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Three months and eleven days after he and his parents had fled the Battle at Hogwarts, cementing their place in history as the most cowardly family in Britain, Draco stood on the pavement and regretted, in no particular order, everything. The cab driver popped the boot without ceremony, and Draco wrestled his suitcase free with the grim efficiency of someone pulling a body from a river, then stood blinking in the early morning light.
It was his new house.
It looked like it had been cursed to shrink slowly over time and had finally given up sometime in the 1970s. Wedged between two Parisian apartment buildings with identical Haussmann façades and self-importance, this house had the audacity to be short, lopsided, and cheerfully vine-covered. A garden bloomed offensively out front with lavender, roses, and something frothy and pink. It had a gate. An actual gate.
He could almost see the tip of the Eiffel Tower above the rooftops. It was unclear whether this made things better or worse.
The Rosier cousin who’d left it to his mother had claimed that Paris suited people in exile. That was putting it generously. Draco dragged the suitcase up the path, keys in hand, and opened the door onto what was either a very small house or a very large cupboard.
Inside, he was greeted by a sitting room the size of a postage stamp and a kitchenette that had clearly been designed by someone who hated cooking and had something to prove. A staircase led upward at a pitch better suited to mountaineering, terminating in what he could only assume was a bedroom loft. There was one chair. It was floral.
It was not Malfoy Manor.
That was the entire point.
He found the Ministry relocation form in his bag, flattened it against the counter, and filled it in with the grim precision of someone signing his own surrender. New address: Paris, 8th arrondissement. Not fleeing justice, allegedly . Still available for trial, theoretically .
He signed. Folded. Left it on the windowsill for the owl post.
Out front, a delivery van stalled at the intersection, a moped buzzed by, and a woman with a baguette longer than her torso screamed into her mobile phone.
Any day now , he thought. Surely .
He had, of course, been warned—sternly and in writing—that he was liable to be recalled at any time, which was Ministry shorthand for don’t get comfortable, traitor .
He began with a schedule.
Wake at seven. Read the French papers with breakfast. Shower and shave, dress properly. Walk to the corner for coffee. Review case law. Eat something green. Sleep. Repeat.
He had, after all, been warned—twice by owl and once by a terrifyingly efficient clerk at the Ministry—that he was liable to be recalled at any time. That phrase echoed in his head with a kind of bureaucratic menace. At any time became the framework around which his life stretched thin and strange.
He stopped doing spellwork after the second week. At first it was a practical decision. He didn’t want to trigger any trace-monitoring, didn’t want to seem reckless. But then it became something else. The hesitation settled into his bones. His wand stayed on the mantel, untouched. He began doing things by hand. Lighting the stove with matches. Ironing shirts. Tying knots with a sort of grim, exiled precision.
Once, he spent an hour trying to repair the tap without using Aguamenti . He succeeded, eventually, and felt sick with pride.
The silence stretched. He told himself the owl was delayed. Or lost. Or that perhaps the Ministry was staggering trials to control press attention.
He rehearsed his defense in the evenings. In French, sometimes, just to see if it felt more noble. It didn’t. Everything sounded worse in translation. He did not like the way his mouth looked when he said clemency .
He was afraid, and worse, he was beginning to get used to it.
Still, he kept the bag by the door. He folded his clothes neatly. Every night, he made sure he had socks without holes, just in case they came.
Then, nothing happened.
No owl. No summons. No furious delegation from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement storming his garden with grim expressions and black boots. Just Paris. Constant, loud, uncaring Paris.
By the second month, the bag had acquired a thin layer of indifference. He stopped checking it. He also stopped shaving regularly. He learned to buy wine like a local: cheap, red, and in quantities that suggested he had friends. Once, while attempting small talk with a waiter at a bouillon near Montparnasse, he managed to both insult Corsicans and imply he'd fought in Algeria. Two carafes later, he passed out face-first in his boeuf bourguignon and woke to the gentle clink of an espresso being placed in front of him, accompanied by the kind of practiced pity that suggested this was neither shocking nor especially interesting.
At one point he did consider returning home. Briefly. He wrote half a letter to his mother, then left it in the oven by mistake. The oven had been off, but still. He took it as a sign.
By the end of the year, Draco read the news only in French, smoked copious French cigarettes in the garden, and was so fluent in French that he began to prefer masturbating to pornography a la francaise. He had not been recalled. He had not been tried. He had not, in fact, heard a single word from anyone in England except Blaise, who had written once to say Your Rosier cousin was a lesbian. Thought you’d enjoy that.
And he did, actually. Quite a bit.
It started, as all life-altering disasters apparently did, with Draco being judgmental in a museum.
He had wandered into the Musée des Arts Décoratifs mostly to avoid weather and people. He was halfway through the exhibit on restored interiors when he stopped in front of a ceiling panel and, without thinking, muttered, “Well, that’s wrong.”
Unfortunately, someone heard him.
The woman supervising the restoration turned to glare. She had a smear of pigment on her cheek and the unmistakable air of someone who hadn’t slept properly in three decades. “You know fresco?” she said in French that had sharp elbows.
“No,” Draco said. Then, “Yes. Well—sort of.”
He ended up holding a brush.
He didn’t mean to become good at it. He certainly didn’t mean to care. But fresco restoration was detailed and unforgiving, and there was something perversely soothing about trying to save what someone else had tried to paint over. The colors were stubborn. The patterns were fussy. He found himself concentrating in a way he hadn’t managed in years.
By spring, he was apprenticing under the woman who refused to learn his name and referred to him exclusively as le long . By following summer, he had been added, reluctantly, and only after a very long silence, to the local restoration guild.
He told himself it was temporary. Just a skill. Something to pass the time until the summons came.
The summons did not come.
He stopped thinking of magic. The wand remained on the mantel. Frescoes, as it turned out, didn’t tolerate shortcuts. Most magic made the paint run or the plaster bubble. He worked with brushes and solvents and scaffolding. He wore gloves. He learned how to say things like binding agent and early 18th century Italianate influence in fluent French.
Eventually, he became one of the few in Europe who could restore pigment without overcorrecting. He was good at it. It was horrifying.
He left Paris only when the job was truly worth it—a chapel in Florence, a ceiling in Vienna, a ruined ballroom outside Prague. He charged enough to make it unpleasant. Still, most of the time, he preferred the scaffolding in Montmartre, the workshops off quiet courtyards, the cafés where no one asked questions in English.
Eventually, he stopped thinking in English. Stopped forgetting words in French, and began forgetting them in English. He wrote to his mother, and Blaise, twice a month, and otherwise, it was francaise.
He liked being a little difficult to reach. He liked that no one here knew who he had been, or what he had done, or what he was still quietly waiting for.
Nine Years Later
Draco took the escalator two steps at a time, not because he was in a hurry, but because the lighting in the metro tunnels made him feel like if he lingered, he might get a migraine.
It was late enough that the evening rush had dulled into something looser. Fewer briefcases, more backpacks. The corridor smelled like metal, wet paper, and that faint, brackish scent particular to the Paris underground and neither mold nor magic, but close enough to both.
He stepped onto the platform for Line 8 and adjusted the tote on his shoulder. It was heavier than it should have been. He'd meant to buy only bread, and somehow ended up with half a bulb of fennel, some olives, and a small tin of sardines.
He hadn’t planned on taking the metro, but walking had started to feel like a dare. The sky was threatening rain, and the street noise had been unbearable, even by his standards. The train, for all its fluorescent grimness, at least did not require decision-making.
He checked the board (three minutes until the next one) and leaned against the wall.
A child dropped something small and plastic onto the tracks. A parent swore under their breath. A tourist across the platform took a photo of absolutely nothing.
Then the train arrived.
And when the doors slid open, she was there. He would have known her anywhere.
It hit like muscle memory. The slope of her shoulders beneath the fabric of her jacket. The quick, scanning way her eyes moved across the platform before settling. The mouth set in concentration.
There was a new crease between her brows. Her posture was different, a little more economical, less inclined to waste movement. But it was still her. Still Hermione Granger, in sensible boots and a skirt that didn’t quite match her blouse, moving through a Paris metro with the calm determination of someone who refused to be late on principle .
She had a coffee in one hand, lidded and probably cold, and she gripped like it had been keeping her upright for several blocks.
And just like that, the years went thin.
All the layers: time, distance, the half-truths people passed around after the war, they all peeled off in an instant, and there she was, not ten feet away, same as she’d ever been. Not untouched by time, exactly. There were lines around her eyes, and her hair was shorter, and she looked paler, but she was still, in essence, the same.
His chest felt tight. Not in a poetic way. Just in the real, physical way of someone forgetting how to breathe.
She didn’t notice him at all.
Then she did.
It was not a dramatic reaction. She simply stopped walking.
He didn’t move either.
They stood like that for a second or two, maybe longer.
“…Hi,” she said finally.
“Hello.”
The train behind her hissed and closed its doors.
She stared at him a moment longer. “You still exist, then.”
“I do.” He shifted the tote on his shoulder. Something round and vegetable-shaped was digging into his ribs. “Just barely.”
“Blaise said you were in Paris,” she added, almost absently. “I didn’t know if that meant in Paris or near Paris or emotionally adjacent to Paris .”
“All of the above.”
“On purpose?”
“Technically.”
Hermione nodded slowly. “I assumed you’d go back to England ages ago.”
“I didn’t.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Several,” he said. “None of them urgent.”
Another train thundered past behind him. She turned slightly to avoid the full gust of it, one hand rising instinctively toward her hair.
Draco said, “You’re here for work.”
“Yes.”
“Ministry?”
“Junior Undersecretary for Magical Infrastructure.”
Draco blinked. “That sounds made up.”
“It is.”
They stood again in silence. The platform wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t quiet either. A man somewhere behind them was trying to sell phone chargers from a coat pocket. Someone else was beatboxing into their sleeve.
Finally, Hermione said, “You look—” She paused. “You look almost exactly the same.”
Draco made a face. “God. I hope not.”
“You do,” she insisted. “Just a bit tanner. You look like someone who owns a ladder.”
“I do.”
“See?”
He shifted his tote bag. “You look like someone who schedules her holidays in hour-long blocks.”
“I don’t take holidays,” she said, not quite defensively.
He nodded like this confirmed something for him.
A silence settled between them—not uncomfortable, just full.
Hermione finally asked, “So what is it you do now, really?”
Draco leaned back. “I restore frescoes. Mostly ceilings. Sometimes walls. Occasionally decorative plaster, if I’m cornered.”
She didn’t laugh, but she looked like she wanted to. “You do not.”
“I do.”
“For wizards?”
“For museums. For hotels. For churches. For hotels that used to be churches.”
Hermione huffed. “Do you use magic?”
“Only when I have to.”
“I thought you were always showing off with it.”
He shrugged. “I was always good at it. That’s not the same thing.”
A third train came and went. They didn’t board it.
Hermione adjusted her briefcase. “I asked about you once, at the ministry,” she said. “After the war. I never heard anything back.”
“They never called me.”
“I know.”
He looked down at his shoes, then back at her. “I’m not hiding. My address has been the same for nine years.”
“I didn’t think you were hiding.”
“I think they forgot.”
She hesitated. Then, too quickly: “I didn’t.”
The words just sat there between them. Loud, even in the noise of the station.
Her mouth tightened like she wanted to take them back. She looked away, toward the track, as if that might undo it.
Draco didn’t say anything. He just looked at her.
And the next train came and went.
Draco said, “You look the same.”
“I don’t,” she said. “But thank you.”
“You do,” he insisted. “You look like someone who corrects architects in public.”
Hermione cracked a smile. “And you look like someone who owns their own scaffolding.”
“I do.”
She laughed, brief and reluctant. “That’s actually impressive.”
“I invoice,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”
Another train approached. Hermione checked the board automatically, then didn’t move.
Draco gestured toward her coffee. “That any good?”
“Cold. Bitter. I think it hates me.”
“Let’s get wine instead.”
She looked at him. “Now?”
“Yes.”
Hermione considered this for exactly as long as she needed. “Okay.”
The train doors opened again. Neither of them got on.