Chapter Text
A/N: the timeline has shifted and some of the canon events have been moved around to fit the story.
This is a final year at Hogwarts story, while the War builds around them. Draco also wasn’t tasked to kill Dumbledore in this world, only to get the Death Eaters in the castle while Snape finished the job. So, kind of mashing ideas around, kind of canon. Canon divergent, maybe? What’s necessary will be here.
Harry and Ron will not be at Hogwarts, rather they will be off finding horcruxes. The Death Eaters will not have taken over Hogwarts, or the Ministry just yet. Those things will happen, eventually, possibly, deciding on how long this story decides it needs to be.
For now, this is Dramione focused with a HEA. Draco needs to get his life together before any of the things mentioned above can happen. This story is complete, and updates will be posted regularly. But, he’s also a good dude with some evil. Not an evil dude with some good. Plus, you should expect off-page development. We’re mainly catching them at moments in time, not completely following them through every second of their growth.
Also, I don’t write smut, sorry loves. If that’s what you’re looking for, you came to the wrong place. Hopefully the tension will be enough for you, and satisfying enough that the fade to blacks don’t cause a problem.
Happy reading!
Disclaimer: I do not and will never own the Harry Potter universe, or its characters. I am simply a girl who thinks that Hermione was done dirty by ending up with Ron, and should have married a true equal: Draco Malfoy.
One:
July, 1987
“You're looking for the thrill,
And you know just what it takes and where to go.”
- Save a Prayer, Duran Duran
They’re heading to Hermione’s favorite place in the world.
She’s known since April that as soon as school let out for the summer they would be. Knowing it was coming had just allowed the anticipation to build and build, keeping her awake at night, tossing and turning as excitement refused to let her slip into sleep. Her suitcase was packed, in the boot of their car, just waiting until they turned into granddad’s driveway to come out.
Hermione’s arm dangles out the window, breeze whipping her curly brown hair into a frenzy, whirlwind of curls wild and untamed as her dad flies down the highway. Duran Duran’s Save a Prayer loud on the radio over the noise from the wind. Her mother’s laughter, warm and gentle, echoes over the synthesizers pumping through the speakers.
She loves this, being with her parents. Everything she wants to be when she grew up starts and ends in the laugh lines on her mother’s face and the spark of mischief her father’s eyes always seems to hold.
The sun is just starting to sink behind the horizon, streaking the sky pink and warming the mountains with a golden glow. Deer lift their heads from where they’re grazing, watching as her father speeds by, as anxious as she is to get out of the car and stretch her legs.
Hermione pulls her arm back into the car, using both of her hands to crank her window closed. A week before, she’d been able to use her eyes to roll it up automatically, but her parents hadn’t believed her, instead telling her that her imagination was something they admired about her.
For all their pretending to know things, grown-ups really don’t understand much. She hasn’t bothered to try to explain.
“How much longer?” she asks, sitting back in her seat and brushing her hair out of her face. Her stomach grumbles and she’s annoyed at herself for eating the last packet of Jammie Dodgers that she’d stashed in her rucksack before they’d left that morning.
“Well,” her dad says, meeting her eye in the rearview, “we’ve been on the road for two hours and thirty-seven minutes, and it takes three hours and thirteen minutes to get there. How much farther do you think we have?”
Hermione screws her face up in concentration, working through the calculations in her head slowly until she was sure of an answer.
“Thirty-six minutes?” she asked.
Her dad’s eyes twinkle.
“Exactly,” he says, grin lighting up his face. “There’s no one as smart as our ‘Mione, is there?”
“Not a one,” her mother says in answer, turning around to look at Hermione. “When we get to granddad’s, you’ll have to tell him your times tables.”
“I’m still having trouble with sevens,” Hermione says, worrying her lower lip. “And nines.”
“Those are the hardest numbers,” her dad says, solemnly. “You’ll get them, though. You’ll see.”
“I hope so. I don’t want to be behind.”
“Darling,” her mother says with a soft smile, “if anything, you’ll be ahead.”
They turn off the highway for the final stretch of the drive, the foothills rising into the distance around them. Her granddad lives just outside the Lake District, the best part in the whole of England, with the best libraries. Every year for Christmas Hermione would ask if they could move there forever.
The car accelerates, her father driving so fast she nearly missed it.
A giant, dark-stone manor rose up from the distance, wrought iron gate shut against visitors. It set a cold, sharp, contrast against the warm glow of a summer evening. Even the clouds over it looked gloomy, and… were those white peacocks? Hermione had never seen the place before.
“Mummy!” she says, launching herself across the back seat and to the other side of the car. “Look at that house!”
“What house, love?’ her mother asks, looking where Hermione is pointing out the window. “There’s only hills.”
“There’s a house,” Hermione says with a huff. “Look harder.”
“She must be getting tired,” her father says, lowly. “You know how her brain runs away from her when she is.”
He takes another right and the house fades behind her as she folds her arms over her chest. There is a house there. She knows what she’d seen, and she would find a way to prove it.
--
Three days into their trip, one of her granddad’s ponies takes off across its field when Hermione is trying to pet it. It’s her favorite pony, only a little bigger than her, and she’s determined to befriend him before she left to go back to London.
“Okay, Hermione,” she says to herself, closing her hands into fists. “Don’t panic. There’s a fence. He can’t run away. You’ll just have to go fetch him.”
She glances back over her shoulder, her parents are out of sight, and she can hear the faint buzz of a lawn mower. She won’t be gone long, and she won’t leave the property. The pony isn’t even that far from her, nose in the grass without a care in the world as the breeze ruffles his mane.
“Turnip!” she whisper-shouts, crossing the field towards the flea-bitten grey. “Come back!”
The pony ignores her, his ears flicking in the wind as he continues to chomp on grass happily.
“Granddad will be cross with you!” she says, thinking that might work better. “Turnip, come here!”
“Who are you?” a voice to her right asks.
Hermione shrieks, jumping almost a foot in the air before stumbling back a step. She catches her balance, but only just, on a sapling in the field as she looks to where the voice had come from.
Sitting on a boulder, staring at her in confusion, is a boy, nearly her age, with platinum blonde hair and grey eyes.
“This is my granddad’s land!” she says, folding her arms over her chest. “Who are you, and why are you here?”
The boy scoffs, turning his nose up in distaste. “My family lives in that manor, just there.”
He points with one hand lazily, arrogance dripping over his features. Hermione’s eyes trailed over his jumper-clad arm to where the giant house rose in the distance.
“You live there?” her eyes went wide. “My mum told me there wasn’t a house there when I asked her about it.”
“Muggles can’t see it,” he sneers. She flinches at his tone, and his expression turns thoughtful. “So, why can you?”
“I don’t know.” She replies. “I don’t know what a Muggle is, but it sounds rude. All I know, is that that house appeared out of nowhere this year. It has an iron gate and lots of windows—”
“I know what my house looks like, thanks,” he says with a huff. “Are you magical?”
“I—my parents say I’m smart,” Hermione replies in confusion. She worrieds at her lip as his eyes appraises her, and they really are the most wonderful shade of grey she had ever seen. Like clouds over the highlands in the fall.
“Can you do anything special?”
“My times tables!” she says, brightening.
“Not maths,” the boy says, shaking his head. “Like this.”
He breaks a piece of bark off of the tree he’s leaning against before propelling himself off of the boulder and stepping towards her. He closes his fist, and without three seconds passing, opens it again.
A butterfly, the brightest purple she had ever seen, sits in his palm.
Her eyes went wide.
“Let me try!” she says, not wanting to disappoint the boy in front of her.
He crouches down, searching the grass for a pebble, and hands it to her. She takes it from him, and closs her fist around it.
“Nothing is happening,” she says, looking up at him. He’s only two inches taller than her, at the most.
“Concentrate,” he replies.
She looks away from him, closing her eyes as she does.
Her hand starts to tingle, and she feels warmth leave her fingers where they’re wrapped around the pebble. Opening her eyes and fist at the same time, she looks down and gasps.
A tiny tree frog hops out of her hand, and she jumps back with a cry of delight.
“Magic,” the boy whispers, watching her hands as she closes them again. He looks up at her, grey meeting brown. “I’m Draco.”
“My name is Hermione.”
--
She has never met someone quite like Draco before. Quick-witted, and intelligent, with a cool air of indifference about him that both excites and terrifies her, she wants to be his friend. Desperately. The other kids her age have never been able to keep up with her, so they had taken to bullying her instead.
But Draco. Draco.
He meets her comments with fire, carrying on conversation that she would look back on and discover was far beyond their years or comprehension. Talking about different rock formations and edible berries in Turnip’s field. Creating their own, shared language out of their time hidden in the tall grasses and weaving in between the trees. He shows her more magic, and she learns to do it better. Turning rocks into tea cups with the touch of her hands while he watches her in wide-eyed wonder before shuttering back into himself.
They play together for hours while her parents work at her granddad’s house, repainting the shutters and planting flower boxes. Draco’s parents had a constant flow of people in and out of their house, people that Draco wanted an escape from, and he had found it in Hermione.
“Where do you go to school?” Hermione asks him, one day. They’re laying in a clear spot in the field, staring up at the clouds. He’d just told her his birthday had been June fifth, and he’d just turned seven. She’d told him she was turning eight in September, and if he wants he could come to her birthday party.
“I don’t go to school,” he replied, looking up at the clouds.
“You don’t?” she askd, turning her head to look at him, eyes wide. “Where did you learn to do all of the magic?”
“It’s in my blood,” he says, sniffing. “My family are part of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, you know.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re better than Mudbloods,” Draco says, spitting the last word before looking over at her. “Our family has been pure since the beginning of Magical history.”
“Oh,” she says, softly.
“Hundreds of years of Malfoys,” he replies, looking back to the sky. “And not one of us is anything but pure blood. And Slytherins, too.”
She hums in response, watching the clouds shift as the breeze rustles through the grass and brought quiet to her racing mind.
“When I go to Hogwarts, I’ll be next,” he says, sitting up and ripping a handful of grass from the earth. “Slytherin green and silver.”
He let the grass sift from his hand, down, down, down, onto Hermione’s face. She wrinkles her nose.
“Better than Gryffindor,” he says, hard edge to his voice. “Blood traitors find their home in red and gold.”
“When will you go to Hogwarts?” Hermione asks, suddenly afraid he would be leaving sooner than she would.
“The same time you do, I’d expect,” he replies with a shrug. “I don’t turn eleven for another few years.”
Her curiosity is nearly insatiable, and her mind floods with questions she wants to ask about Hogwarts. She’s gathered that it was a school for magic people, and there was something called Gryffindor and Slytherin that separates them. Maybe it was like the house systems her father had told her stories of when he’d been at Eton. But where is Hogwarts? How would she know if she gets accepted there? Does she have to be the smartest in her year? How will they know how to find her?
She opens her mouth to ask, and then closes it again. Hermione doesn’t like to let people find out that she doesn’t know what they were talking about, unless it’s her parents. They have always told her it was okay for her not to know everything, but in this situation, she isn’t sure.
She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and make him run away.
Not when she’s waited her whole life for another person to see her.
--
On the calendar in her room, Hermione has circled the day she and her parents had to return to London in red. The closer her x’s through the calendar came to the circled date, the more she begs her parents to stay, to move here and put her in the village school, to open a dental office closer to granddad.
They had thought she would just miss Turnip, and who was she to tell them any different when she has kept Draco a secret for the summer, sure they wouldn’t believe her when they’d thought the manor had been an illusion, even when she’d mentioned it two days later.
She’s also had the sense that they would get angry if she brought it up again, so she kept Draco, and his house, to herself. He rarely mentioned his parents to her, so she did the same with him, instead keeping their friendship contained to the adventures they created together.
The closer she got to Draco, the more and more she dreaded the day she was going to have to pack up and leave. As much as she loved school, she wanted to stay with her friend. She and Draco had explored every inch of Turnip’s field, venturing to the creek at the edge, and into the trees just beyond. She has never had someone like this before, has never thought that she would feel so deeply connected to another person, when her experience with children her own age has proven the opposite to be true.
Every night when they went back to their respective houses, Hermione puzzles through how she could make her parents stay.
“There’s no way around it,” she says one day, hands on her hips as Draco waded into the creek at the edge of Turnip’s field. “We have to get married.”
“We have to what?!” Draco asks, eyes flying up to meet hers, wide with anxiety.
“I don’t want to go back to London,” Hermione says. “Not if you can’t come. If we’re married, I’ll have to stay here.”
“Do you really think that would work?”
“We have to try, don’t we?” she asks, eyes filling with tears. “You’re my only friend, and I don’t want to go anywhere without you.”
“Okay, Hermione,” he says, scrambling out of the creek and coming to a stop in front of her. “We can try.”
He hesitates before opening his arms, and she throws her own around his neck.
“It will work,” she says, determined. “It has to work.”