Shit, Blaise thinks, wondering if his own helpless expression is cracking through his neutral pleasantry.
“Extra cheese, Blaise?” She requests quietly, gesturing to what will eventually be a lasagna.
“You got it, Granger,” he nods and wonders if he’s looking like one of those Muggle bobblehead dollies her father had sent her as a joke a few years ago. Luna, likely with some sort of illusive sixth sense that she will never own up to, releases Hermione as soon as the bushy-haired girl decides to go and try and talk to their angry housemate.
When Draco has finally allowed Granger entrance to his bedroom, Luna sidles over to the other side of the counter and hugs Blaise tight, her front pressed into his back, squeezing hard in little short burst of one-two-three the way that she does when she’s feeling worried. All she says though, is “At this rate, deciding to tell them when Draco gets his wand back means we’ll already be married with children before they find out.”
Blaise thinks about how beautiful their kids will be with his dark skin and her pale eyes and kisses her until they’re both panting a little. She tugs at his hair and his ears and pulls away, smiling vaguely and, Salazar, he loves her, and then she steps out of the kitchen to go sort out her Orb.
-
Draco lets Granger knock and ask to come in a few times before he agrees because she’s the only one in the whole flat who ever bothers with such formalities, and she’s the only one in the whole flat he’d actually let in when he’s in this sort of mood. He’s nothing if he doesn’t cling to this last shred of pride, even though Blaise constantly tells him he’s just being a prat.
Granger drifts around his room, running delicate fingers over picture frames and straightening the stack of books on his desk absentmindedly. Eventually she makes her way to the window seat he’s sitting on, smiling vaguely at it in a way that he’s certain means she’s remembering the weeks of shouting over which of them got to have this bedroom. In the end, he and Blaise had paid someone to put in two walls of sturdy shelves in her room and she’d let up.
She squishes herself in on the opposite side, one of her legs beneath her bum and the other slotted between his own bent knees and she sighs, tilting her head so her temple is resting against the glass.
“We’re going to get there,” she tells him and Draco wants to explode all over her because she’s wrong. The ministry is not going to allow him a wand again, ever. He’s lucky he hadn’t been arrested and thrown into prison like his father and the rest of the insane blighters who’d willingly taken the Dark Lord’s Mark. He’s too damn tired to argue, though, and if he makes her cry again today he’ll probably just Avada himself. Her eyes are still red and a little puffy from when they’d screamed at each other in Potter’s office after waiting at the ministry for four hours only to be told by an unapologetic Shacklebolt that his request for appeal had been denied again and he could try again in a fortnight, and thank you and have a nice day.
The only other person Draco had known to be so unconcerned and guiltless about removing what amounted to a wizard’s arm for no decent reason had been the Dark Lord. Granger was on his side, but she’d taken offense at the comparison that had mostly been a piss-poor attempt at humour.
She leans over and catches his hand, closing his fingers around the Golden Snitch he’s been playing with and clasping her hands round his fist. Granger tugs his hand into her space, her expression imploring him to meet her eyes. “We’re going to get there,” she repeats to him, more firmly than the last time. “I promise, Draco.”
He flexes his hand until she loosens her vice-grip, the snitch escaping when he turns his palm so that she can lace her fingers through his own. She turns his arm so that they can both look at his mottled Dark Mark, disfigured from when he’d gotten absolutely smashed and tried to carve it off his arm. Disfigured, but still easily distinctive. Granger takes a lot of liberties with him--has gotten into actual arguments with him over things like hugging and tears and that he shouldn’t let the patriarchy make him think he has to be emotionally stunted--but she has never touched his Mark. He knows her well enough to know that it’s out of respect for his boundaries more than any sort of lingering disgust, but sometimes he can’t help but wonder.
When he swallows tightly she turns their hands the other way so that they’re looking at her own Mark instead: Mudblood, angry red and raised because Bellatrix had used some sort of poison on the blade when she’d branded this girl. It was as permanent as his own, and, while he could sometimes imagine that he’d had some sort of choice about joining up with the Dark Lord, he’d watched Granger writhe and scream on the floor of his parents’ home as each letter was dug into her pale skin.
She doesn’t let go and she doesn’t turn her arm away, a sort of defiant expression painting her pretty face in a way that he can’t help but blink at, a little awed every time it shows up. And he’s so distracted with recommitting her features to memory that he doesn’t notice until she jabs him with it, but she’s holding out her wand to him in a way that cannot be misinterpreted but Draco still thinks he’s reading the entire situation wrong.
“It’s yours,” she says, voice barely above a whisper as her hand finally releases his, forcing his fingers open so that she can close them around the handle of her wand. “Until we get your real one back.”
And it’s not like she hadn’t started testing his parents’ insane purity-superiority ideals since the day he’d met her, and he hasn’t actually believed being raised by purebloods made a person better than one who was raised by muggles, but sometimes there are little things--more cultural than anything--that witches and wizards who are raised by muggles don’t know because they haven’t been taught. Most married couples decline to share wands.
Granger raises her eyebrows at him in a way that makes him wonder if she actually does know--he definitely wouldn’t put it past her to learn magical custom on the sly, especially before moving into a flat she shares with three purebloods, though he’s sure that’s coincidence more than anything else. Eventually he’s gripping the wand without her making him and he can feel her magic vibrating in his fingertips as the wand decides whether it’s willing to serve someone who is not its master.
-
Luna dumps an entire kilogram of mozzarella into the lasagna and proceeds to pretend she doesn’t understand why Blaise is so outraged. He’s distracted well enough from how pink Draco’s ears are when he and Hermione emerge from his bedroom. Hermione looks like nothing’s amiss, which means they hadn’t been mating, but Luna is confident that will come soon enough.
She engages her bushy-haired friend in a discussion on how she might go about making her bedroom look like the ceiling in the Hogwarts Great Hall, how the spells would have to be modified to fit a smaller space and the fact that while the great hall can just reflect what’s above it, Luna’s got two more floors of flats to pass up before she hits the sky.
Hermione chokes on her wine when Luna admits that her first attempt had gone horribly awry and allowed her to see into the bedroom above hers, where a nude older gentleman had been watching some cartoon with pastel horses and a jangly theme song.
“My Little Pony,” Hermione supplies once she’s regained the ability to breathe. “It got very popular amongst muggles very recently—started off as a children’s show before a group of grown men decided to get off to the horses.”
Blaise and Draco probably tune in around there because Blaise drops the lasagna as he’s carrying it to the table and Draco whips out a wand and flicks it at the enormous roasting dish quick enough that nothing happens beyond Blaise having a minor heart attack.
And then Blaise remembers that Draco’s wand had been confiscated by the ministry almost five years prior. Luna swivels to see how Hermione is taking this all and she looks extremely satisfied and, well, it’s not hard to put together from there. Except, apparently it is, since Blaise spends the first ten minutes of their family dinner trying to get Draco to ‘fess up.
Luna flicks her own wand so that the parmesan will start grating itself over the lasagna and Blaise lets up on Draco so that he can shield his precious pot Italian comfort food from what he considers blasphemy on her part.
“Hermione said she wanted extra cheese,” Luna says as vacantly as she can manage while stifling laughter. And it’s a testament to how far they’ve all come that Draco claps a hand around her knee and jiggles it a few times in silent thanks once the conversation has turned to Teddy Lupin’s fifth birthday party that Hermione insists they all attend.
-
It’s not like Hermione hadn’t expected the Weasleys and Harry to find out she’d requisitioned her wand to someone who needed it more than she, and it isn’t as though she’d thought they’d be anything close to pleased when they discovered exactly who it was who was using it instead of her.
But this sort of whispered yelling in the kitchen while Teddy and a handful of younger children run around out in the garden, shrieking with laughter, is kind of mental, she thinks.
“He needed one and I don’t!” Hermione finally says, loud and firm, over everyone else’s noisy and utterly useless drivel. “I can apparate without it and stun without it and--that’s what you’re all so concerned about, isn’t it? My safety?” She almost laughs at their flummoxed expressions because obviously that’s not what they’re concerned about, but they’re never going to admit it to her face that they take issue with her giving her wand to a known Death Eater. They still haven’t really gotten over the fact that she lives with him.
“Yes,” Fleur eventually says, crossing the ground to stand on her side, throwing an arm over her shoulders. Fleur and her tendency towards superficial interests and unapologetic comments about the younger witch’s hair and clothing still tended to grate Hermione the wrong way, but time and time again has proved that she was always the first one to side with her when it came to something involving Draco and his rights. “Ve vorry about you,” she says, accent thick as she begins tugging Hermione closer. “Ve always weel, but you ees abeel to take care ov yourseelf.”
Fleur says something about how would they feel if they’d taken Bill’s wand for being a werewolf and Hermione wonders why she’d never thought to go for that blow, because it clearly works pretty effectively.
“Hermione knows what she’s doing,” Harry says to Ron when the rest of the family has vacated the kitchen. Blaise and Draco are in the garden, watching Luna teach the children and the gnomes some sort of synchronized swimming routine without the water. Ron sighs at length, but he can’t exactly deny it. He grips her elbow and jiggles her arm around in some sort of silent apology and he still looks pretty damn furious, his cheeks still ruddy, but Hermione doesn’t need a wand to shut him up and she’s certain he’s not willing to chance it at Teddy’s birthday party.
“When he gets his wand back,” Hermione tells Harry quietly, after Ron finally leaves to go be swarmed by Bill and Fleur’s tiny blonde hellions, who have taken a particular shine to him. “Then I’ll get my wand back.”
“It’s pretty intimate to share wands,” Harry says, like she wasn’t the one to tell him when she’d found out a few months after the war. She knows it means something, that the only two people in the world she’s ever shared her wand with are her brother and Draco Malfoy. Who is most decidedly not in the brother category.
“It’s pretty intimate to go on an extended camping trip with two boys for the better part of a school year,” she says, deliberately ignoring that previous thought. Harry barks out a surprised laugh at that, though.
“Oh, yeah, that was a real treat of a holiday,” he snarks at her and she smiles at him, allowing him to pull her in and hug her close for just a minute. Harry and Ron and the rest of the Weasleys are so much a part of her that she can’t even begin to imagine what she’d be like if they hadn’t been in her life. But they’re not quite as tight-knit as they’d been during her Hogwarts years and Hermione doesn’t pretend to not know why. If Harry and the Weasleys are her foundation, Blaise and Luna and Draco are the pillars on top, new and magnificent, but just as strong as the base.
Or, something. Her father had swapped from architecture to dentistry when she was still small. Not that either of those interests mattered to Wendell and Monica Wilkins.
Hermione watches Harry leave the kitchen and takes a few steadying breaths, pouring herself some juice the muggle way, like it’s such a hassle, and taking an enormous gulp. Eventually, she feels like she’s ready to go outside and be social, so she does, and is immediately cornered by the birthday boy, who likes her because she sometimes forgets to put her less child-friendly books away when it’s her day to watch him.
“Aunt ‘Mione!” He shouts, arms raised above his head as he waits for her to scoop him up like he’s still a little baby. Teddy is perhaps the only child who’s ever liked her this much and she cannot find it in herself to deny him. “I’m five!” He holds out five grubby fingers and she beams at him, calling him an old man and asking him about his job and his taxes because the kid has a very strange sense of humour.
“Work’s been rough,” he tells her very seriously and her lips twitch from her faux-sympathetic expression. She carries him over to the picnic table Draco and Blaise are at, playing cards with George and Percy’s girlfriend, Audrey, while Teddy chatters away, occasionally throwing in some sort of work-related word that he’s learned from one of them.
-
Blaise sort of knows he’s got it much easier than most Slytherins in their year. It’s not like he went strutting about the castle throwing out Mudbloods like the word was flower petals and he was some sort of teenaged-boy flower girl. Or, something that makes more sense than that.
Sometimes his mum even married Muggles, even during his Hogwarts years. It’s not like she cared one way or another, so long as the man was wealthy enough for her standards. And, yeah, his step-fathers always mysteriously died soon after they added him and his mother to their wills, but, you know. Innocent until someone takes issue with Aurora Zabini’s odd love life history and, really, his mum’s long list of ex-husbands is hardly the biggest issue the ministry has to deal with.
So he’s got a nice, normal, utterly boring ministry job in the Department of Magical Games and Sports, which is really the best he could hope for, since no one’s about to let a Slytherin become an Auror any time soon. He always thinks he’s got it bad, until Draco works up the nerve to visit him and Hermione for lunch every couple of weeks.
Blaise has to meet him near the entrance, because having a ministry employee vouch shaves off a solid ten minutes between the time when the acne-ridden kid hears Draco’s name and his bored expression immediately shifts into some odd mutant child of fear and hatred and the time when a member of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement shows up to announce that Draco’s been cleared as Relatively Safe In Common Areas.
“He’s with me and Auror Granger,” Blaise says, because he’s utterly unashamed about name-dropping when Draco’s ears have reached that particular shade of red. His expression is completely closed off, but it’s clear he’s as humiliated as always and he’s damn lucky he’s not used to having a wand in his possession, because this level of indignant fury used to cause him to draw immediately and ask questions later.
“Let’s just go,” Blaise says quietly after Draco is given a pin with his clearance level on it in yellow lettering. “We’ll have to drag Hermione away from the office like always and it’s already late and I’m starving.”
Only, Hermione isn’t in her cubicle. There’s a chance she’s down in the Department of Secrets, because she’s been working on getting some sort of Unspeakable clearance down there as well as her Auror certification, but Blaise thinks he can hear her shouting in Kingsley’s office across the main hall. Draco’s ears still haven’t cooled off, though, so Blaise decides they’re going to wait for her by taking turns spinning around in her desk chair as fast as they can.
He figures he’s being helpful, taking Draco’s turns as well as his own, until Hermione storms out of the Minister of Magic’s office, her enormous hair spitting sparks and Blaise stands up to meet her and immediately topples over. Although, from this position, he can see Draco’s odd expression as his blonde-haired friend takes in their very clearly furious housemate.
“Get off the floor, Zabini,” Hermione says waspishly at him as she gathers her things and stuffs them in her old, ratty beaded bag. “That carpet hasn’t been cleaned properly in three centuries.”
Well, that’s disgusting.
She plucks her wand from Draco’s robe pocket and Scorgifys him without asking and it is as completely violating and embarrassing as it was the first time she did it, in the middle of the Quidditch shop after he’d dumped some sort of broom polish all over himself and Draco four years previously.
“Hold this for me?” She asks Draco in a neutral voice that’s loud enough to carry without being obvious, just in case there are busybodies watching. She doesn’t usually take her wand from him in public—rarely takes it from him in private, actually—but if she does, she’s always sure to act as though Draco’s just being a pal and holding onto it while she carries a bunch of crap around that could easily fit in her tiny beaded bag.
It’s not exactly illegal for Draco to possess a wand, but no wandmaker is going to sell him one after the ministry went and took his first one and stealing a wand is obviously illegal, but Blaise is certain that even Hermione Granger would get into a lot of trouble for taking advantage of the glaring loophole and just handing her own bloody wand over, which Blaise is still not entirely over, especially because the damn thing seems to respond to Draco as readily as it responds to Hermione.
Which means something, obviously.
“Are we meeting Luna?” Hermione asks as she leads the pair of them over to the apparition point a floor below.
“She and Mr. Lovegood are busy, apparently,” Draco says, his shoulders hunched up by his ears as everyone that passes them gives him dirty, cautious looks and keeps a wide berth. Hermione’s not even looking at them, but she dumps her pile of crap into her beaded bag and slows her gait so that she can walk in between them, linking her arms with both of theirs and shooting looks at anyone and everyone, daring someone to say something.
Blaise is sometimes very sorry he’d not had the wherewithal to befriend Hermione Granger sooner.
“Are you wearing proper clothes under that robe?” Hermione asks Draco, already reaching over to flip open his collar and check, which makes his ears burn red as he swats her hands away and tells her he is, dammit, Granger, at least wait for me to answer before you start trying to undress me in the middle of the ministry, but she looks unapologetic, because she and Draco are very odd. If one of them is blushing, the other doesn’t, out of the sheer ability to be utterly contrary on every level.
“Let’s go and get Indian,” she says, linking her arms through theirs again and fucking apparating all three of them to a secluded alley in muggle London without her wand.
“You are a frightening woman,” Blaise tells her and she smiles like the sun and Draco looks a little bit like he’s gotten walloped over the head when he looks at her.
Nothing new, then.
-
“At what point are you going to sit back and say ‘okay, I have eighty million different certifications, I think I’m ready to stop’?” Blaise is asking Hermione while she sits on the couch in the common area and studies medical flash cards for her General Healer certification she wants to get before her next birthday. Every time she gets one right thrice, she transfigures it into a bird and sends it fluttering over to Draco, who is on the opposite end and pretending he’s not openly staring by reading one of her text books.
No one’d ever let him be a Healer, but it’s not like there’s much harm in knowing a few basic charms.
He flicks Hermione’s wand at her look and once all of her little paper birds are floating in a mostly straight line, swishes it the way she’d taught him after using the spell on him during an argument, and all of the little paper bird-notecards go hurtling towards Blaise, who yelps and ducks behind the couch. Draco tries his best not to flush when Hermione turns those big fucking doe-eyes full of pride on him, shakes out his book like it’s the paper and settles in to read about bone-fixing charms until she finally goes back to her note-cards and Blaise and Luna sneak into the blonde girl’s room to have sex they think no one is aware they’re having.
“What’s the one that’s opposite of Snape’s?” Draco asks once the bed springs in Lovegood’s bedroom start squeaking. He used to have more of an issue with admitting that Hermione Granger knew anything he didn’t, but not even the most mule-headed person could deny the fact that she was some sort of black-hole sponge of knowledge. Once she learned something, it didn’t go away.
She tells him, sounding out the pronunciations with the stressed syllables carefully and setting aside her note cards to lean across the couch and wrap her tiny hand around his and guide him through the wand movements a few times.
He gets the spell right and she looks like she’s about to burst with pleasure at his success and he swallows tightly and tries not to think about kissing her.
Even if she thought of him as anything other than her sexless roommate slash charity case, he can’t imagine ever being selfish enough to start some sort of relationship with her. And he’s done some pretty selfish things in his life.
Hermione tucks her cold feet under his thigh twenty minutes later and her notecards slowly shift from being finches to being doves.
Draco reads her medical textbook with the sort of fervor his mum had always wanted him to study for Hogwarts exams with.
-
Luna’s always the first one awake in the mornings, rising with the sun because dawn was her mother’s favorite time of day and Luna had never been able to quell the habit. She gets the coffee started and stirs up eggs and takes a shower and sits at the table to read about Ginny’s Quidditch adventures in the sporting section of The Prophet so that when Draco shows up at half past six on the dot, he can sit next to her and decide whether or not he wants to talk without her looking at him, waiting for an answer.
Luna knows Draco feels more comfortable sharing when people aren’t watching. Knows he’s never really gotten over the guilt over having her and Hermione and the rest of them locked in his basement during the war. She’d forgiven him nearly immediately, and he’d surreptitiously stunned a Death Eater who was pressing her to the stone floor and saying dirty, awful things to her during the war, but sometimes people weren’t ready to be forgiven.
“I think Granger fancies me,” Draco says after a length of time in which he stares at his cup of coffee. He never drinks it, but pours himself a mug every single morning without fail. She thinks the routine of it settles him a little.
“Hermione doesn’t fancy people very often,” Luna says because, well. Ron, and then Draco. Luna thinks Hermione just picks a person and then never really un-picks that person once she’s decided. When Ron had been shifted into a permanent friends role, there’d been an opening available.
“She can’t fancy me!” Draco hisses at her, his expression vaguely panicked.
“Good luck telling her that,” Luna says, instead of asking why, because she’s pretty sure she knows and she’s pretty sure Draco Malfoy is an idiot.
Draco’s quiet for a long time, and eventually Blaise stumbles into the room to turn on the frying pan and cook them all eggs and bacon, his vibrant orange boxer briefs in contrast with his deep brown skin. Luna can’t wait until Draco goes off to shower so she can tell Blaise she loves him.
-
Hermione makes Draco wait outside of the courtroom at the next hearing. He shrugs, mumbles something about how if it doesn’t work out they’ll be back again in two weeks anyway, and she wishes he hadn’t resigned himself to being treated like dirt for the rest of his life. It’s not like she’d really liked him all that much when he’d been an overly arrogant toerag, but she’d been fascinated by the sheer level of confidence even when they were little.
Kingsley and the rest of the Wizengamot look startled when she marches inside without the person in question.
“Hermione--” Kingsley starts, because they fought alongside each other in a war not half a decade ago and she may be ten years younger but she’d worked damn hard for his respect. She only wishes he could show her the same kindness when looking at Draco’s face.
“Minister Shacklebolt,” She says briskly, forcing herself not to fidget with her cute skirt-suit and the robe she has draped over her shoulders. His expression smooths out into neutral territory at the sound of her business voice. “What did Voldemort teach everyone about Muggleborns such as myself?”
He doesn’t seem to want to answer. Some of the Wizengamot members are still recovering from her use of the lunatic’s name. The problem is that they’d trained a whole generation of children to be soldiers and, then, once the war was over, expected them to suddenly forget how to harness the roaring blaze inside and fight for what was right.
“Voldemort believed Muggleborns were filthy. He and his followers taught the population that muggles are no better than animals and that muggleborns somehow stole magic from wizards. He was the reason for two wars and for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of us dying.”
“Voldemort believed I did not deserve a wand.” She says succinctly. “That I did not deserve to live.” Hermione swells, gaining momentum with every moment they allow her to keep talking out of turn. “Imagine how that would have gone over, just for a moment. The wizarding population is small. Muggleborns keep us from dying out. We keep the gene pool varied enough that generation after generation is able to be born. What would have happened after we were gone? Who would have been Voldemort’s next target?”
She allows them to swallow that for a minute before continuing. “Fenrir Greyback bit fifty nine people in the time it took for Harry Potter to vanquish Voldemort. All of them are now considered half-wizards. Their wands would have been taken next. Part-veelas. Part-vampires. Halfbloods would have been forced into submissive spots after all of the Muggleborns and half-wizards were eradicated.” Much of the Wizengamot is halfblood. They look distinctly uncomfortable with this proclamation.
“I fought against Voldemort because I didn’t think it was fair or right or good to make these kinds of distinctions. I do not believe someone should be allowed the chance to play god and decide who is deserving of magic and who is not.” A younger woman in the back is nodding along with what Hermione is saying. It gives her the confidence to make the next jump.
“Draco Malfoy is a person. He is a wizard, and you have taken his wand because he was coerced, underaged, to join up with the Death Eaters at the threat of his parents’ lives. You all have sat in your cushy seats, in your black-and-white world and decided to dehumanize him. You replace the terrified boy with his hands tied that he was with the man he is now. You have made your judgments based on his last name and not of his crimes--”
“He has blood on his hands, Granger!” shouts Seth Raczidian and Hermione cannot help shooting him a look so venomous that he shrinks back, just a little.
“So do I,” Harry says acidically from behind her, and Hermione barely manages to avoid jumping in fright. She’s going to kill him if he makes her twist an ankle in these shoes.
“And I,” she concurs after Kingsley manages to contain the shouting. “We fought in a bloody war, you sheltered imbecile--everyone who bothered to stand up and fight instead of hiding away in the countryside has blood on their hands. Draco Malfoy switched sides in the end, refused to identify us when we were at the Malfoy Manor with Bellatrix and the rest of them, where I got my own special Mark, is a model citizen. He and his mother have given most of their fortune to the reparations after the war and to the orphanages in the country so that they may better care for the magical children.”
“You can make all of the laws you want,” Harry says after the silence stretches a little too long, the adults unwilling to bend in the face of two children, though she and Harry are not children any longer. “You can’t charge Draco, and if you don’t let him have his own wand, he’ll just use someone else’s.”
“Stealing wands is punishable by sentence, Potter,” Holden Fabray all but snarls.
“Gifting them is not,” Hermione cuts in evenly, holding her chin up high and daring someone to make the connection. She hadn’t been able to turn in a wand upon stepping into the courtroom because she didn’t have one. “Willingly handing your wand over to another is not a crime.”
And she knows that Blaise and Draco had thought she’d been unaware of the significance of wand-sharing, understands why Draco had been odd about it for days until she’d socked him in the face and told him to fix it himself. But sharing a wand is a level of intimacy that few people reach, and it’s a level of trust beyond sharing a home with someone and vouching for them in court.
She’s not one to use her own name to get her way, but she’s counting on the idea that Hermione Granger sharing a wand with Draco Malfoy has the kind of impact that she’d hoped. And it does. The entire courtroom looks flummoxed. Kingsley’s mouth is actually gaping a little.
Harry throws an arm over her shoulder, and then suddenly Ron’s on her other side and she wants to burst into tears, because they’d disagreed with her but they would still stand at her back in the face of adversity without hesitation.
-
Blaise is trying his damnedest to crack this spaghetti squash in half so that he can get to the insides and bake them properly when the front door flies open and Draco stalks in, his hair askew and his expression dazed as he crosses the flat and slams his bedroom door behind him. The Juniper Jocky Orb remains at its post, untouched, and Blaise levels a gaze with Luna, wondering how the hearing had gone.
Draco hadn’t looked very happy, but he hadn’t kicked the Orb out of his way. Luna smiles vaguely at him and flicks her wand at the squash so that it splits into two perfect halves.
Hermione shows up a few minutes later, carrying her beaded bag and tugging her hair out of her fancy French twist and shrugging off her Official Business robes that she hates wearing. Her expression looks as bewildered as Draco’s had and Blaise is really curious.
“Spaghetti squash for dinner?” Hermione asks evenly, pulling her hair up into some sort of knot at the top of her head that is somehow preferable to the sleek twist. She kicks off her high heels and sits on the stool at the island for a long time before she goes to call Draco for dinner.
Blaise rambles about his mother’s upcoming wedding with increasing speed as he panics about the outcome of the hearing. What if they arrested Hermione? She yelled at the Minister an awful lot, and there had to be some sort of limit. Hermione tells them all that they’re all going to Potter’s birthday party the following week and no one bothers to even pretend to fight it anymore and then Blaise continues to go on and on about the flowers his mother has picked this time around until suddenly there is no noise coming out of his mouth and Luna squeals delightedly when Hermione smacks herself on the forehead in exasperation.
“We had an elaborate plan, mate,” Draco muses, twirling his own damn wand between his fingers, looking settled in a way Blaise hasn't seen him in a very long time. “But it was either the Silencing Charm or I would have put my foot through your face.”
I’d like to see you try, Blaise tries to say, but, well. He can’t even be too angry—he’d been driving himself up the wall, and Draco had a wand again.
“She yelled at the Wizengamot for half an hour,” Draco says, because he knows the weird garbling noise Blaise had made was him asking what the hell happened. “Didn’t even let me in the room with her. Potter and Weaselbee showed up towards the end to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her and the court was furious, but I guess you just don’t say no to Hermione Granger.”
It’s said kind of mockingly, but Blaise has known Draco his entire life and that is fucking wonder lighting up his grey eyes, and it’s aimed at one flushing Gryffindor badass.
Hermione shifts some of her food around on her plate and Blaise waits for the charm to wear off and Luna congratulates Draco sincerely enough that his ears begin to turn red. He can’t stop twirling his wand now that he’s started and Blaise usually thinks that sort of move looks inherently prattish, but Draco’s been without his wand for five and a half years now. His friend’s shoulders haven’t been this relaxed in close to two decades, Blaise estimates.
Hermione starts to talk about some group of old laws she’d found that she’s now in charge of rewriting so that they don’t discriminate against half-wizards and muggleborns and women. She’s in the middle of taking a breath to continue when Draco drops his fork and blurts out “I’m in love with you.”
When they awkwardly excuse themselves to go and yell at one another in Draco’s room, Luna flicks her wand at him and suddenly Blaise can talk again, but he’s not quite sure what to say.
“We can tell them tomorrow,” Luna says serenely, and he leans over to kiss her, since he’s sure Draco and Hermione will be more than a while.
-
Draco’s literally faced down an angry Dark Lord and he’s fairly certain he wasn’t quite as terrified as he is the moment Hermione closes his bedroom door behind her. He makes for the window seat so that he can watch her and maybe escape from the window if she starts throwing books at him.
“I didn’t know we were discussing that,” is what she says, instead of the book-throwing.
“Discussing what?” he asks a little dumbly. Maybe he should’ve waited a different day to awkwardly blurt out forever-feelings over dinner, because if he’s honest with himself, he’s still kind of dazed about getting his wand back.
“Well, obviously I’m in love with you,” she says, rather clinically, and Draco chokes on his spit like a common Weasley, which she ignores. “But you were giving off very I’m not going to date her because I, idiotically, think peoples’ opinions on this sort of thing matter to her vibes.”
Draco used to think Granger was shy.
“I have those sorts of vibes?” is what he settles for saying, because he thinks if he questions her obviously I’m in love with you bit she will actually assassinate him.
“Did you get over it?” She asks him curiously, tilting her head in a way that makes him want to kiss her. He thinks, wildly, that he might be able to do that. “Or are you on some sort of adrenaline rush from getting your wand back?”
“I have been in love with you for years,” he says, trying to match her nonchalant tone and failing pretty miserably. “Probably since you called me an arse-faced yeti and shrunk all of my furniture and gave it to Mrs. Weasley’s garden gnomes.”
Hermione appears to consider this. Draco wonders when she’s going to let him kiss her. She mostly looks like she’s about to start talking about the weather conditions, though, but apparently that expression doesn’t mean much anymore, since she’d been able to tell him she loved him with about the same level of interest as she had commenting on the state of the tomatoes at the market.
“Well?” she intones after a few minutes of them just staring at each other. For the first time, she looks a little out of her element and Draco feels a wave of fondness wash over him quite unlike anything else. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
He’s been imagining kissing her even before she called him an arse-faced yeti, but he always figured they’d start off angry and a little violent, with teeth and swearing--in the middle of an argument or after he or she explodes from just waiting. But when she sits down next to him on the window seat and carefully puts his two books on the floor and he leans over to cup his hand around her nape, the kiss feels like they’ve been doing it for years, like he’s coming home after far too long away. She gasps into his mouth and tilts her head so the angle is better and he thinks she might feel the same way.