From The Inside Out [PG] for Alexa
Title: From The Inside Out
Author: Savage_Midnight
Rating: PG
Recipient: Alexa
Disclaimer: They be Rowling’s.
Summary: Draco Malfoy is their dirty little secret.
Author’s Note: Alexa requested learning to love, self-discovery, beauty in the breakdowns, hurt/comfort, hope, post-Hogwarts EWE. I tried to touch on all of these things without making it too heavy. I hope you like it.
---
"It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
---
Draco Malfoy is their dirty little secret.
They don't talk about it. Not even Hermione. For all intents and purposes, they are still children in the eyes of the Order. To speak of it is to taint them, in a way they believe the war and the deaths and the battles never did.
His name is never mentioned. His face is never seen. They pushed him into the dark of the shadows after the war and there he stays. Even when they need him. Especially when they need him.
She followed him once. On an assignment. The Order's instructions are always vague when it comes to Draco, but the intention is always clear, always precise, always expected. She's learned that much. In the early years she never understood what they meant when they said the Death Eater situation was being "monitored", but the night she watched Draco slide a dagger into the gut of a minion, his hand reaching for the dead man's mask, she knew. She knew.
She doesn't blame them, but sometimes she hates them a little. She hears them talking of being better, of being more, never once acknowledging that they are pushing someone else into the gutter, lowering someone else into the darkness because to lower themselves would be to lose everything they are fighting for.
She understands it, but she knows that this was a choice they should have made in the beginning, before they lost so much. They're still letting the darkness in, a slow seep through the cracks, but it's all for nothing, because they've already given up everything.
Ron doesn't like to talk about it and Harry has no interest in anything that isn't Ginny or raising a family in peace. He's not a part of the Order anymore. Left it not long after the war, believing -- and rightly so -- that he'd done his part, made his share of sacrifices, lost enough that he had very little else to give.
It wasn't until Harry's wedding day, weeks before he and Ginny disappeared to France to build a new life, that she realised that Ron loved Harry just that little bit more than Hermione, in a way that had made her gut clench in the beginning.
She let him go. Eventually.
Seven months later she followed Draco into the dark. And she's never quite managed to find her way out again.
---
The second time she found herself creeping after him through the streets of London, her gut coiled tight and her body cold, he double-backed on her. Flattened her against the wall of a rundown coffee shop before she even knew he was there. She expected him to be angry, furious, expected a dagger against her throat, but when she looked at him there was nothing but disappointment in his gaze. Shame flashed across his face so fast she wasn't certain it had been there at all.
"Malfoy--"
"What are you doing here?" His voice was tight, controlled, lacking the sharp whining edge she remembered from Hogwarts.
She swallowed. Decided on the truth because it was quicker and she was tired of pretending. "I saw you--"
"I let you see."
Her mouth snapped shut. She wasn't sure what he meant by that and she found the feeling of confusion very peculiar. She was rarely confused. She was rarely speechless, either.
"Why?"
She remembers how he smiled then, a slow, lazy, dangerous smile that hadn't belonged to the Malfoy she thought she knew. She didn't know it then, but that smile changed everything.
"So I could watch you run."
She said nothing else that night. Instead she did the last thing she ever wanted to do, and the first thing he'd ever expected her to.
She ran.
---
They lost Luna somewhere in the weeks that followed.
No one thought that Malfoy would be the one to find her. When the call came Hermione said nothing to the others, just grabbed her wand and made her way to a rundown warehouse in the heart of London.
It wasn't until she saw him, curled protectively around a body that was too still and too pale amidst the shadows and the debris, that she realised they weren't winning, not really. They'd heaped all their darkness on to the one person they believed had been born for it and then they'd hoped. Hoped that it would fix what was broken. Hoped that they could still call themselves the good guys at the end of it.
That was the night the Order had no choice but to look Draco in the eye. And she'd watched them all, watched their backs bend with the shame as he'd laid Luna's broken body on the table and left.
She followed him. She made the decision without hesitation or thought and she left the Order behind. Left them all behind.
She caught up to him three blocks away and found herself slammed up against another wall. This time there was a dagger and she jumped as he tried his damnedest to bury it in the brick beside her head. But the brick wouldn't give and it clattered to the floor, forgotten.
And then his face was buried in her neck, his hands clenched in her hair, and she thought she heard something between a sob and a scream muffled against her skin, but she couldn't be sure.
"Draco," she said softly, and was surprised when her arms instinctively came up to wrap around him. She slid them under the arms that were stretched out and resting against the wall behind her, and laid her hands on his shoulder blades, her fingers digging into the muscles she found there.
"I killed them all," he whispered hoarsely, breath hot against her throat. "I destroyed them for doing what I was born to do."
"You weren't born for that."
But they'd believed it, hadn't they? They all had, except for Snape. They'd buried him beneath the sins of his father, had used his name and his legacy to bind him, and had still found it in within themselves to feel betrayed when he'd buckled and bent and broke beneath their doubts.
"Draco," she said again, and this time she took his head in her hands and made him look at her. He said nothing, but he watched her face through hooded eyes, his jaw tight.
"We fight because we choose to," she said, and for a split second she wondered if that was still true, if it ever had been. "You fight because they made you think you had to. They all did. I don't think you even know if it matters what side you're on."
His eyes slipped closed at that and she heard him swallow hard. "I was born a Death Eater, Hermione. I was raised for death. And I didn't--I couldn't--I ran from it and then I became it, anyway. But it was supposed to mean something this time. I wanted--I wanted to--"
"--save us," she whispered. And now Luna was dead and all of this, the missions, the blood, the deaths -- it all meant nothing, because they still weren't safe. None of them were.
Resting her hand against his heart, she said, "You don't owe us that, Draco. We're not a debt to be paid and you're not a tool to be used. Fight because there's something worth fighting for, not because there's nothing left at all. Do you understand?"
His gaze locked on hers and she held it, strong and unwavering even as something inside of her was shaking at the sound of her own words.
"You and the Order… you're not helping us," she added. "We can't be the kids we were at Hogwarts, no matter how hard they try to keep us that way. We can't be those people and survive. And you can't fight a war on your own."
There was silence for a long second. And then his eyes dropped and he took a step back, kneeling beside her. She heard the scrape of metal across pavement before he rose, dagger in hand and a soft, half-smile on his face.
“I don’t know how else to fight,” he said.
And then he turned and disappeared into the shadows, and she didn’t see him again for another three months.
---
He wasn’t at the funeral and she never caught him in the halls of Grimmauld Place in the middle of the night. She couldn’t follow him when she couldn’t find him and she wondered if any of them even knew where he lived.
The heavy cloak of shame that had blanketed them all when Draco had stood in their kitchen drenched in blood, Luna tucked against his chest, had dissipated in a matter of days. Before, Hermione had believed it had been a matter of survival to bury the doubt and the guilt, to do what was necessary at a time when all that mattered was staying alive, however threadbare their existence. Now their secrecy stank of rigid denial, a steadfast refusal to accept that things were changing, shifting. The foundations were rotting beneath their pedestals, and still they fixed their eyes upward, remaining willfully blind to the decay surrounding them.
That’s why, after one too many vodkas and not nearly enough to eat, she cornered Mr. Weasley.
“Hermione,” he greeted, his smile slightly strained as he watched her steamroll her way into the kitchen. He was baking cookies, she noticed, and he looked so homely standing there wearing oven gloves and an apron that she almost turned around. Almost.
His eyes widened a fraction when she came to a stop bare inches away from his face. “Are you-“
“I need to talk to Draco.”
“Draco Malfoy? Whatever for? Is everything alright?”
“No, it’s not,” she snapped. “I need. To talk. To Draco. So you either swish that wand of yours or give me his mobile number or I'll make it my mission right now to dig up every single one of the Order’s dirty little secrets, because I’m not naïve enough to believe that Draco’s your only one. So. Wand. Number. Your choice.”
Twenty minutes later she left Grimmauld Place with a slip of paper in her left hand and a cookie in her right.
---
And that’s how she finds herself standing in front of a dingy loft apartment on the outskirts of town. It’s a far cry from the Malfoy Estate and she feels herself shiver involuntarily. This isn’t the darkness of the halls in Grimmauld Place, or the shadows of a dirty alley in King’s Cross. This is something else. This is decay and neglect. This is a corner of the city that people forgot about because it wasn’t pretty enough, bright enough to be a part of their world.
There is no doorbell. She’s about to knock before she changes her mind and simply walks straight on in. She doubts he’d answer, anyway, and she wonders if he leaves his home unlocked out of arrogance or simple indifference.
She finds him in the kitchen making dinner the Muggle way, slicing a red pepper while a pan of minced beef sizzles away beside him. He looks up when she walks in and the knife he’s holding freezes.
He looks… relaxed, despite the brief tensing of his jaw at the sight of her. She never thought she’d catch Draco Malfoy wearing sweatpants, but she can see the loose, grey material of them through a gap in the breakfast bar. The navy t-shirt he’s wearing is clearly old and well-loved, the Frog and Peach logo almost faded. His hair has grown since she last saw him and it looks soft and freshly-washed and carelessly brushed out of his eyes.
He’s not what she expected at all and she realises then that she’s not altogether sure what she was expecting. A broken man whimpering in the corner? A hardened killer sharpening knives in his living room? She doesn’t know him at all, has never really known him, and she thinks that maybe she’s not really here to save him. Maybe she’s just here to learn.
"Hi," she says.
He stares at her for a moment and then drops his gaze. He resumes chopping his pepper into little squares and then moves on to an onion.
"What are you doing here, Granger?"
"I don't know," she admits. "I thought... I thought maybe we could talk to each other. Instead of at each other. I don't really know who you are and I'd like to. Know you, that is."
And there, that's enough honesty for the evening. The truth is hard work, she realises. It's no wonder they've all avoided it for so long.
Draco says nothing for a long moment. He doesn't even look at her. She waits, feeling embarrassment creeping up her neck as he stands there, motionless, head down. The sound of meat sizzling and spitting is unerringly loud in the silence and she knows, with a stinging clarity, that it's stretched too far.
She's turning to leave when he says, "Are you hungry?"
She pauses in the doorway, heart pounding. And she realises then how much this honesty will cost them. How much will fall apart because of it.
She turns and he reads the answer in her smile. She settles herself on to a stool and he smiles back at her, small and real and still slightly dangerous.
Let it all fall apart, she thinks, nodding mentally to herself.
Because he may have been their dirty little secret, but she wouldn't let him be hers.
ferretbush_post is the account the mods use to post the gifts. It has not created any of the gifts.
Author: Savage_Midnight
Rating: PG
Recipient: Alexa
Disclaimer: They be Rowling’s.
Summary: Draco Malfoy is their dirty little secret.
Author’s Note: Alexa requested learning to love, self-discovery, beauty in the breakdowns, hurt/comfort, hope, post-Hogwarts EWE. I tried to touch on all of these things without making it too heavy. I hope you like it.
---
"It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun." -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
---
Draco Malfoy is their dirty little secret.
They don't talk about it. Not even Hermione. For all intents and purposes, they are still children in the eyes of the Order. To speak of it is to taint them, in a way they believe the war and the deaths and the battles never did.
His name is never mentioned. His face is never seen. They pushed him into the dark of the shadows after the war and there he stays. Even when they need him. Especially when they need him.
She followed him once. On an assignment. The Order's instructions are always vague when it comes to Draco, but the intention is always clear, always precise, always expected. She's learned that much. In the early years she never understood what they meant when they said the Death Eater situation was being "monitored", but the night she watched Draco slide a dagger into the gut of a minion, his hand reaching for the dead man's mask, she knew. She knew.
She doesn't blame them, but sometimes she hates them a little. She hears them talking of being better, of being more, never once acknowledging that they are pushing someone else into the gutter, lowering someone else into the darkness because to lower themselves would be to lose everything they are fighting for.
She understands it, but she knows that this was a choice they should have made in the beginning, before they lost so much. They're still letting the darkness in, a slow seep through the cracks, but it's all for nothing, because they've already given up everything.
Ron doesn't like to talk about it and Harry has no interest in anything that isn't Ginny or raising a family in peace. He's not a part of the Order anymore. Left it not long after the war, believing -- and rightly so -- that he'd done his part, made his share of sacrifices, lost enough that he had very little else to give.
It wasn't until Harry's wedding day, weeks before he and Ginny disappeared to France to build a new life, that she realised that Ron loved Harry just that little bit more than Hermione, in a way that had made her gut clench in the beginning.
She let him go. Eventually.
Seven months later she followed Draco into the dark. And she's never quite managed to find her way out again.
---
The second time she found herself creeping after him through the streets of London, her gut coiled tight and her body cold, he double-backed on her. Flattened her against the wall of a rundown coffee shop before she even knew he was there. She expected him to be angry, furious, expected a dagger against her throat, but when she looked at him there was nothing but disappointment in his gaze. Shame flashed across his face so fast she wasn't certain it had been there at all.
"Malfoy--"
"What are you doing here?" His voice was tight, controlled, lacking the sharp whining edge she remembered from Hogwarts.
She swallowed. Decided on the truth because it was quicker and she was tired of pretending. "I saw you--"
"I let you see."
Her mouth snapped shut. She wasn't sure what he meant by that and she found the feeling of confusion very peculiar. She was rarely confused. She was rarely speechless, either.
"Why?"
She remembers how he smiled then, a slow, lazy, dangerous smile that hadn't belonged to the Malfoy she thought she knew. She didn't know it then, but that smile changed everything.
"So I could watch you run."
She said nothing else that night. Instead she did the last thing she ever wanted to do, and the first thing he'd ever expected her to.
She ran.
---
They lost Luna somewhere in the weeks that followed.
No one thought that Malfoy would be the one to find her. When the call came Hermione said nothing to the others, just grabbed her wand and made her way to a rundown warehouse in the heart of London.
It wasn't until she saw him, curled protectively around a body that was too still and too pale amidst the shadows and the debris, that she realised they weren't winning, not really. They'd heaped all their darkness on to the one person they believed had been born for it and then they'd hoped. Hoped that it would fix what was broken. Hoped that they could still call themselves the good guys at the end of it.
That was the night the Order had no choice but to look Draco in the eye. And she'd watched them all, watched their backs bend with the shame as he'd laid Luna's broken body on the table and left.
She followed him. She made the decision without hesitation or thought and she left the Order behind. Left them all behind.
She caught up to him three blocks away and found herself slammed up against another wall. This time there was a dagger and she jumped as he tried his damnedest to bury it in the brick beside her head. But the brick wouldn't give and it clattered to the floor, forgotten.
And then his face was buried in her neck, his hands clenched in her hair, and she thought she heard something between a sob and a scream muffled against her skin, but she couldn't be sure.
"Draco," she said softly, and was surprised when her arms instinctively came up to wrap around him. She slid them under the arms that were stretched out and resting against the wall behind her, and laid her hands on his shoulder blades, her fingers digging into the muscles she found there.
"I killed them all," he whispered hoarsely, breath hot against her throat. "I destroyed them for doing what I was born to do."
"You weren't born for that."
But they'd believed it, hadn't they? They all had, except for Snape. They'd buried him beneath the sins of his father, had used his name and his legacy to bind him, and had still found it in within themselves to feel betrayed when he'd buckled and bent and broke beneath their doubts.
"Draco," she said again, and this time she took his head in her hands and made him look at her. He said nothing, but he watched her face through hooded eyes, his jaw tight.
"We fight because we choose to," she said, and for a split second she wondered if that was still true, if it ever had been. "You fight because they made you think you had to. They all did. I don't think you even know if it matters what side you're on."
His eyes slipped closed at that and she heard him swallow hard. "I was born a Death Eater, Hermione. I was raised for death. And I didn't--I couldn't--I ran from it and then I became it, anyway. But it was supposed to mean something this time. I wanted--I wanted to--"
"--save us," she whispered. And now Luna was dead and all of this, the missions, the blood, the deaths -- it all meant nothing, because they still weren't safe. None of them were.
Resting her hand against his heart, she said, "You don't owe us that, Draco. We're not a debt to be paid and you're not a tool to be used. Fight because there's something worth fighting for, not because there's nothing left at all. Do you understand?"
His gaze locked on hers and she held it, strong and unwavering even as something inside of her was shaking at the sound of her own words.
"You and the Order… you're not helping us," she added. "We can't be the kids we were at Hogwarts, no matter how hard they try to keep us that way. We can't be those people and survive. And you can't fight a war on your own."
There was silence for a long second. And then his eyes dropped and he took a step back, kneeling beside her. She heard the scrape of metal across pavement before he rose, dagger in hand and a soft, half-smile on his face.
“I don’t know how else to fight,” he said.
And then he turned and disappeared into the shadows, and she didn’t see him again for another three months.
---
He wasn’t at the funeral and she never caught him in the halls of Grimmauld Place in the middle of the night. She couldn’t follow him when she couldn’t find him and she wondered if any of them even knew where he lived.
The heavy cloak of shame that had blanketed them all when Draco had stood in their kitchen drenched in blood, Luna tucked against his chest, had dissipated in a matter of days. Before, Hermione had believed it had been a matter of survival to bury the doubt and the guilt, to do what was necessary at a time when all that mattered was staying alive, however threadbare their existence. Now their secrecy stank of rigid denial, a steadfast refusal to accept that things were changing, shifting. The foundations were rotting beneath their pedestals, and still they fixed their eyes upward, remaining willfully blind to the decay surrounding them.
That’s why, after one too many vodkas and not nearly enough to eat, she cornered Mr. Weasley.
“Hermione,” he greeted, his smile slightly strained as he watched her steamroll her way into the kitchen. He was baking cookies, she noticed, and he looked so homely standing there wearing oven gloves and an apron that she almost turned around. Almost.
His eyes widened a fraction when she came to a stop bare inches away from his face. “Are you-“
“I need to talk to Draco.”
“Draco Malfoy? Whatever for? Is everything alright?”
“No, it’s not,” she snapped. “I need. To talk. To Draco. So you either swish that wand of yours or give me his mobile number or I'll make it my mission right now to dig up every single one of the Order’s dirty little secrets, because I’m not naïve enough to believe that Draco’s your only one. So. Wand. Number. Your choice.”
Twenty minutes later she left Grimmauld Place with a slip of paper in her left hand and a cookie in her right.
---
And that’s how she finds herself standing in front of a dingy loft apartment on the outskirts of town. It’s a far cry from the Malfoy Estate and she feels herself shiver involuntarily. This isn’t the darkness of the halls in Grimmauld Place, or the shadows of a dirty alley in King’s Cross. This is something else. This is decay and neglect. This is a corner of the city that people forgot about because it wasn’t pretty enough, bright enough to be a part of their world.
There is no doorbell. She’s about to knock before she changes her mind and simply walks straight on in. She doubts he’d answer, anyway, and she wonders if he leaves his home unlocked out of arrogance or simple indifference.
She finds him in the kitchen making dinner the Muggle way, slicing a red pepper while a pan of minced beef sizzles away beside him. He looks up when she walks in and the knife he’s holding freezes.
He looks… relaxed, despite the brief tensing of his jaw at the sight of her. She never thought she’d catch Draco Malfoy wearing sweatpants, but she can see the loose, grey material of them through a gap in the breakfast bar. The navy t-shirt he’s wearing is clearly old and well-loved, the Frog and Peach logo almost faded. His hair has grown since she last saw him and it looks soft and freshly-washed and carelessly brushed out of his eyes.
He’s not what she expected at all and she realises then that she’s not altogether sure what she was expecting. A broken man whimpering in the corner? A hardened killer sharpening knives in his living room? She doesn’t know him at all, has never really known him, and she thinks that maybe she’s not really here to save him. Maybe she’s just here to learn.
"Hi," she says.
He stares at her for a moment and then drops his gaze. He resumes chopping his pepper into little squares and then moves on to an onion.
"What are you doing here, Granger?"
"I don't know," she admits. "I thought... I thought maybe we could talk to each other. Instead of at each other. I don't really know who you are and I'd like to. Know you, that is."
And there, that's enough honesty for the evening. The truth is hard work, she realises. It's no wonder they've all avoided it for so long.
Draco says nothing for a long moment. He doesn't even look at her. She waits, feeling embarrassment creeping up her neck as he stands there, motionless, head down. The sound of meat sizzling and spitting is unerringly loud in the silence and she knows, with a stinging clarity, that it's stretched too far.
She's turning to leave when he says, "Are you hungry?"
She pauses in the doorway, heart pounding. And she realises then how much this honesty will cost them. How much will fall apart because of it.
She turns and he reads the answer in her smile. She settles herself on to a stool and he smiles back at her, small and real and still slightly dangerous.
Let it all fall apart, she thinks, nodding mentally to herself.
Because he may have been their dirty little secret, but she wouldn't let him be hers.
ferretbush_post is the account the mods use to post the gifts. It has not created any of the gifts.