Chapter Text
Hermione Granger needs some air.
It is four in the morning, and yet Hermione finds herself walking through Diagon Alley, drinking in the silence of the morning, the silence of nobody needing anything from her. All of the storefronts are closed, and only Ollivander’s has the lights on, a solitary witch sorting boxes, her locs falling over her face. The young witch does not notice Hermione pausing at the window, gazing as memories rise like bubbles in a champagne glass: the first time she stepped through that brick wall and onto the streets of the most concentrated collection of witches and wizards in London; seeing Gilderoy Lockhart at Flourish and Blotts with her collection of books, eager for the man to sign; the time she, Ron, and Harry had come to the streets, to Gringotts, to steal the Horcrux from Bellatrix’s vault; the first day Rose held her own wand, eyes alight with wonder, while Ron watched with pride.
Ron.
Hermione walks away from Ollivander’s, shaking her head. There is nothing inherently wrong with their marriage. There is nothing inherently bad about being married to Ronald Weasley. Ron is not abusive, he is not neglectful, and he is far from incapable of raising their kids. There is no single issue that needs to be resolved with their relationship for Hermione to feel content. It’s only a million little things that have built up over nearly two decades, tiny grievances that eat away at their happiness - things that Hermione feels bad for bringing up sometimes, even though she is exhausted that Ron does not see them.
She used to ask Ron for so many things - to put the dirty clothes in the hamper and not leave them on the floor; to set the mug directly in the dishwasher and not the countertop; to wipe down the countertops at the end of the day and stop the ants from resurging; to spend a few minutes of his evening leisure time putting away his folded laundry, not even the children’s, because she could do that herself. With magic, these tasks could take seconds rather than minutes, and yet they usually remained unfinished by the end of the day, when the clock struck nine and the kids were either asleep or sitting quietly in their rooms.
It made sense that he resented these requests when they both worked at the Ministry. “I’m tired,” he argued, like she wasn’t also tired, like she did not also work the same long hours while the children went to school and after-school care. He was tired, but so was she; she felt like she had been tired since the moment they found out she was pregnant, since the days of sterilizing bottles and taking the little ones to St. Mungo’s when they had ear infections and fevers and colic. When her maternity leave was up she was back at the office for eight, nine, sometimes ten hours a day, leaving childcare to Molly (energetic as ever, given new life by this latest generation) and housekeeping to the times Rose was attached to her via carrier or asleep in her crib.
She was tired of going from managing post-War Ministry reformation to post-baby mental load, calculating how many clean cloth diapers were left and which laundry basket needed emptying first, but she had just come to accept it, and yet somehow Ron could not. He was always seemingly searching for “more time,” complaining that he was “always on,” that he never had time to himself.
It was tolerable, until it wasn’t. When Ron moved from Ministry work to helping George at the shop, and still he would come home and complain about being tired, complain about having not even five minutes to rest, complain about “always being on,” and yet still find the time to page through the Daily Prophet while she cleared away dinner plates and made sure Hugo took a bath more than once a week. He went to bed while she made the grocery list, got up after she had already been awake for an hour sorting laundry, and still complained that he was “so tired.” He looked at the bags under her eyes from days of fighting with the Wizengamot over crucial reforms and said, “I’m just exhausted from working at the shop.”
They fought. It was inevitable. The fighting had begun when Rose was a newborn and Hermione, for once, felt overwhelmed at having to learn something from painful trial and error rather than a clean, concise textbook. Textbooks didn’t have colic that kept you up for three weeks straight; you couldn’t overfeed a textbook and get milk all down the back of your shirt. Ron loved Rose so much, held her and looked at her like she was the most precious thing in the entire universe - then, six weeks into newborn life, he asked if he could meet up with Harry at the pub for some guy time.
“Why doesn’t Harry come here?” Hermione asked, putting on the third clean nappy of the morning after two disgusting blowouts.
“Here? Hermione, have you seen the place?” And he gestured to, well, the entire house, the whirlwind of unfolded clothes and sanitized bottles and dog-eared books that Hermione tried to page through during midnight feedings to keep from falling asleep in the rocking chair. He swung his arms out at the entire house that neither of them had been able to maintain even though Hermione was doing all of the night feeds (because “breast is best” according to the books and that meant she was the food source on demand, right?) while Ron got to sleep for at least a five-hour stretch at a time.
They fought, then they blamed the sleep deprivation, and when Rose started sleeping through the night around six months, and Hermione started pumping, and they introduced liquid green beans, they forgot about the arguments over sleeping in shifts and having Ron take the baby for a day while Hermione took some time to herself at the library. Then they fought again when Hugo came around, and then they forgot again.
And then the fights were no longer big blow-ups but little, end-of-day tiffs about things that hadn’t gone exactly according to plan: Hermione having to stay late at work unexpectedly due to a vote of no confidence in Kingsley Shacklebolt, leaving Ron to scrounge up dinner and end up feeding Rose and Hugo cheddar cheese slices on untoasted bread; Ron missing a parent-teacher conference because he and George lost track of time while they refined a new batch of exploding truffles, leaving Hermione to wrangle toddler Hugo while Rose’s teacher explained that she had been “acting odd lately,” in other words beginning to display her magical abilities; both of them finding the tiniest things in how the shoes were put on the shoe rack or how the books were cleared from the kitchen table at dinner time, miniscule failings to critique to death. Hermione felt like no matter what, Ron was not happy with how things were done, but each time she asked him to do it he would only follow through for a couple of weeks before letting the chore drop again.
“Praise him when he does it,” her mother encouraged.
“But he does it wrong,” Hermione argued. “Why should I praise someone for half-assing a task that I then have to finish? Am I his manager at home, too?”
Her mother sighed. “That’s just how marriage is.”
She used to ask Ron for so many things, but gradually it became easier - in other words, it became easier to avoid arguments - to just do them herself. The laundry, the sweeping, the laundry again, the mopping, the shopping, the cooking, the dishwashing; changing the sheets, taking out the trash, scrubbing the tub, checking to see if there was enough toilet paper and paper towels, putting together the calendar of extracurriculars for Hugo (and for Rose, before she took the train to Hogwarts); sending thank-you cards for Christmas and birthday presents,
Sometimes her mother wondered why she complained so much. “You have a wand, you can literally just make the trash disappear from the bins,” Robin Granger would point out. “What’s the problem?”
“The problem,” Hermione tried to explain, “is that I have to remember it all, and he doesn’t seem to remember anything.”
“I’d help if you just asked,” pointed out Ron, feeling hurt after an argument where they quarrelled about a school form for Hugo that was forgotten until the last minute. Hermione had asked why Ron hadn’t done it and he had replied, “I thought you were handling it.”
“I’ve been working late at the Ministry all week. You saw it was on the table this whole time, why didn’t you do anything?”
“I was busy! I thought you wouldn’t want me to touch it. You said I bungled the forms for Rose to go to Hogsmeade, so I figured it would be better if you took care of it.”
“It’s a permission slip, Ron. You could have just signed it.”
So he said, “I’d help if you just asked.”
It is four in the morning and Hermione Granger is out for a walk on Diagon Alley, not because she loves being awake before even the slightest hint of sunrise but because she woke at three-thirty, spent half an hour tossing and turning in bed while worrying about a dozen things, and decided that at least by walking outside she might be able to clear her head. Walking is always good for getting thoughts in order, for taking the jumble of ideas and hopes and fears and concerns and putting them all in categories, a matrix of “urgent vs non-urgent” and “important vs trivial,” exactly the way she learned to manage every “urgent” request at the Ministry. She can walk in her trainers and a cream-colored pullover and take every pending need of her life, her children’s lives, even her husband’s life, and sort it in this time when no one needs her, no one is asking anything of her, no one is dirtying plates or searching for their backpacks or leaving trimmed beard hair in the sink.
“Granger?”
Hermione spins fast enough that she nearly loses her balance, wand at the ready. She thought she was alone on the streets, but when she turns she sees white-blond hair and light grey eyes staring at her with equal shock. She blinks, then puts her wand back in her pocket.
“Malfoy.”
Sure enough, Draco is maybe five meters away, having just emerged from some side alley onto the main thoroughfare. He puts his hands in the pockets of his quilted rain jacket and hunches just slightly. “Wasn’t expecting to see the likes of you out at this hour.”
Hermione raises an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Draco shrugs. “Means I wasn’t expecting that you would be out in the middle of the night by yourself. You alright?”
Hermione keeps her eyebrow raised. “Fine. Just needed to clear my head. Ministry work keeps me up sometimes. You?”
Another shrug. “I don’t need much sleep. Not since the War - got pretty good at getting by on a few hours at a time.”
The war. Over twenty years later, it feels more like a nightmare than history, at least to Hermione. Some parts of it are seared into her memory - being tortured by Bellatrix; the night Ron left camp out of pure frustration; Dumbledore’s death. But after two decades, much of it has faded into the tidy story she, Ron, and Harry tell themselves and their children: they fought, they won, it was all worth it. They tell it even as the Ministry continues to flounder in dealing with the pureblood ideology that led to the wars in the first place. It feels like a bad dream, they say over and over again, an incantation. Say it enough times and it becomes true - right?
Hermione realizes that for Draco it must be somewhat similar - it was horrible, we did terrible things to each other, but it’s all in the past. Except he has to deal with his father, still trying to worm his way back into the good graces of the Ministry and the powerful witches and wizards of pureblood society, still saying that even though Voldemort clearly took things too far there was still some value to pureblood ideas and traditions. Lucius regularly showed up trying to curry favor with the few remaining purebloods in office, and these days he could also be seen mingling with the purists who opposed “wandless magic” and wanted all “unregulated” magic to be strictly prosecuted. The Ministry had to manage Lucius Malfoy on his occasional visits; Draco dealt with that man at his dinner table in his family home.
Good, thought Hermione. Fitting punishment for what you did. And yet a part of her felt a little sorry for Draco, who had stayed out of the limelight and instead pursued niche hobbies, buoyed by the family’s wealth but with no clear intentions of using it for anything outside of family life. Lucius so badly wanted to be back “in” with the Hogwarts board and the powerful people of the day; his son seemed to have no such desire.
“Is this your usual haunt?” she asks, sticking her own hands in her pocket.
“Usually. It’s familiar, you know? The faces sometimes change, but everything else is the same as ever.”
She nods. “You could say that pretty much anywhere in the wizarding world. I heard the students were going to boycott the use of quills in favor of pens.”
“Boycott against the likes of McGonagall? Best of luck to them.”
They both chuckle at that, and immediately Hermione finds it odd that she can laugh with someone who so vehemently hated her as a child. She remembers every terrible slur Malfoy ever called her - but that, too, feels something like a bad dream. Painful, awful, but not close enough to her daily life to hurt her compared with the pains of being a mother and wife and Ministry reformer at a time when tradition seems to be coming back en vogue.
“I’ll leave you to your walk,” she says after a long-enough silence, beginning to turn away from Malfoy.
“I’m sorry.”
Hermione stops less from wanting to hear Draco out and more because the words are so completely unexpected coming out of his mouth.
“You called me a ‘foul, loathsome, evil little cockroach’ once, and I think in hindsight that was fair.” He tries to smile, quickly drops it. “I was pretty shite to you at school, and I’m sorry about that. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just - since we’re here. I’ve been thinking about things since Astoria passed. I’m trying not to get to the end with any regrets over things I didn’t say.”
Hermione feels some of the bravado rush from her body. Of course now she would remember - Rose mentioned that Scorpius’ mother died. Some incurable blood curse, and now Scorpius was afraid he would have it too. Rose had been focused on the younger Malfoy, but not once had Hermione considered the state of the father, what he must be going through as a grieving single parent to a grieving teenager.
Draco looks away, down the Alley and towards Gringotts. “I don’t need you to - I’m not asking you to forgive me or anything. I know it’s not as simple as just saying sorry and trying to move on. But I wanted to say it anyway.”
“I mean, you’re right, I don’t forgive you.” Then Hermione sighs. “But I appreciate the apology. And I’m sorry. About Astoria.”
Draco looks down at the cobblestones and nods once in appreciation. Hermione turns away again.
“Stay safe, Malfoy.”
“You too, Granger.”
At home Hugo is fast asleep in his bed; he hardly stirs when Hermione kisses the top of his messy head. Ron is only just coming out of the bathroom. He looks puzzled at her full outfit. “You go out?”
“Just for a walk,” Hermione replies. “Don’t worry about it.”