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Zanled suggested this as the perfect piece of music to accompany this fic and I couldn't agree more, so here it is:
It’s a funny thing, falling in love—despite all odds, all reservations, all history. Despite their differences, their doubts, their pride. Despite the warring dance of wills, the way they tested one another’s boundaries like duellists…
Indeed, despite it all Draco Malfoy had never meant to fall in love with Hermione Granger.
Not at the Ministry gala—where, by some unfortunate twist of fate, they’d found themselves paired for a formal dance. Her ink-stained hand had gripped his with stiff civility, yet he had been petrified into static silence. She’d been wearing a figure-hugging black dragon-scale dress, wielding hushed barbs and snarky remarks like a wand to his throat.
Here, they fell in step.
Not during the endless policy debates at Wizengamot hearings, where they clashed in a dance of rhetorical intensity—eyes narrowed, sneers sharp, sparks flying.
Here, they fell in lust.
Not even on their first date, hard won on his part, when she sat across from him in a quiet Muggle café, lips pursed, her foot tapping beneath the table—whether from nerves or habit, he wasn’t sure. And, without thinking, his own foot slid beside hers… and began to tap along with the melody.
Here, they fell in sync.
But there had been that one moment that had dropped him off the cliff of fate, broomless and wandless, where he truly felt what it was to fall and not have anything to cushion the blow.
They’d just finished their second course at the up-market restaurant of Kismet . Sultry Jazz played from a live band, while the dim lighting provided the perfect mood for shameless flirting and even more shameless caresses. Granger was swirling her wine absentmindedly, red staining her lips in a way that made him want to taste them, she’d been animatedly discussing goblin wand rights when a familiar smoky tune was struck up.
A twinkle in her eye was followed by her standing and offering him her hand.
“Come on,” she said, flicking her gaze to a patch of clear floor space by the bandstand. “Dance with me.”
“Here?” Draco scoffed, swallowing down his nerves, looking to all the seated guests and baffling over the impropriety of the suggestion.
“Why not?” she challenged, mouth twitching with that impossible mix of mischief and sincerity that was so uniquely hers. “Afraid of a little dance, Malfoy?”
His trepidation was eased by the sheer audacity of the witch, beaming down at him, challenging him to once again go against the grain of his upbringing. He took her hand.
It wasn’t a perfect dance, a little awkward at first as he found his feet in the public setting, all eyes on them. He stumbled over a table leg and, flustered, stepped on her foot, cheeks flaring in unexpected bashfulness. Granger had laughed so hard she snorted. He wanted to bottle the sound, capture it like a pensieve memory and never let it go. But once they’d found the beat—chest to chest, her head resting on his shoulder, his hand framing her waist—Draco’s heart never left hers again.
Here, they fell in love.
They danced more the next night, and the one after that. She always found a way.
In the secret atrium garden of the Department for the Regulation of Magical Creatures.
In the candlelit library at her cottage in the Cotswolds. In their kitchen, amidst flour clouds and half-finished pancakes. In rainstorms and under moonlight and once, even, in the middle of Diagon Alley—a street musician playing something mystical and irresistible.
She danced like she had something to prove, that even after everything she had been through, every slur and prejudice set against her, everyone she had lost, this could not be taken from her.
He danced like he was finally home.
On their wedding day, Hermione had chosen a grove just outside of Ottery St. Catchpole—enchanted gardens and the night sky lit with floating lanterns hovering like memories waiting to be wished on. Draco closed his eyes and thanked the Universe for bringing him a love he could only ever have dreamed of.
She wore a muggle gown with lace shoulder sleeves and a corset that he was desperate to deconstruct. He wore his heart in his eyes.
Their first dance as husband and wife wasn’t choreographed, it didn’t need to be. They’d had enough practice over the years to know how to move as one. The guests faded. The music melted. What remained was only her, Mrs Granger-Malfoy. His wife, his love, his world.
If Draco had known then, if he’d seen the curse weaving its way beneath her skin, acrid and insidious, would he have found a way to hold her tighter?
Would he have memorised the weight of her hand in his just a little more carefully?
Would he have selfishly squirrelled her away, to take her for himself, and himself alone, for a little longer?
It began subtly: a tremor in her fingers, the greying of her skin, a weakness in her steps.
She waved it off. “Work stress. Burnout. Magical Pregnancy Symptoms. Nothing I can’t shake.”
But their private Healer had spoken with a graver tone, her tone low and reluctant—as if naming it might give it power.
“A curse,” she said. “Not a new one. An old remnant, buried deep.”
The last spiteful kiss from his Aunt, left on the drawing room floor. ‘MUDBLOOD,’ still etched like a brand on Hermione’s forearm. The red wound had mostly faded from view, but the magic… the magic had not.
It had coiled inward, silent and serpentine; slithering between her veins, muscles, bones, and wrapping itself around her magical core. Dormant and patient. Much like the Dark Lord himself once had—gathering strength in the shadows, waiting for the moment to rise again.
But when it did, it would not seek power. It would seek devastation. It would tear through her from within. And with her, it would tear Draco’s world to pieces.
They fought it. Of course they did. Hermione fought everything, with potion regimens and ancient rituals, obscure texts and experimental spellcraft. For a time, in the latter stages of her pregnancy, it even seemed to have worked.
Throughout it all, she still danced.
Even through exhaustion. Even through the ache.
She danced with him in the hallways at night when she couldn’t sleep.
She swayed with him in starlit silence when words became too heavy.
She bobbed with him in the pregnancy ward, when their daughter, stubborn as her parents, refused to shift into position.
Hermione had grinned at the Mediwitch’s suggestion, her face lighting up with glee, and pulled Draco to his feet.
“We’re shimmying,” she said.
“Says who?” he asked, bemused.
“Says me, the Healer and the baby apparently. Come on. Side to side. That’s it.”
Swaying back and forth to a radio she’d smuggled in, they fell into step together, bumping into medical cabinets and laughing like they used to, like they didn’t have a care in the world.
Perhaps their little wonder had cured the curse from within?
One hoped. One could only hope.
Aurora roared into the world with the ferocity of her mother, all feral cries and charged with life. Hermione sighed and lay back, body spent, and Draco thought he might burst from love.
After Aurora’s birth, the world became soft-edged and golden. He would find Hermione in the nursery, tiredly rocking their daughter cradled to her chest, singing muggle rhymes that were entirely new to him.
Draco would slip behind her, wrapping them both in his arms. They moved together, like flowing tides. The rhythm was always the same: a dance of heartbeats and devotion.
But time is a thief, and curses are cruel.
The illness washed over her like a building tsunami, a fierce torrent, a thrashing crush.
There was nothing more to try. No spell untouched. No hope unspent.
She left this life on a morning sprinkled in dewy mist and birdsong. Her hand in his. Her final breath a melody locked in his heart forevermore.
The grief was immeasurable. Some days, he was certain that if he stood still long enough, the pain would rise like a tide and swallow him whole. And perhaps… perhaps that would be a kindness. The final dance.
But the world did not stop, could not stop. Not for the small child at his side—silver-eyed, wild-haired, her untamable curls the same chestnut brown as her mother’s. The life they had created together stood, clutching his hand, looking up at him with a gaze too wise for her years.
Aurora squeezed his hand gently.
She needed someone to show her how to move through this world. Someone to take her hand and teach her the steps her mother would have shown. And though every beat of that rhythm hurt, he understood: the dance wasn’t over.
Not yet.
When she was little, he would hold her feet atop his and sway to the sound of old records her mother had loved. And as she grew, so did their dances—from clumsy twirls to graceful spins. From giggles to thoughtful conversations. From jigs in the playroom to sophisticated soirees.
Aurora Granger-Malfoy grew into a storm of a woman.
She had Hermione’s mouth, quick to argue and even quicker to smile. She had her hunger for justice, for books, for truth. But she also had Draco’s stillness. His keen observation. His quiet cunning. And he watched her change the world—one curse, one case, one dazzling dance at a time.
On a summer's day, cherry blossoms floating in the breeze, Draco stood on the edges of the reception—held in the middle of a meadow, the flowers charmed to sing sweetly as guests walked by.
A raised wooden dance floor glimmered with ancient runes of blessings traced in light. Aurora stood before him in moon-pale robes, dark curls cascading down her back, white petals in her hair. She smiled at him, twinkling and mischievous.
“Dance with me, Papa?”
He placed his glass down on a tall table and pressed his palm in hers. It was smaller than her mothers, but still bore the trademark ink-stains she seemed to don as an ode.
They swayed to the melody, she led the way, just how he’d taught her. Just how her mother would have done. He twirled her like the precious gift she had always been to him, her gown sweeping the floor in silken waves. One blink—one shift in the haze of memory—and for the briefest of moments, he could have sworn he was dancing with her mother again.
The music rose, and they moved across the floor with the fluid ease of a choreography long practiced, long cherished—known now only to the two of them. Step by step, breath by breath, heart to aching heart.
His chest swelled with the music, with pride, with a love so fierce it almost brought him to his knees.
As the final note hung suspended in the air, they came to stillness. He bowed low, pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, and—with his own wily smile—spun his daughter deftly into the waiting arms of her husband.
She was laughing. Luminous. The guests circled the couple, singing old songs of love and life and luck, while Draco stepped back.
The sun set slowly. The flowers whistled. The meadow sighed. And he whispered, softly, so only the wind might hear:
“Hope you’re saving me a dance, my love.”
And in that sacred space between memory and magic, where grief feeds into love—he felt her. Just as he always did when he danced.
In the sway of the music.
In the glint of their daughter’s eyes.
In the sweet song of heartbeats.
“Always,” she answered.