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[Cover made in Canva by me]
Hermione stood at the edge of the pitch, watching the broom like it might do something on its own if she just waited long enough.
It didn't.
The castle glowed behind her, warm-windowed and full of noise she wasn't part of—laughter drifting from somewhere she couldn't place, distant and easy in the way things were easy for people who didn't think too hard. She'd left the common room before anyone noticed she'd gone quiet. That was the trick she'd perfected over six years: leaving before she became a problem.
She knew, vaguely, that there'd been a gathering in the boys' dormitory. She knew because she'd heard the laughter, heard Ginny's voice carrying over it all—bright and effortless—and felt something small and shameful twist in her chest. Not jealousy, exactly. Just the persistent, quiet ache of being the one who was always needed but never quite wanted.
You cannot leave this school without being able to do this.
The mantra had started in first year, whispered through gritted teeth after Neville's broomstick had knocked her sideways and everyone had laughed, the way people laughed when something wasn't happening to them. She'd said it a hundred times since. Maybe more. It had stopped feeling like motivation and started feeling like an accusation.
Hermione crouched, arms wrapped around her knees, and stared at the grass. The wind was cold and biting against the back of her neck.
She wasn't going to cry. She just needed a moment where no one needed anything from her.
There was a soft crunch of footfall on frost-stiff grass, unhurried and deliberate. She straightened instinctively, shoulders back, chin up. She wasn't going to be caught crouching in the dark like a wounded animal.
"Granger."
The tone was horribly familiar. Drawn out, faintly amused, like he'd already decided the situation was beneath him and mildly entertaining in equal measure.
She turned slowly, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a flinch. Malfoy stood at the edge of the pitch, broomstick slung over one shoulder, pale in the moonlight and thoroughly unbothered.
"Of all the places," he said, letting his gaze drift across the empty pitch with theatrical disappointment. "I do hope you're not making a habit of haunting the grounds. It's terribly undignified."
"Go away, Malfoy."
"I would." He tilted his head. “But I was in the mood for a nice evening flight. Didn’t realise the pitch had been overtaken by melodrama.”
She stood, broom clenched in her fist like a weapon. “I don’t need this. Not from you. Not tonight.”
Malfoy gave her a once-over, smirk curling like smoke at the corners of his lips. “A broom, Granger? You? Still pretending you don’t have an irrational fear of airborne movement?”
“Just leave me alone,” she snapped, turning her back on him.
"You say that," he called after her, "but your tragic little sniffle suggests otherwise."
She spun round, fire lighting her eyes. "Go and polish your bloody broomstick, Malfoy."
A beat.
Then he laughed—low and genuine and clearly against his will. Not the performative drawl he usually deployed, but something real and startled out of him.
She blinked. She hadn't expected that. Neither, it seemed, had he.
"Did you just—" he started.
"Don't," she said, pointing a finger at him. "Don't you dare make that into something."
"Granger." The laugh was still in his voice, reluctant and warm. "I think you just propositioned me."
"I absolutely did not—" She stopped. Closed her eyes briefly. "That is not what I meant and you know it."
"Do I?" His smirk had returned, but it was different now. Lighter somehow.
She turned to walk off again.
"Wait."
She stopped. She hated that she did.
He opened his mouth—she could see it, the shape of something dismissive already forming—and then he closed it again. He looked, briefly, like a person doing silent battle with himself.
"What?" she asked, warily.
"I—" He stopped. Looked away. "That was—you didn't deserve that. The sniffle comment."
Hermione stared at him.
"You're apologising," she said slowly.
"I'm making an observation," he said, with considerably less conviction than usual. "Don't read into it."
"That was an apology."
"Granger—"
"You apologised to me, Malfoy."
"If you say that one more time," he said tightly, "I will retract it."
Silence settled between them. Wind rustled through the trees beyond the pitch. Somewhere an owl hooted, distant and unbothered.
"I'm bored," he said, more flippant now. "And slightly intrigued. So if you're going to have a complete emotional breakdown, I might as well be your unwilling audience."
She narrowed her eyes. "Why would you care?"
"I don't," he said, too quickly. "But I'm curious. So unburden yourself."
She should have walked away. She knew that. But there was something in the way he was looking at her—not with the usual contempt, nor the performance for an audience that wasn't there. And it kept her feet where they were. Obviously, she didn't trust it, but she couldn't quite leave either.
She held up the broom instead. "Fine. You want to know? I want to fly. Properly. Just—once."
He looked at the broom, then at her. "That's it?"
"That's it."
She waited for the smirk, the drawled dismissal. It didn't come.
"You're not completely hopeless, Granger," he said eventually. "Just occasionally your own worst obstacle."
"I hate you."
"Mm." He didn't seem particularly wounded by it.
A beat passed. Then another. She looked at the broom.
"I'm scared," she said quietly, like admitting it was its own small defeat. "Not just of falling. But of being awful at it. Of this being the one thing I can't just… work at until it's fixed."
“You’re allowed to be bad at things, you know.”
She blinked. “That sounded almost like encouragement. Are you feeling well?”
"Don't push it," he muttered.
There was a pause. He looked at the broom. Then at her. Then, as if the words had simply fallen out of him:
"I could help you."
Silence.
He looked faintly annoyed with himself.
"Why would you do that?" she asked carefully, like she was afraid of startling him out of it.
"I—" He stopped. The gleam in his grey eyes shifted into something more guarded. "Because watching you stand there failing to mount a broomstick is becoming genuinely tedious," he said finally. "And I have nothing better to do."
It was a terrible excuse and they both knew it.
She didn't say thank you. And he didn't expect it. He simply set the broom on the grass between them and guided her hand above it—not touching, just directing, his fingers a breath away from hers.
"Calm," he murmured. "Confidence."
She almost said something sharp. She swallowed it.
He moved behind her. His hand settled at her lower back—it was large and warm. Hermione went very still. Not from fear exactly, but from the simple fact of it. His hand. There. Like it was nothing.
He didn't move. Didn't speak. Just waited with a patience she wouldn't have thought him capable of.
The wind shifted. She was suddenly very aware of how quiet the pitch was, how far from the castle, how completely alone they were out here in the dark.
"Breathe," he said quietly.
She realised she hadn't been.
She exhaled slowly, feeling the tension in her shoulders loosen a fraction. His hand was still there. She'd half expected him to have removed it.
"Again."
She breathed.
"Now believe it."
It was such a stupid thing to say. She almost told him so. But something in the quiet certainty of his voice stopped her, and instead she looked at the broom and thought—just for a moment—yes.
The broom rose.
She stared at it. At her own hand, curled around the handle like she'd done this a hundred times.
"I did it," she said, barely above a whisper.
"You did." His voice was low, and there was something in it she didn't quite know how to name—something that had no business being there. "Now comes the fun bit."
"Flying?"
"Falling," he said, and the wicked smile was back, familiar and safe in its way. "Try not to die. It'd be terribly inconvenient for everyone."
Hermione stared at the broom, then at the sky above—an endless expanse of darkness, scattered with stars that felt impossibly far. Her hands tightened on the handle, and despite everything—the lecture, the breathing, the borrowed confidence—her legs refused to move.
She swallowed hard.
"I can't," she whispered. "Not alone."
Malfoy, who had already taken a step back, stilled. He glanced over his shoulder, expression unreadable in the half-light. She watched him make some internal calculation—she could almost see it, the weighing of options, the slow exhale through his nose.
"Of course you can't," he said finally, quieter than she expected. "Hold it steady."
She gripped the handle. He crossed back toward her, and for a moment they both just looked at the broom, then at each other, then away again.
"Mount it then," he said.
"I know how to mount a broom, Malfoy."
"Evidently not, or we wouldn't be here."
She shot him a look and swung her leg over, settling onto the handle with as much dignity as she could manage, which wasn't much. The broom wobbled. She grabbed for it with both hands.
He caught it from the other side, steadying it, his fingers briefly overlapping hers. Neither of them mentioned it.
Then he slid on behind her.
There was a moment—just a moment—where neither of them moved or spoke. He was close. Closer than she'd anticipated, closer than was strictly necessary, and she became acutely aware of the specific geography of it: his chest against her back, his arms coming around either side of her to grip the broom, his jaw somewhere just above her temple.
She stared straight ahead.
"You're tense," he said.
"I'm fine."
"You're going to snap the handle."
She loosened her grip by a fraction. He didn't comment, just shifted slightly behind her, adjusting his hold, and the movement brought him incrementally closer. She felt the warmth of him all along her back. Solid and real. Distractingly real.
She noticed, with some irritation, that his hands were completely steady. Much steadier than hers.
"Count with me," he said, close to her ear. Not a suggestion.
"Malfoy—"
"On three."
She swallowed. Nodded once.
"One."
His breath was warm against the shell of her ear. She fixed her gaze on the middle distance and said nothing.
"Two."
Her fingers curled tighter around the handle. She could feel the faint tension in his arms, the coiled readiness of him, and underneath that—just barely—the quickened rhythm of his pulse where his wrist brushed hers.
He wasn't entirely unaffected either.
That thought did nothing to help.
"Three."
And then the ground was gone.
It dropped away beneath them in a rush of cold air and sudden weightlessness and Hermione's stomach lurched violently upward before something else took over—something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite exhilaration but lived in the narrow space between them. Her hair whipped back into his face and she heard him curse quietly against her temple, but his grip never wavered, not even slightly.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Then, slowly, opened them.
The world had become enormous. Black treetops swayed far beneath them under the wash of silver moonlight, the castle glowing warm and distant like an ember in the dark. And the stars—like a million diamonds—scattered across the sky in every direction as though someone had split the night open just to show her what was inside.
She had read about this. She had never understood it until now.
Hermione felt herself trembling but couldn't exactly pinpoint when it had started. She couldn't have said whether it was the cold or the height or the strange, disorienting fact of Malfoy's heartbeat pressed against her spine. It was fast, steady. It felt real. A rhythm that had no business being so grounding, so anchor-like, in a moment that had no business existing at all.
Without quite deciding to, she leaned back into him.
Neither of them spoke.
They just flew.
The landing was ungraceful—the ground rushing up faster than expected, both of them stumbling slightly as the broom touched down, her hand grabbing his arm without thinking. His other arm steadying her by the waist. They both let go immediately.
They stood in the dark, breathing harder than the flight quite accounted for. The castle glowed in the distance. The pitch was very quiet.
She turned to say something—she didn't know what, something brisk and deflecting, something that would put the last hour back in its proper box—and found him already looking at her. Not with a smirk. Not with any kind of performance. Just looking, the way he had on the broom when he'd thought she couldn't see his face.
He closed the distance slowly enough that she could have stepped back. She didn't.
And then his mouth was on hers.
Her mind went blank for one long, suspended second—just the warmth of it, the unexpected softness, the faint taste of cold air and peppermint on his lips. His hand came up to her jaw, light and deliberate, and something coiled low in her stomach that had absolutely nothing to do with flying. She was aware of the heat of him, the closeness, the fact that this was happening and she was not stopping it. That some part of her, some traitorous and inconvenient part, was kissing him back with a fervour that she would be deeply embarrassed about later.
This is Draco Malfoy, said some distant, rapidly diminishing corner of her brain.
She knew that. She kissed him anyway.
When they finally broke apart it was gradual rather than sudden. It was a slow separation, neither of them quite rushing it. She kept her eyes closed for a moment longer than necessary. When she opened them he was still close, close enough that she could see the slight unevenness of his breathing, the way his silver-grey eyes were gazing into hers like she was something he couldn’t quite figure out.
She suspected she was looking at him the same way.
"Well," he said finally. His voice was different. Quieter.
"Well," she managed.
A beat passed. Then another. He looked away first, jaw tightening slightly, and she got the impression he was going to ruin it.
"Don't," she said quietly, before she could stop herself.
He looked back.
"Don't make it into nothing," she said. "Just—don't."
Something moved across his face that she couldn't name. He nodded, once, barely perceptibly. Then he picked up his broom, and walked back toward the castle without another word.
Hermione stood alone on the pitch, her lips still warm, her heart still loud, the broom hanging forgotten from her hand.
She had absolutely no idea what to do with any of it.