Chapter Text
It had been one of those days.
Usually, Hermione didn’t have to cover the emergency room anymore. She was allowed to stay in her section of the hospital, working on Magical Rehabilitation and Dark Magic mitigation. On this particular day, however, half the emergency healing staff seemed to be away for one reason or another. One was on their honeymoon; another had Parent’s Day at their child’s school; another was caring for their parents who had both come down with the Black Cat flu and so on and so on. Hermione had no such commitments, and so she’d spent the morning in what the hospital staff cheerfully called “The Pit”.
There, she had magically knitted flesh back together, been splattered in various bodily fluids, and had seen firsthand why experimental potions should not be brewed in the same room as homemade ale. She was tired, hungry, behind on her actual work and—despite multiple scourigfies—still convinced she could smell vomit on her person. Please don’t let it be in her hair. She had already washed her hair this week.
Her desk was a riot of papers and memos that had flown in her absence, and she knew lunch would not be an option that day. Not that she felt like eating, smell of vomit and all. She was triaging each request in different piles when she made a deliberate choice to ignore the person who hovered at her doorway. They didn’t set off her Sneakascope or her carefully honed intuition. No doubt it was one of the hospital administrators coming to ask her to fill in for some other deliriously happy and loved member of staff who had something to do, but she also had something to do. Her work.
“Hello, Kit.”
Her intuition and Sneakascope had both failed her. The deep voice that reverberated around her office wasn’t that of an administrator. And it called her a name she hadn’t heard in 16 years.
One that heralded danger.
She didn’t turn. Couldn’t turn. There was no way her eyes could confirm what her brain already knew. Besides, she’d already been bled, vomited and sweated on; she didn’t need to add her own tears to the mix.
“So it’s true then?” the voice continued, “Curious.”
Hermione swallowed the lump at the back of her throat and tried to clear her mind. She’d been practising Occlumency for 15 years, and while it had been useful with her work and made Christmases at The Burrow and Grimmauld Place more pleasant, she couldn’t say she’d ever needed it until now. She taped up the moving boxes of her thoughts until she could finally turn and look over the man she hadn’t seen in person since they were barely adults.
“Mr Malfoy, I wasn’t aware we had an appointment today,” she said, standing, her tone light and airy.
Yet she knew that if offered her hand, the way one should when greeting someone, it would be shaking. No, her hands would stay clasped together, even if doing so inevitably proved the ridiculous belief that Muggles were poorly mannered. She hated proving her critics right, but there was no way in hell she would survive touching him.
“Really, Miss Granger? You’re going to try to play this off as a meeting between distant acquaintances? You and I both know that we are so much more than that.”
Draco Malfoy wasn’t exactly as she remembered him. He was taller, or maybe she had shrunk him in her recollections. He was older; that wasn’t a trick of memory. He had fine lines at the corners of his eyes. Unlike hers, they made him look more assured. Distinguished. The way he spoke to her was still the same, though: a teasing tone that reminded her of one of her cats playing with their food. Danger wrapped in playfulness.
“So now you are wondering how this could be possible. You might be wondering how a memory charm you cast has failed after, oh, how many years has it been, Kit?”
Draco took a step closer and then another, and for a second, Hermione wondered if he was going to reach out and tug on one of the curls that had come loose around her face the way he used to do. She shoved the memory back in its box and attacked it with masking tape. The last thing she needed was thoughts like that escaping.
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, Mr Malfoy,” she said cautiously, taking a tiny step back.
“Sure you do, darling. Otherwise, you’d be calling me Malfoy and threatening to slap me for my insolence as I remember you doing at school.”
“I was a little tempestuous at school, but I can assure you in the last 16 years I’ve-”
“Ah! So it’s been 16 years, then?”
Draco smirked, and Hermione closed her eyes, wondering how to get out of this room. How could she erase this moment? Her hand itched to grab her wand and cast her way of escape.
“Doing it again won’t help you, Granger,” Draco said, and Hermione reluctantly opened her eyes to find his grey ones studying her intently.
“Your first charm held,” he continued, and Hermione felt a tiny itch of relief.
Yet, he knew something. The name proved it. Which meant there was another source. It should have been impossible.
“My mother died recently,” Draco continued, looking out the window momentarily.
Hermione felt a stab of empathy. She knew, probably better than anyone, how much his mother meant to him. Tape it up. No, she didn’t.
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
The polite and practised words came easily.
“Are you?” Draco’s gaze was back on her now, “I’m not sure I am. We’d fallen out of touch over the years. Anyway, her death allowed me to return to The Manor for the first time in many years. Sixteen, in fact.”
He paused and let the significance of the time sink in. Hermione swallowed uncomfortably but didn’t say anything. Don’t speak. She couldn’t be held accountable by the words she didn’t say.
The pause stretched until Draco chuckled.
“Oh, you are good,” he purred, “Not tempestuous anymore, it seems. I wonder if I taught you that.”
He shook his head, and if Hermione didn’t know him so well, she could have mistaken the expression for fondness. There was a hardness in his eyes, however, one that she knew meant she was on perilous ground indeed.
“Anyway, I was going through my boyhood bedroom, looking for some sort of material to wank to, and imagine my surprise when I found journals written by me detailing the months from September 1998 to June 1999.”
Journals. After 16 years, it was all going to tumble down because Draco Malfoy kept a bloody journal? What was it with Slytherins and diaries?.
“Then imagine my surprise when they detailed events of which I had no recollection. Very extensive time spent with one Golden Girl, Saviour of the Wizarding World. And I will confess, I haven’t read them in their entirety as I was quite verbose in my retelling. There are multiple notebooks all going on and on, but I got the sense from the parts I did read, that you and I were in a relationship of sorts. One that, should I have kept reading, would have resulted in me writing my own masturbatory aid.”
Hermione flinched at his crudeness. He was doing it on purpose. He always had. He used to say it was because he found nothing prettier than her blush, but she was older now, wiser. She knew that it was about throwing her off balance. Maintaining his power.
“Now, I considered that maybe it was all fiction, however, I can still remember all the other fictional scenarios that my teenage brain had created prior to 8th year, and I have to tell you Granger, those didn’t dilly-dally so much. Were more straight to the good stuff, and by straight to the good stuff, I mean you on your knees-”
“-Malfoy!” Hermione couldn’t help but snap at him, her cheeks burning. She immediately regretted it, even before his lips curled up into a snide grin.
“Well, hello, Granger. I was wondering if you were still in there.”
Masking tape and boxes. Crooked stacks and endless rows. She shut down her reaction, her anger, and let calm wash over her. Like slipping into a lake in the height of summer.
“No, you don’t want to play? Shame,” he tsked, “Oh well, back to my story. So I sat in my room, reading eighteen-year-old me wax lyrical over your ankles or some such nonsense, wondering what the hell was going on, when I remembered a tiny spot of gossip about a decade ago. That war hero Hermione Granger had a private hearing for the crime of using memory magic on Muggles. Pardoned, of course, as it was an essential use given wartime. However, it made me wonder whether it was a signature move of yours.”
Masking tape and boxes. She needed so much masking tape.
“I mean, it was apparent that I’d had my memory tampered with; it was just a question of by whom. You’ll like this, but for a short while, I blamed my mother,” he looked at her then to gauge her reaction, and when she stayed, still and unyielding, he leaned back against the wall and continued. “She would have been aghast to learn what we were getting up to in the library while we studied. She would’ve been willing to do anything to stop it. Then I realised that if she had gone to all the trouble to obliviate her only child, she probably would have destroyed the journals that had sat in her house for a decade and a half, that gave the game away. That, and if my mother had used a memory charm to erase a relationship between us, she would have had to contend with the Gryffindor princess charging at her gate to win me back. No, the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that the only person who could have removed Hermione Granger from my life so completely was Hermione Granger herself.”
He pushed away from the wall then, coming closer to where she stood, frozen in the middle of her office. It was her space, but, right now, he owned it.
“And so, now I am here, in the office of Hermione Granger, to ask the only question I still have.
Why?”