Fic: 'Anathema' D/Hr
Omg can you believe it? Het? Yes, well, this is not new, so that is my only excuse. *Hides face in shame*
Hope you like it anyway. Oh, and I apologize in advance to anyone that has me on thier flist that also has the dramoine community on thier flist. You're seeing double, I know, sorry.
Title: Anathema
Pairing: D/Hr
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 9,074
Summary: In the heat of battle, Hermione is faced with a choice and makes an irreversible decision. What happens when your soul mate is not who you thought he would be?
Anathema
Part I
Hermione falls to her knees in the grass and watches Harry slump to the grass twenty feet away, almost mirroring her for an instant, before he collapses to the ground. One lens of his glasses is shattered, but she can see that the eyes just beyond the glass are wide open and staring. Green as summer grass, green as the sea before a storm, green as peridots laid out on velvet, as deep and dark and green as all of the deadliest curses. Those eyes are open, staring, blank; empty of all the things that gave them their fire.
I did that, she marvels.
She looks down at her hands, at the wand clutched in the right one, at the cuts and bruises on the palm of the left one. There is a mixture of dirt, grit, and blood under her nails.
All around her, the battle continues on. She doesn’t move, and as long as she does not notice anyone or anything around her, no one and nothing notices her.
Someone screams Harry! and Hermione thinks it might be Ginny. There are voices raised in rage and colored curses flying everywhere, the smell of blood, metallic and sharp, and just under that, the smell of earth.
Hermione looks back down at her hands and watches her fingers like they don’t belong to her as she closes them into tight fists, then slowly, almost like a flower blooming in the sun, opens them again, splaying them out. There is that same mixture of blood and grime in the creases between her fingers.
A body, cloaked in black, wearing a silver mask falls to the ground beside her. She doesn’t flinch or move away from it, merely regards it as one might a strange bird that had just fallen from the sky, or an oddly shaped rock she had come upon while walking on the beach. That it is the body of a Death Eater does not even enter into her thoughts. She is not looking at it like that because it was once a Death Eater, she is looking at it like that because it was once a man.
When the rain starts to fall, it takes her a while to realize that the world has suddenly gone silent. It is an abrupt thing, more startling in its strangeness and finality than the previous screams of anger.
Then that silence is broken by more screams, and it does not surprise her at all that they are screams of anguish, not anger and terror.
“How could you?!” a woman shouts, and that gets her attention, because there is the rage again. Rage coating pain and despair.
“Ginny?” Hermione murmurs. She looks up and meets the young woman’s tear filled, angry eyes over the prone and lifeless body of Harry Potter.
“Hermione,” someone says, and she feels a hand on her arm, pulling her up. “Hermione? Are you all right?”
“Ron?”
Ron shakes her. “Hermione, what happened?”
“I . . . I-“
“She killed him,” Ginny says fiercely. “I saw her.”
Hermione looks at her, sees her grief, her anger, her tears. Her tears have left trails in the dirt and dust from the battle. She sees all of this, and feels nothing.
Ron shakes her again, roughly, his fingers biting into her arms, hurting her. “Is that true?” he demands. “God, it can’t be-is that what happened? Hermione, answer me, damn you!”
“I think-yes,” she says, trying to force herself to focus. Distantly, she knows that she is experiencing severe shock, but she can’t seem to make anything matter. Not even with Ron gripping her like he is seconds away from hitting her, not with Ginny crying out her grief into the cold dust of the battlefield.
“Ron, stop it, you’re hurting her,” someone says. It isn’t Ginny. It sounds like Fred, or maybe George. She can never tell.
“Why, Hermione?!”
“Why?” she repeats, tasting the word like she’s never heard it before.
“Yes, for fuck’s sake, why?!”
“Ron, let her go,” Fred/George says. “Let go.”
And suddenly he does, and she almost slumps back to the ground, but catches herself on the sleeve of Fred/George’s shirt. He reaches out and steadies her, then turns back to Ron.
“Calm down, mate,” Fred/George tells Ron. “Just calm down.”
“Why, Hermione?” Ron asks again, a note of desperation in his voice. “Just tell me why?”
“She did it for him,” Ginny snarls.
Hermione looks up and sees that Ginny is pointing a finger angrily at someone. A man who is getting slowly to his feet. He brushes dirt off of the sleeve of his robe, then starts walking toward her, and she watches because she can’t help it. It has always been that way.
“Malfoy?!” Ron yells, almost in her face again despite Fred/George’s attempts to restrain him. “You killed Harry for Malfoy? Why?”
“To save him,” Ginny says. She has pulled Harry’s body so that his shoulders are resting in her lap. “She did it to save him. Harry was going to kill him.”
Silence at that, then another voice, she thinks it’s Neville, says, “Why would Harry want to kill Malfoy?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Ron says.
“Ron, Malfoy’s on our side,” Fred/George reminds him.
Hermione is barely listening to them. She is watching Draco cross the field. He ignores the conversation around them as though he does not even realize that he and his loyalties are the topic under discussion. He locks eyes with her and has almost reached her when Ron pulls away from Fred/George and raises his hand to strike her.
She does not flinch from him as his hand descends, merely looks at him expectantly. The blow does not fall.
In an instant Draco is there between them. Moving with a catlike agility that his previous calm grace had not even hinted at, he seizes Ron’s hand and presses the tip of his suddenly glowing wand to his throat. “Try it Weasley,” he hisses, “and I’ll hex you so fast your eyes will cross.”
Hermione’s curly hair has fallen across her face and she stares through it, looking between the two men with wide amber eyes. Ron swallows and she watches in morbid fascination the way his throat works against the glowing tip of Draco’s wand. Suddenly, Draco shoves him away, and he would have fallen if Fred/George hadn’t been there to catch him.
“You would trade Harry for this . . . this, bastard?!” Ron shouts at her, jerking away from his brother.
“Ron,” Neville says calmly. “Ron, I think he was hit with the Imperious Curse.”
“I don’t care if he was,” Ron says. “I’d still trade a hundred of Malfoy for one of him. Why couldn’t you just-?”
“What Weasley?” Draco murmures dangerously. “Why couldn’t she just let him kill me, is that what you were going to ask? Not very fucking Gryffndor of you to be thinking such things, is it?”
“Fuck off, Malfoy.”
“So sorry to disappoint you, Weasley, but you’re not my type,” Draco says with a cold sneer.
Ron lunges at him then, his wand forgotten, as it seems to sometimes be when his temper gets the best of him. Fred/George grabs him around the waist and hauls him back with a curse.
“Ron, this is really not the time or place for this-”
“She killed Harry!” Ron screams, practically in his brother’s face. “For Malfoy! She killed Harry for Malfoy! I just want to know why!”
Silence. Everyone seems to be looking at her, for an answer, for a reason, for something, anything. What was the question?
Hermione looks at Draco, who is the only one not watching her for an answer. She lifts a trembling hand and touches the side of his face; lets her fingers linger there until the corner of his mouth curves up just a little.
Ron backs away in horror, his eyes wide with sudden comprehension. He bends forward and puts his hands on his knees and his head down. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“How could you?” Ginny says again, but this time it is almost a whisper.
It was really very easy. Much easier than she could have ever imagined, and she almost tells Ginny that, then doesn’t.
How could she not? How could she not, when the marks of his fingers were still set in her skin, when she has only to close her eyes and cast her mind back a few hours to feel the hands that made them moving along her body, holding her down, guiding her. When she has only to look at him to recall the taste of him, the feel of him so full, moving within her; soft words whispered against her mouth between kisses, and touches that burn and strive in vain not to linger.
She knows the soft satin of his skin, the sleekness of the muscles beneath it, the sound of his voice in the darkness; murmured endearments and encouragement, a hiss somewhere between pleasure and pain as she sinks her teeth into his shoulder, her body tightening around him in every way. She knows the taste of his sweat and the sound of his laughter. She knows that he has a mole on the inside of his upper right thigh, and that if she puts her mouth there just so, he will gasp her name in the sweetest way. She knows that he has a scar along the back of his left shoulder from a fall he took off a broom when he was six. She knows that until very recently, it was the only unnatural blemish on his lovely pale body. She knows that he is ticklish along his ribcage and at the backs of his knees, and she knows that he likes her to tickle him anyway, because tickling often leads to something else. She knows that the moment before orgasm overtakes him, his eyes flutter, then search out hers and try to hold her gaze. She knows that it never works; that his back arches and his eyes close, always, in spite of his every effort to control it. She knows that he has memorized every dark spell that she has ever heard of, and some that she has not, because he firmly believes that it is nothing but sheer ignorance not to know ones enemy and their weapons. She knows that there is a piece of him inside her, and that every day it is slowly, miraculously growing.
Knowing all of this, how could she be expected to stand back and watch him die if she could save him?
Hermione turns to Draco and he reaches out and pulls her against his side. He holds his wand lightly in one hand as he leads her away from the field, ready to use it if anyone tries to stop them. Nobody does.
The war was over now. Somewhere on this field of carnage lay the body of Tom Riddle, and with him, the war has ended.
But victory is bitter sweet, marred by the many deaths of the brightest and the most valiant of them all. Tomorrow the world would celebrate the end of a long reign of terror, but that celebration would be overshadowed by the knowledge that their shining hero lay dead in his grave, the only payment for his bravery a cold coffin and a dark hole in the ground.
It occurs to Hermione to wonder who had delivered the killing spell to the Dark Lord. Not Harry. Harry had been fighting him when he was hit by the Imperious Curse. Perhaps Neville? That seemed fitting, in a way, and she hoped that was how it had happened. And wouldn’t that be ironic?
“Are you cold?” Draco asks her.
“A little,” she says. She burrows in deeper against his side when he wraps his cloak around her shoulders. He smells of earth and magic, but just under that there is a sweet tangy smell that is all his own, and it makes her think of apples just after the rain.
She knows everything about his skin and his flesh, and she is probably the only person who knows even half of what is underneath it.
The world would condemn her for this knowledge if they knew what it had cost for her to keep it. No matter what curses and spells he had been under at the time, the world would remember that she had brought down their Chosen One to save the life of a man who had been branded with the Dark Mark. They could not arrest her for it because, after all, this was war, and war was about death-when it got right down to it, that was all that it was about-but they could ostracize her, and they probably would.
She would not be forgiven.
“Are you ready?” Draco says.
She looks at him strangely for a moment, then understands what he is asking and says, “Yes.”
“Hold onto me,” he says.
“Yes,” she says again and squeezes him tight.
They disapparate, leaving the smell and the taste and the gore of battle behind them. They will have more battles to fight tomorrow, of a different kind, but that is tomorrow, and it can wait.
********
Part II
Draco takes another drag on his cigarette, then reaches across the bed to the nightstand and crushes it out in the ashtray. It is a muggle habit, one he knows even the muggles look down on, but that hasn’t done anything to keep him from lighting one after another for over an hour.
The room smells like sex, smoke, and Hermione’s expensive perfume. It is a good smell.
On the bed, Hermione stirs and turns over in her sleep. She is dreaming, he can see her eyes darting back and forth beneath her lids, her long dark eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks like the fans of pixy dancers. She is so peaceful like that, with her curly brown hair pooled on the white sheets, her body relaxed as it so seldom is when she is awake, her lips slightly parted to let in the light, even breath of slumber.
There are tear tracks on her face, and very lightly, he brushes them with his fingertips.
Today was Potter’s funeral. It was a disgustingly grand affair; achingly soft music, mourners from every corner of the globe, and so many flowers that their perfume made it nearly impossible to breathe.
Draco had held Hermione while she cried. He had tried to shield her from the covert glances and blatant stares of the other wizards and witches present. The whole time he was thinking how disgusted Potter would have been by the entire affair. The sheer number of flowers that had been killed to line his magnificent coffin would have made him cringe.
Hermione sighs and moves her face closer to his fingers. He smiles down at her and brushes a twisted lock of hair behind her ear.
On the nightstand beside the ashtray, there is a newspaper. Hermione’s pretty face looks out of a black and white photograph on the front beneath the headline BOY-WHO-LIVED SLAYED BY TRUSTED FRIEND! As he watches, the picture Hermione looks at him and smiles. He wonders what Potter would have thought of the headline. He was almost twenty-six years old, but right up until he died he was the BOY-WHO-LIVED. He never got to become the Man-Who-Lived.
Draco shakes his head with a humorless cough of laughter. Was he really sitting there, naked in the dark with his sleeping lover, smoking cigarettes and mourning Potter, of all people? Yes, it would seem that he is.
And really, who had more right to it than he did? Not the hundreds upon hundreds of fools that had flocked to stare at Potter’s dead face and marvel at the fall of a hero. What the fuck did they know? Towards the end, Potter had finally gotten a few things straight in his head. He would have told them that there was nothing heroic about it, that there is nothing less heroic than dying for a hopeless cause. If he had been able to, he would have told them, but they wouldn’t have listened.
He’d had to kill a few people and watch a few of his friends die before he figured it out himself, but knowing it hadn’t changed anything. People had kept right on fucking dying, and Potter, noble, sainted, fucking Potter had kept fighting the good fight.
And so they had won.
George Weasley had died in his twin’s arms as they were getting on a train in Paris, following a lead for the Order. Tonks had been Avada Kedavra’d on the doorstep of her own home and when he found her, Lupin had gone crazy; what the werewolves called ‘feral’, like a wild animal.
And then, of course, there was Harry Potter. But Draco didn’t see how anyone could have actually expected him to live. They had practically thrown him at the Death Eaters. He’d been offered magic and wonder, the price of which . . . he was expected to save the world.
Was it any wonder that he was dead?
Everyone was walking around smiling and joyful. We’ve won! They shout. And so they have. But at what cost?
“Draco?” Hermione whispers.
He looks down at her and sees that she is awake. The light from the bedside lamp casts little gold sparks in her dark eyes.
He cups her cheek in one hand and bends forward to kiss her, lightly at first, then deeper, using tongue and teeth until he feels her shiver against him.
“Are you alright?” she asks. He is being gentle and sweet, and she loves it when he is gentle and sweet, but he usually isn’t. Not unless he’s been drinking, or unless there’s something wrong.
“I’m fine,” he says, sitting back. He takes another cigarette from the pack on the nightstand and lights it. “I’m just feeling maudlin, I guess.”
She scoots up and rests her head against his thigh. “About today?”
And all the ones that came before. About the blood and the death and the madness. About all of the things that war is, and what it is not. What it can never be. How stupid they were, all of them, to think that it would be easy, that it was an adventure, a game. In the back of their minds, none of them never thought it was real, not really real, because didn’t everyone tell them from the moment they were big enough to walk that violence never solved anything? That was such a crock of shit. Violence solved everything. It razed it all to the ground, and it did not discriminate. Countries and civilizations rose and fell on the tip of a sword-or wand. Only those who had never seen war could dismiss the power of violence with such flippancy.
But Draco doesn’t say any of this to her. She knows it already, and such things have no place here. “Yes,” he says instead. “I was thinking about today.”
“It was a beautiful funeral, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he says, because he thinks it’s what she wants to hear. He crushes out his cigarette, though he has only smoked half of it. “Potter would have loved it.”
She laughs. “He would have hated it.”
“I know.”
Sometimes he wonders how they came to be here like this. It started with a sudden, late-night, tension-breaking fuck with her bent over the big oak dining room table at Grimmauld Place. Somewhere, somehow, it had become something more. It had happened while he wasn’t paying attention. She had climbed up inside of him and made a home for herself before he even realized it, and by then it was too late.
She runs her hand along the inside of his thigh and their eyes meet. It is only an instant, but that is all it takes. They know each other that well.
He moves behind her so that she is facing the wall, grasping the headboard. The sheet is between them, and with a growl and a curse, he yanks it out of the way. She bends her head forward and whimpers when he grazes his teeth over the small vertebrae there at the base of her skull. He slides his hand along the inside of her thigh, then puts a finger inside her, and when she gasps and her body contracts, he adds another one and begins moving them in the slow, firm way he knows she likes best.
“Draco, please,” she pants, her fingers griping the headboard tight enough to turn them white. “Please.”
He presses his erection against her clit and with a slow roll of his hips he slides it over the little bundle of nerves without entering her. “Please what?” he murmurs against the shell of her ear. He nibbles lightly on her earlobe and she shudders. “Please what?”
“Oh God, Draco, don’t,” she whimpers. “Don’t do that. Just fuck me, please. Please. Christ. Please.”
He moves his hands to hold her hips in place, then pushes inside her. She moans and bows her back. He clamps his teeth down on her shoulder to keep from crying out. She is unbelievably tight. He holds himself still, deep inside her, as deep as he can go, because he knows that she likes it. She likes to feel him there, filling her up, deep inside her, deep enough that she can almost taste him. But then it’s too much, it’s too hot, too tight, too wet, too everything, and he has to move.
“Hermione, I-I’m sorry, I have to-oh fuck!”
She laughs softly at his exclamation and pushes back on him again, deliberately tightening her inner muscles around him, drawing another cry from him that rides the fine line between pleasure and pain.
He hisses out a breath and holds perfectly still, letting her fuck him, slowly, and with such skill that it makes him gasp, and groan, and cry her name against her sweat slick skin.
“Do you want me to . . . stop?” she asks him over her shoulder, doing just that.
“No,” he breathes, but suddenly her slow torturous movements are no longer enough. His fingers bite into her hips and he thrusts into her hard and deep, so deep that he’s almost afraid that he’s hurt her. “I’m sorry,” he says and forces himself to go more slowly, be more gentle, though he desperately wants to just pound her into the mattress.
“Draco,” she says through hitching breath. “Don’t stop.”
“I’ll hurt you,” he says. “I can’t . . . I shouldn’t-”
She thrusts back against him, impaling herself on him. He cries out and holds her fiercely tight. He knows that she will have bruises from his fingers in the morning, but at the moment he can’t make himself care.
“Do what you want,” she tells him, “not what you should.”
He takes her at her word and pushes her down on the mattress. She props her weight on her elbows, but soon her fingers are digging into the sheets and the edge of the mattress as he thrusts into her hard and fast. Her head is bent forward, pressed against the backs of her hands, and short little screams fall from her lips, but he doesn’t stop. He couldn’t stop now even if he wanted to. He’s so close. So close.
She senses it in the tightening of his stomach muscles and the uneven hitch of his breathing and turns her head as much as she can from her position to watch his face. Their eyes lock for a moment, silver and amber, and he tries to hold it, but he can’t. Pleasure rushes through him like liquid magic and his back arches. He is riding the last wave of his orgasm when she has hers. Her whole body tightens, inside and out, and she screams with her mouth pressed into the sheets.
He slumps forward and rests his head on her smooth back. They are both trembling violently and trying to catch their breath. He brushes a soft kiss against the damp curve of her back and she twitches.
She is so beautiful, this woman of his. He has given up everything for her; betrayed his blood, renounced his heritage, all for her. She who is everything he was once taught to hate, and now . . . now he cannot even look at her without wanting to touch her, hold her, kiss her, fuck her, and tell her in a hundred different ways how much he loves her. Yes, loves. Though he has never said the words, those patent, over-used words that every woman wants to hear, he does love her.
“Draco,” she says.
He reluctantly pulls out of her and lies back on his side. She relaxes beside him and stares up at the ceiling of their room. It is dark with only the single lamp to cast a faint yellow glow on the surface, but he knows that she is seeing the mural of animals and stars painted there. They are sleeping now, as most of the innocent, sane, untroubled world is, but in the morning light, they march across the flat walls, roaring and dancing.
“Draco, I’m pregnant,” she says.
He thinks he sees a dragon lift its head and look back at him. “Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah,” she says. Then, “Are you angry?”
“No.” He doesn’t even have to think about it. “No, I’m not angry.”
She finally turns to look at him. He can smell himself on her, and her on him. The scent of sex is heavy on the air, but it’s a good smell. It makes him smile.
“Are you happy?” she murmurs, running her slim fingers lightly over his belly. It is a caress meant to soothe, not arouse.
He lays the palm of his hand on her flat stomach and wonders. There is life in there, in her. It’s strange to know that life can spring from destruction and chaos, in the midst of death and so much that strives to snatch life away and crush it out. Yet here it is, resting just under the palm of his hand, no larger than the tip of his smallest finger, but every day, growing. It is the very best kind of magic.
“Yes, I’m happy,” he says, partly because it is true, but mostly because it is what she wants to hear, and he will give her anything she wants. “Do you want to get married?”
She looks at him for a long time, not moving, then shakes her head. “Do you?”
He picks up a lock of her tangled, curly hair and twists it around his finger. “If it’s what you want.”
She stills his hand in her hair and lifts it to her mouth. She kisses the backs of his fingers, then sucks and nibbles lightly on the tip of his middle one, watching his eyes go dark and smoky. “Not yet,” she says. “Maybe . . . later. Maybe someday. But not yet.”
He swallows and looks away from her. “You know that I love you,” he whispers.
It is the first time he has ever spoken that word to her, or any woman, and it startles him to hear her laugh. He looks at her, already a little hurt and ready to be angry.
She is smiling, the gold flecks in her eyes shimmering with amusement. She lifts a hand and caresses his cheek. “I know.”
********
Part III
When he is with her there is no dark and there is no light; there are only shades of grey. He has a way of chasing the shadows from her eyes and sheltering her from the heat with a lingering look or a gentle touch.
So many people ask her now, now that it’s all over, ‘How do you live? How do you move on? How do you stay sane?’ They always ask it like it is a redundant question, so she doesn’t feel the need to answer, and just smiles and shakes her head and doesn’t say a word. They don’t want to hear the truth; they want her to assure them that they are talking to someone like them. But she’s not like them, and neither is he, not anymore. And the answer to all of their questions; ‘How do you live? How do you move on? How do you stay sane?’ The answer is very simple; they don’t.
Their one consolation is that they love, and it is a love made all the more precious because it was snatched from the jaws of death. She doesn’t tell them this either. Not only would they not understand, but they would not want to.
There are no two people imaginable who are less alike than they; outwardly Draco is everything light and golden and pale, but inside he holds more secrets than the most ancient and twisted labyrinth. His every word and deed seem to contradict each other, and what he says and what he thinks are often not the same thing at all. She is his opposite in every way; she is dark and wild and joyous. She has her moments of silent contemplation, but if he asks her what she’s thinking, she tells him and feels no need to lie.
They were never meant to be what they are. They defied the expectations of the world and the laws set down by fate to be together. Fate and the world would make them enemies, and for some time, that is what they were. How they changed that is something that even they are not entirely sure about. Can a moment of rough passion unbalance the scales of destiny?
So it would seem, because here they are, five years after that lonely night when he threw her down on the table, and four years after she accepted the role of an outcast to save his life. She killed Harry Potter, the boy hero of the world, to save an expendable double-agent, and even four years after the fact, the world has not forgotten. Her name is in all of the history books, but not for the reasons she might have hoped. She thinks maybe she should have gotten used to it by now, or at least become numb to hearing it wherever she goes, but she hasn’t. And standing here today, what she has given up for him, what she is still being punished for, suddenly hits her and she looks around.
They are getting married today. Four years after he first asked her, they are finally doing it.
She doesn’t know why they decided to do it after so many years together, but she thinks maybe it is because of their daughter, Lily. She is small now, and she looks so much like her daddy, and nothing at all like her mum, and she is so innocent. But Hermione is not, and she hears the whispers of the old ladies at the market place and sees the look in the eye of the witch at the candy shop when Lily laughs with the other children, and she cannot let that hate and hypocrisy touch her baby. Lily doesn’t notice it now, but one day she will, and she will ask her mum why, and Hermione dreads that day more than her own death. If it were only the two of them, herself and Draco, they could ignore it, but it is not only them anymore, and they cannot ask their child to pay for their sins.
But those people are not here today. Today of all days, they can shut them out of their lives and not care what they think about it. Her parents are here, looking excited and a little out of place, and his mother, Narcissa, is there beside them, though the way she is frowning Hermione half suspects her son forced her into it. Fred is also here, holding little laughing Lily in his lap and conjuring glowing butterflies with his wand to tickle her nose. Beside him is Neville, looking fidgety and uncomfortable in his new dress robes. It is a small gathering, but that is the way they wanted it. These people are friends and family, and when they look at her and Draco, the first thing that comes to their minds is not the tattoo on Draco’s arm or Harry Potter laying dead in a field. They will never look at Lily and think the word ‘bastard’.
She loves Draco, more than she’s ever loved anyone in her life. Sometimes she thinks that she might even love him more than she loves her own daughter. But love is not the reason why she’s marrying him. She is doing it to protect her child, to keep her innocent just one more day, and she is doing it because she has run out of reasons to say no.
The old wizard who has been droning on about duty and commitment for the last twenty minutes finally falls silent and looks at Draco. They have written their own vows for this, because this, like so many other things, is theirs alone, and something out of a book that has been said a thousand times by a thousand different people just won’t do.
He takes her hand, looking sullen and a little embarrassed about the whole thing, and says, “I love you, Hermione Granger,” and slips the little filigree ring on her finger, and that is it. The old wizard looks at him strangely and asks him if there is not something more he wishes to say to his bride. He looks her in the eyes and his mouth twitches in an amused smile. “No, that’s it,” he says.
It is so simple and so right. It is without pretension, and she finds herself throwing away the elaborate declaration of love that she had prepared for this moment and read over and over again so that she would not forget it now. She happily casts it aside, because there is no room for such nonsense between them, and there never has been. It would make a mockery of what she feels to start spouting poetic drivel now. It would be dishonest. So instead, she smiles at him as he closes his fingers over hers and says, “I love you, Draco Malfoy,” and that is all. She means it, and he knows, and that is all that matters.
The old wizard conducting the ceremony looks a bit perplexed, but he smiles when he declares them man and wife. They are Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy now, and Draco laughs when Fred claps him on the back and tells him how lucky he is that he’s not walking out of the hall as Mr. Granger. Fred ducks a bat-bogey hex that she shoots at him and it hits a potted tea rose, splattering Narcissa Malfoy’s baby blue robes with soil.
Lily pulls away from Hermione’s mother and runs to Draco and he lifts her up on one shoulder and twirls around so that she shrieks and giggles.
It is a happy time, and they have not had many of those. Not outside of their home, with friends and family. Because there is always the chance that some evil-tempered old wizard will spit at them as they pass, and Fred still has a hot-temper and a wicked fast wand hand, and her parents, being muggles, still do not understand. They would understand it even less if Fred cursed the old goat and sent him home with a watermelon for a head.
Neville comes over, still looking uncomfortable, and says that he’s happy for them. He blushes when Hermione kisses his cheek and sputters when Draco mockingly threatens to put him in a full body-bind if his hands should wander.
Narcissa congratulates her son, though they can both see that her heart is not in it. Draco tells her that she doesn’t have to bother when she leans in to give Hermione a kiss on the cheek, and she looks intensely relieved. Though time and Lily have softened her heart a little, she still looks at Hermione and thinks ‘mudblood’, and considers her to be beneath her son.
Fred slings one arm around Neville’s shoulders and the other around Draco’s as everyone is leaving.
“So where are we off to now?” he asks Draco.
Draco gives Hermione a lingering look, and she grins. “Home,” she says and he nods.
“Well then, let’s go,” Fred says.
“Shove off, Weasley,” Draco says. “You’re not invited.”
Fred pretends to be wounded by this, but he happily agrees to take Lily for the night so that they can be alone. Fred and his wife have become very fond of Lily, and she calls them ‘Uncle Fred’ and ‘Aunt Tilly’, and has since she first learned to talk.
They say goodbye and make arrangements for Hermione’s parents to get home. In a taxi because floo powder makes them nauseous.
Then she and Draco are left standing alone outside the great party hall where they were married minutes before. He puts his arm around her waist and she puts her arm around his and they stand there silently for a few minutes. Finally he says, “You were beautiful.”
She smiles and rests her head against his shoulder. “So were you.”
They walk a little way down the street, her in her white gold-embroidered robes, and he in his black ones. No one hisses at them as they pass or curses at them. They probably don’t recognize them. As they walk, they tease each other, her calling him ‘Mr. Malfoy’ and him calling her ‘Mrs. Malfoy’ like a couple of old people who have been married forever and fallen back on formality.
When they get bored with this, they walk in silence, smelling the sweet smell of candy from Honeydukes, listening to the sound of children chasing each other on their older sibling’s broomsticks, and thinking about nothing in particular. It is a happy time, one of very few that they have enjoyed outside of their own home in too long.
Hermione realizes she is crying when he leans down and kisses the corner of her eyes, licking her tears away. He doesn’t ask her what is wrong-he knows-he just suggests that they leave now. The unspoken implication is there in his eyes and she feels her heart speed up just a little. Five years together and he can still do that to her without a touch or a word. It’s rather humbling.
“Let’s go home,” he murmurs against her ear.
Her blood heats and she trembles just a little. “Alright,” she says. “It is our wedding night, after all.”
“Yes it is,” he says, and holds her tight while they disapparate.
********
Part IV
“Tell me,” Draco whispers against her ear.
Hermione arches her back, her fingers clutch the wrought-iron of the headboard as he moves inside her with slow, deep strokes.
She made the mistake of admitting that she wrote down vows different from his that she did not say at the wedding. She should have known better.
“Tell me, Hermione,” he persists. He watches her face as he thrusts inside her slowly, almost gently, with a rhythm that he knows will drive her mad. “What were you going to say? What didn’t you tell me?”
“Nothing,” she whimpers.
“Don’t be coy with me, luv,” he says. He flicks his tongue lightly into the hollow at the base of her throat. “There’s no one else here. Just us. Tell me.”
“You evil …arrogant-” She cries out as he thrusts once, hard and deep enough to bump her cervix.
“Those don’t sound like love words to me,” he murmurs with a mischievous gleam in his eyes.
She pants and lets go of the headboard to thread her fingers through his hair. She presses her lips to his neck just below his ear and whispers, “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
He lets out his breath in a rush and his fingers dig in to her hips.
She licks the curve of his ear and tightens her legs around his waist. “But that’s not why I love you,” she says.
“Why do you?” he asks, pressing his mouth to her shoulder and kissing it tenderly.
“I love who… you are,” she tells him. “All of who you are.”
He rolls on the bed so that she is astride him, and it’s deeper from this position, sharper, almost too much. She moans and a small cry escapes her as she bows her back and rolls her hips.
“It is love formed by …a thousand touches ...a hundred conversations …a million shared looks,” she says, her breath catching with pleasure as she moves over him.
She throws her head back and lets her eyes fall shut, her palms pressed flat to his chest, her hips swaying slowly over him, taking him with agonizingly slow thrusts, and a level of consummate skill learned through years of doing this very thing. She knows every touch that will make him quiver, every word that will make his breath come faster, every way to move that will bring him to the keen razor’s edge of pleasure and have his blood running hot and fast through his veins.
He knows the same things about her, and he learned them the very same way.
He slides his hands up her thighs to her hips, where he holds on and helps her to move, guiding her just a little.
“What else?” he whispers. “Tell me the rest.”
“Shared perils…” she gasps. “Enemies vanquished.” She opens her eyes and looks straight into his silver ones. “I would never change you …even if I could.”
He smiles and laughs a little breathlessly, thrusting up to meet her. “Not even … a little?”
“No,” she says, and he sees that she means it. “You are an arrogant ass …sometimes …most of the time. If I took that away …it would make you …someone else.”
Draco laughs again. It’s not everyday that your wife calls you an arrogant ass as she fucks your brains out, he thinks with amusement.
“I’m serious,” Hermione says, cupping his face in her hands and leaning down to kiss him.
“I know you are,” he says, his eyes still laughing at her. “That’s why it’s funny.”
“I want you,” she breathes against his lips.
“You have me,” he says.
“Not just for sex,” she says. “For everything.”
He pushes up against her, feeling the first light fluttering contractions that herald her orgasm. “I know,” he tells her, and he does. They spend a good deal of their time together in bed, or fucking wherever they happen to be, but there has always been more between them than just that. If it was just sex, she would have let him die years ago on the battlefield.
She moans and arches her back, her sable curls falling down her back to her waist like a waterfall, and her orgasm takes her softly, with gentle pulsing fingers. She slumps forward onto his chest. “I want to grow old with you,” she whispers against his damp skin.
Draco grits his teeth as the last fluttering spasms of her climax tip him over the edge and her muscles milk him, drinking him in. He smoothes his palms down her back, inhaling the light tang of her sweat and perfume as he tries to catch his breath.
“If we grow old,” he whispers against her ear, “we’ll do it together.”
She sighs and nuzzles his chest, feeling sated and content. “Don’t make me any promises you can’t keep.”
“I make no promises,” he says. “That’s why I said ‘if’.”
Hermione pinches his nipple and he hisses out a breath. “Arrogant ass,” she murmurs, but she’s smiling.
********
Part V
Most people think that they named Lily after Harry’s mother out of some twisted kind of spite. Or they think that Hermione insisted on it as some desperate means of seeking atonement.
Because of Harry Potter, that name, like ‘Harry’, ‘James’, ‘Sirius’, and even ‘Ronald’, should have become very popular among wizarding families and expectant parents. That it did not is a testament of how deeply the wizarding community can hold a grudge, and for how long.
Lily Malfoy is the only child of her generation to bear that name. It has become anathema, just as Hermione herself has; something that is shied away from by ‘decent’ folks.
When they took Lily to the train for her first day at Hogwarts, Hermione clung to her daughter’s hand until she boarded and cried into Draco’s collar when the express pulled out. She was so afraid, so very afraid that something would happen to her child. The sins of the mother vested on the daughter, or something of the like.
She was relieved beyond measure when they received the owl from the headmistress informing them that Lily Malfoy had been placed into Slytherin house. It seems that Lily did not just inherit her father’s grey eyes and flaxen hair, but his temperament as well. Slytherin would protect her. In Slytherin, Lily would learn how to defend herself and not worry about morality or right and wrong-things that can get her killed if she hesitates because of them. In Slytherin, Lily would be safe.
Also, in Slytherin more than any other house, Lily was looked upon with a little awe as the daughter of one of that house’s most infamous members.
What the world does not know is that it was Draco and not Hermione that suggested the name ‘Lily’ when their daughter was born. But then, what the world does not know about things in general, and the Malfoy’s in particular, could fill an entire ocean with tears.
Sometimes Hermione cries over the things that she has done. Sometimes, when it is too much, the tiniest thing can trigger an outburst. She is walking down the street, carrying books, or robes, or potions ingredients, or just groceries, home from the village, and two spinsterish women recognize her and put their heads together, whispering and pointing. She is sitting in the library with scrolls of parchment spread out before her, doing research on something that has piqued her interest, and the librarian comes over and asks her to leave because she is disturbing the other patrons. She opens the Daily Prophet to see her own face smiling back at her with another article speculating about her and Draco’s sex life. These articles always sound nasty and superior, like they spend their entire time in bed doing scandalous things to each other and laughing about Harry Potter. Sometimes these things make her cry, sometimes they make her laugh, and sometimes she pretends that she doesn’t care just long enough to get home and start a fight with Draco.
She has heard every insult that the human brain can possibly conceive of; Jezebel, Harlot, Traitor, Whore-one kindly-looking little old man with round gold-rimmed spectacles even called her The Whore of Babylon once. It has not escaped her notice that most of these derisive names and taunts concern themselves primarily with how many people she is fucking and how often. Usually they just strike her as tiresome and entirely unoriginal, but every once in a while, it matters. She hates that it matters. It shouldn’t matter. She knows that she had no choice. She knows better than any of them what really happened on that field and why. And she knows that the only man to ever touch her in that way is her husband. There has been no other, and she cannot even imagine there ever being another. He is her heart and soul.
But sometimes she resents him, just a little.
She resents his sarcasm. She resents that Lily has his face, his hair, his eyes, and his laugh. She resents it when she is tired and he makes her tea, even though it is always perfect. She resents it when she kisses him and he leaves the flavor of smoke and whisky on her tongue. She resents it when she cries, and he holds her like he would protect her from the very air around them if she requested it. She resents it when she tries to pick a fight, and he just won’t let her. She resents it when he does let her, and he wins. She resents it even more when he lets her win.
All of these things are reasons to hate him, but they are also the same things that she loves so fiercely about him.
They spend their holidays at the Manor, because it is bigger, and the Weasley’s do not have house elves. Fred had one to run his shop in Hogsmead, but the poor creature banged its head too hard against the wall one day to punish itself for stepping on a misplaced pygmy puff and he hasn’t had the heart to replace it. Fred told them that Tilly cried when the house elf died, and Draco laughed so hard that he had to excuse himself.
The Weasley’s do not have children, which is odd, coming from such a large family. They love Lily, and spoil her terribly, but they have none of their own. Hermione believes that they do not want children because Fred and Tilly both come from families with loads of siblings and they know just how hectic it can be. Draco thinks Tilly is barren.
Because Fred and the Malfoy’s are such good friends, despite the war and Harry Potter, Fred is not that close with Ron and Ginny anymore. Ron tells him he is disloyal. Fred says loyalty is overrated.
The things they’ve learned from the war are not nice things, but they are true, and war is rarely ever nice, even in the aftermath. Probably especially in the aftermath.
Lily comes home to the Manor for Christmas and summer, but she’s twelve now, and she has friends of her own despite her notorious parentage, so it feels more and more like she is visiting. Every time Hermione and Draco see her, she seems to have changed a little. She is beautiful-with Draco as her father, it was almost inevitable that she would be-but, unlike the young Draco Malfoy, she seems blissfully unaware of it.
On her twelfth birthday, she received an owl from a famous Argentinean wizard proposing marriage. Draco ripped it to pieces and broke a tea set before Hermione could calm him down enough to content himself with sending the perverted man a Howler. His first impulse had been to Apparate there immediately and start tossing Unforgivable Curses like firecrackers-a course of action she secretly supported-but Hermione had reminded him how much the Ministry would have loved that. They are always waiting for either of them to do something so they can punish them. They do their waiting patiently, in a tolerant and infuriating manner that suggests they consider it to be inevitable.
Lily thought the whole betrothal thing was a lark and did not give it much thought. She put down Draco’s temper tantrum to something her mother had said and forgot about it.
Just as well. Lily has a wicked sense of humor; she very well may have accepted the proposal just so she could see what would happen.
If she had known that it was serious, she would have sent the man a Howler of her own, and likely filled the envelope with Instant Darkness Powder in the hopes that when the Howler started screaming, he would get sprayed in the eyes with the stuff and be struck blind. There is more than one reason why Lily Malfoy is a Slytherin.
For two people completely and hopelessly in love with each other, Hermione and Draco fight a lot, and quite violently. These arguments often end with one or both of them being hexed, and at least one of them in tears. Hermione is usually the one in tears, but Draco is usually the one hexed.
Their fights are so loud and so passionate that it has become something of a joke among their friends and acquaintances. Everyone assumes that they have really excellent make-up sex.
For Hermione and Draco, it is not a joke. They rarely find their arguments funny even after the fact, even if they do have really brilliant make-up sex.
Everything is not bliss between them. Far from it. They’ve had some whoppers, and come close so many times to just ending it and walking away. There have been times when the words that would end it are on the tip of their tongues, ready to fall, when they have reached the point where to say or do one more thing would be too much, but they have always stopped. One or both of them realize it in time and refuse to let it go further.
It bothers her more; the negative attention. It might not disturb her so much if the world would just let it alone, but they won’t, or can’t, and so every time she turns around, she is confronted with another flyer, or witty little saying, or a book that claims to be the definitive work on a subject the author knows almost nothing about.
It bothers her more, but he sees it, and that bothers him. He knows that sometimes, in the lowest depths of her despair, she hates him a little. It is at these times that the corpse of Harry Potter lays between them like a monolith, like the statue of some long-dead pagan god, and he can almost see the regret that he believes she carries with her shining in her eyes. Though he will never tell her, he waits for the time when he will look at her and finally see that what she has had to endure to be with him has finally broken her. That the cost has outweighed the value of the prize, and love is no longer enough.
Not being a particularly religious man, he prays to whatever gods are listening, whatever spirits know his name, that that day will never come.
/Fin/
Hope you like it anyway. Oh, and I apologize in advance to anyone that has me on thier flist that also has the dramoine community on thier flist. You're seeing double, I know, sorry.
Title: Anathema
Pairing: D/Hr
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 9,074
Summary: In the heat of battle, Hermione is faced with a choice and makes an irreversible decision. What happens when your soul mate is not who you thought he would be?
Anathema
Part I
Hermione falls to her knees in the grass and watches Harry slump to the grass twenty feet away, almost mirroring her for an instant, before he collapses to the ground. One lens of his glasses is shattered, but she can see that the eyes just beyond the glass are wide open and staring. Green as summer grass, green as the sea before a storm, green as peridots laid out on velvet, as deep and dark and green as all of the deadliest curses. Those eyes are open, staring, blank; empty of all the things that gave them their fire.
I did that, she marvels.
She looks down at her hands, at the wand clutched in the right one, at the cuts and bruises on the palm of the left one. There is a mixture of dirt, grit, and blood under her nails.
All around her, the battle continues on. She doesn’t move, and as long as she does not notice anyone or anything around her, no one and nothing notices her.
Someone screams Harry! and Hermione thinks it might be Ginny. There are voices raised in rage and colored curses flying everywhere, the smell of blood, metallic and sharp, and just under that, the smell of earth.
Hermione looks back down at her hands and watches her fingers like they don’t belong to her as she closes them into tight fists, then slowly, almost like a flower blooming in the sun, opens them again, splaying them out. There is that same mixture of blood and grime in the creases between her fingers.
A body, cloaked in black, wearing a silver mask falls to the ground beside her. She doesn’t flinch or move away from it, merely regards it as one might a strange bird that had just fallen from the sky, or an oddly shaped rock she had come upon while walking on the beach. That it is the body of a Death Eater does not even enter into her thoughts. She is not looking at it like that because it was once a Death Eater, she is looking at it like that because it was once a man.
When the rain starts to fall, it takes her a while to realize that the world has suddenly gone silent. It is an abrupt thing, more startling in its strangeness and finality than the previous screams of anger.
Then that silence is broken by more screams, and it does not surprise her at all that they are screams of anguish, not anger and terror.
“How could you?!” a woman shouts, and that gets her attention, because there is the rage again. Rage coating pain and despair.
“Ginny?” Hermione murmurs. She looks up and meets the young woman’s tear filled, angry eyes over the prone and lifeless body of Harry Potter.
“Hermione,” someone says, and she feels a hand on her arm, pulling her up. “Hermione? Are you all right?”
“Ron?”
Ron shakes her. “Hermione, what happened?”
“I . . . I-“
“She killed him,” Ginny says fiercely. “I saw her.”
Hermione looks at her, sees her grief, her anger, her tears. Her tears have left trails in the dirt and dust from the battle. She sees all of this, and feels nothing.
Ron shakes her again, roughly, his fingers biting into her arms, hurting her. “Is that true?” he demands. “God, it can’t be-is that what happened? Hermione, answer me, damn you!”
“I think-yes,” she says, trying to force herself to focus. Distantly, she knows that she is experiencing severe shock, but she can’t seem to make anything matter. Not even with Ron gripping her like he is seconds away from hitting her, not with Ginny crying out her grief into the cold dust of the battlefield.
“Ron, stop it, you’re hurting her,” someone says. It isn’t Ginny. It sounds like Fred, or maybe George. She can never tell.
“Why, Hermione?!”
“Why?” she repeats, tasting the word like she’s never heard it before.
“Yes, for fuck’s sake, why?!”
“Ron, let her go,” Fred/George says. “Let go.”
And suddenly he does, and she almost slumps back to the ground, but catches herself on the sleeve of Fred/George’s shirt. He reaches out and steadies her, then turns back to Ron.
“Calm down, mate,” Fred/George tells Ron. “Just calm down.”
“Why, Hermione?” Ron asks again, a note of desperation in his voice. “Just tell me why?”
“She did it for him,” Ginny snarls.
Hermione looks up and sees that Ginny is pointing a finger angrily at someone. A man who is getting slowly to his feet. He brushes dirt off of the sleeve of his robe, then starts walking toward her, and she watches because she can’t help it. It has always been that way.
“Malfoy?!” Ron yells, almost in her face again despite Fred/George’s attempts to restrain him. “You killed Harry for Malfoy? Why?”
“To save him,” Ginny says. She has pulled Harry’s body so that his shoulders are resting in her lap. “She did it to save him. Harry was going to kill him.”
Silence at that, then another voice, she thinks it’s Neville, says, “Why would Harry want to kill Malfoy?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Ron says.
“Ron, Malfoy’s on our side,” Fred/George reminds him.
Hermione is barely listening to them. She is watching Draco cross the field. He ignores the conversation around them as though he does not even realize that he and his loyalties are the topic under discussion. He locks eyes with her and has almost reached her when Ron pulls away from Fred/George and raises his hand to strike her.
She does not flinch from him as his hand descends, merely looks at him expectantly. The blow does not fall.
In an instant Draco is there between them. Moving with a catlike agility that his previous calm grace had not even hinted at, he seizes Ron’s hand and presses the tip of his suddenly glowing wand to his throat. “Try it Weasley,” he hisses, “and I’ll hex you so fast your eyes will cross.”
Hermione’s curly hair has fallen across her face and she stares through it, looking between the two men with wide amber eyes. Ron swallows and she watches in morbid fascination the way his throat works against the glowing tip of Draco’s wand. Suddenly, Draco shoves him away, and he would have fallen if Fred/George hadn’t been there to catch him.
“You would trade Harry for this . . . this, bastard?!” Ron shouts at her, jerking away from his brother.
“Ron,” Neville says calmly. “Ron, I think he was hit with the Imperious Curse.”
“I don’t care if he was,” Ron says. “I’d still trade a hundred of Malfoy for one of him. Why couldn’t you just-?”
“What Weasley?” Draco murmures dangerously. “Why couldn’t she just let him kill me, is that what you were going to ask? Not very fucking Gryffndor of you to be thinking such things, is it?”
“Fuck off, Malfoy.”
“So sorry to disappoint you, Weasley, but you’re not my type,” Draco says with a cold sneer.
Ron lunges at him then, his wand forgotten, as it seems to sometimes be when his temper gets the best of him. Fred/George grabs him around the waist and hauls him back with a curse.
“Ron, this is really not the time or place for this-”
“She killed Harry!” Ron screams, practically in his brother’s face. “For Malfoy! She killed Harry for Malfoy! I just want to know why!”
Silence. Everyone seems to be looking at her, for an answer, for a reason, for something, anything. What was the question?
Hermione looks at Draco, who is the only one not watching her for an answer. She lifts a trembling hand and touches the side of his face; lets her fingers linger there until the corner of his mouth curves up just a little.
Ron backs away in horror, his eyes wide with sudden comprehension. He bends forward and puts his hands on his knees and his head down. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“How could you?” Ginny says again, but this time it is almost a whisper.
It was really very easy. Much easier than she could have ever imagined, and she almost tells Ginny that, then doesn’t.
How could she not? How could she not, when the marks of his fingers were still set in her skin, when she has only to close her eyes and cast her mind back a few hours to feel the hands that made them moving along her body, holding her down, guiding her. When she has only to look at him to recall the taste of him, the feel of him so full, moving within her; soft words whispered against her mouth between kisses, and touches that burn and strive in vain not to linger.
She knows the soft satin of his skin, the sleekness of the muscles beneath it, the sound of his voice in the darkness; murmured endearments and encouragement, a hiss somewhere between pleasure and pain as she sinks her teeth into his shoulder, her body tightening around him in every way. She knows the taste of his sweat and the sound of his laughter. She knows that he has a mole on the inside of his upper right thigh, and that if she puts her mouth there just so, he will gasp her name in the sweetest way. She knows that he has a scar along the back of his left shoulder from a fall he took off a broom when he was six. She knows that until very recently, it was the only unnatural blemish on his lovely pale body. She knows that he is ticklish along his ribcage and at the backs of his knees, and she knows that he likes her to tickle him anyway, because tickling often leads to something else. She knows that the moment before orgasm overtakes him, his eyes flutter, then search out hers and try to hold her gaze. She knows that it never works; that his back arches and his eyes close, always, in spite of his every effort to control it. She knows that he has memorized every dark spell that she has ever heard of, and some that she has not, because he firmly believes that it is nothing but sheer ignorance not to know ones enemy and their weapons. She knows that there is a piece of him inside her, and that every day it is slowly, miraculously growing.
Knowing all of this, how could she be expected to stand back and watch him die if she could save him?
Hermione turns to Draco and he reaches out and pulls her against his side. He holds his wand lightly in one hand as he leads her away from the field, ready to use it if anyone tries to stop them. Nobody does.
The war was over now. Somewhere on this field of carnage lay the body of Tom Riddle, and with him, the war has ended.
But victory is bitter sweet, marred by the many deaths of the brightest and the most valiant of them all. Tomorrow the world would celebrate the end of a long reign of terror, but that celebration would be overshadowed by the knowledge that their shining hero lay dead in his grave, the only payment for his bravery a cold coffin and a dark hole in the ground.
It occurs to Hermione to wonder who had delivered the killing spell to the Dark Lord. Not Harry. Harry had been fighting him when he was hit by the Imperious Curse. Perhaps Neville? That seemed fitting, in a way, and she hoped that was how it had happened. And wouldn’t that be ironic?
“Are you cold?” Draco asks her.
“A little,” she says. She burrows in deeper against his side when he wraps his cloak around her shoulders. He smells of earth and magic, but just under that there is a sweet tangy smell that is all his own, and it makes her think of apples just after the rain.
She knows everything about his skin and his flesh, and she is probably the only person who knows even half of what is underneath it.
The world would condemn her for this knowledge if they knew what it had cost for her to keep it. No matter what curses and spells he had been under at the time, the world would remember that she had brought down their Chosen One to save the life of a man who had been branded with the Dark Mark. They could not arrest her for it because, after all, this was war, and war was about death-when it got right down to it, that was all that it was about-but they could ostracize her, and they probably would.
She would not be forgiven.
“Are you ready?” Draco says.
She looks at him strangely for a moment, then understands what he is asking and says, “Yes.”
“Hold onto me,” he says.
“Yes,” she says again and squeezes him tight.
They disapparate, leaving the smell and the taste and the gore of battle behind them. They will have more battles to fight tomorrow, of a different kind, but that is tomorrow, and it can wait.
********
Part II
Draco takes another drag on his cigarette, then reaches across the bed to the nightstand and crushes it out in the ashtray. It is a muggle habit, one he knows even the muggles look down on, but that hasn’t done anything to keep him from lighting one after another for over an hour.
The room smells like sex, smoke, and Hermione’s expensive perfume. It is a good smell.
On the bed, Hermione stirs and turns over in her sleep. She is dreaming, he can see her eyes darting back and forth beneath her lids, her long dark eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks like the fans of pixy dancers. She is so peaceful like that, with her curly brown hair pooled on the white sheets, her body relaxed as it so seldom is when she is awake, her lips slightly parted to let in the light, even breath of slumber.
There are tear tracks on her face, and very lightly, he brushes them with his fingertips.
Today was Potter’s funeral. It was a disgustingly grand affair; achingly soft music, mourners from every corner of the globe, and so many flowers that their perfume made it nearly impossible to breathe.
Draco had held Hermione while she cried. He had tried to shield her from the covert glances and blatant stares of the other wizards and witches present. The whole time he was thinking how disgusted Potter would have been by the entire affair. The sheer number of flowers that had been killed to line his magnificent coffin would have made him cringe.
Hermione sighs and moves her face closer to his fingers. He smiles down at her and brushes a twisted lock of hair behind her ear.
On the nightstand beside the ashtray, there is a newspaper. Hermione’s pretty face looks out of a black and white photograph on the front beneath the headline BOY-WHO-LIVED SLAYED BY TRUSTED FRIEND! As he watches, the picture Hermione looks at him and smiles. He wonders what Potter would have thought of the headline. He was almost twenty-six years old, but right up until he died he was the BOY-WHO-LIVED. He never got to become the Man-Who-Lived.
Draco shakes his head with a humorless cough of laughter. Was he really sitting there, naked in the dark with his sleeping lover, smoking cigarettes and mourning Potter, of all people? Yes, it would seem that he is.
And really, who had more right to it than he did? Not the hundreds upon hundreds of fools that had flocked to stare at Potter’s dead face and marvel at the fall of a hero. What the fuck did they know? Towards the end, Potter had finally gotten a few things straight in his head. He would have told them that there was nothing heroic about it, that there is nothing less heroic than dying for a hopeless cause. If he had been able to, he would have told them, but they wouldn’t have listened.
He’d had to kill a few people and watch a few of his friends die before he figured it out himself, but knowing it hadn’t changed anything. People had kept right on fucking dying, and Potter, noble, sainted, fucking Potter had kept fighting the good fight.
And so they had won.
George Weasley had died in his twin’s arms as they were getting on a train in Paris, following a lead for the Order. Tonks had been Avada Kedavra’d on the doorstep of her own home and when he found her, Lupin had gone crazy; what the werewolves called ‘feral’, like a wild animal.
And then, of course, there was Harry Potter. But Draco didn’t see how anyone could have actually expected him to live. They had practically thrown him at the Death Eaters. He’d been offered magic and wonder, the price of which . . . he was expected to save the world.
Was it any wonder that he was dead?
Everyone was walking around smiling and joyful. We’ve won! They shout. And so they have. But at what cost?
“Draco?” Hermione whispers.
He looks down at her and sees that she is awake. The light from the bedside lamp casts little gold sparks in her dark eyes.
He cups her cheek in one hand and bends forward to kiss her, lightly at first, then deeper, using tongue and teeth until he feels her shiver against him.
“Are you alright?” she asks. He is being gentle and sweet, and she loves it when he is gentle and sweet, but he usually isn’t. Not unless he’s been drinking, or unless there’s something wrong.
“I’m fine,” he says, sitting back. He takes another cigarette from the pack on the nightstand and lights it. “I’m just feeling maudlin, I guess.”
She scoots up and rests her head against his thigh. “About today?”
And all the ones that came before. About the blood and the death and the madness. About all of the things that war is, and what it is not. What it can never be. How stupid they were, all of them, to think that it would be easy, that it was an adventure, a game. In the back of their minds, none of them never thought it was real, not really real, because didn’t everyone tell them from the moment they were big enough to walk that violence never solved anything? That was such a crock of shit. Violence solved everything. It razed it all to the ground, and it did not discriminate. Countries and civilizations rose and fell on the tip of a sword-or wand. Only those who had never seen war could dismiss the power of violence with such flippancy.
But Draco doesn’t say any of this to her. She knows it already, and such things have no place here. “Yes,” he says instead. “I was thinking about today.”
“It was a beautiful funeral, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he says, because he thinks it’s what she wants to hear. He crushes out his cigarette, though he has only smoked half of it. “Potter would have loved it.”
She laughs. “He would have hated it.”
“I know.”
Sometimes he wonders how they came to be here like this. It started with a sudden, late-night, tension-breaking fuck with her bent over the big oak dining room table at Grimmauld Place. Somewhere, somehow, it had become something more. It had happened while he wasn’t paying attention. She had climbed up inside of him and made a home for herself before he even realized it, and by then it was too late.
She runs her hand along the inside of his thigh and their eyes meet. It is only an instant, but that is all it takes. They know each other that well.
He moves behind her so that she is facing the wall, grasping the headboard. The sheet is between them, and with a growl and a curse, he yanks it out of the way. She bends her head forward and whimpers when he grazes his teeth over the small vertebrae there at the base of her skull. He slides his hand along the inside of her thigh, then puts a finger inside her, and when she gasps and her body contracts, he adds another one and begins moving them in the slow, firm way he knows she likes best.
“Draco, please,” she pants, her fingers griping the headboard tight enough to turn them white. “Please.”
He presses his erection against her clit and with a slow roll of his hips he slides it over the little bundle of nerves without entering her. “Please what?” he murmurs against the shell of her ear. He nibbles lightly on her earlobe and she shudders. “Please what?”
“Oh God, Draco, don’t,” she whimpers. “Don’t do that. Just fuck me, please. Please. Christ. Please.”
He moves his hands to hold her hips in place, then pushes inside her. She moans and bows her back. He clamps his teeth down on her shoulder to keep from crying out. She is unbelievably tight. He holds himself still, deep inside her, as deep as he can go, because he knows that she likes it. She likes to feel him there, filling her up, deep inside her, deep enough that she can almost taste him. But then it’s too much, it’s too hot, too tight, too wet, too everything, and he has to move.
“Hermione, I-I’m sorry, I have to-oh fuck!”
She laughs softly at his exclamation and pushes back on him again, deliberately tightening her inner muscles around him, drawing another cry from him that rides the fine line between pleasure and pain.
He hisses out a breath and holds perfectly still, letting her fuck him, slowly, and with such skill that it makes him gasp, and groan, and cry her name against her sweat slick skin.
“Do you want me to . . . stop?” she asks him over her shoulder, doing just that.
“No,” he breathes, but suddenly her slow torturous movements are no longer enough. His fingers bite into her hips and he thrusts into her hard and deep, so deep that he’s almost afraid that he’s hurt her. “I’m sorry,” he says and forces himself to go more slowly, be more gentle, though he desperately wants to just pound her into the mattress.
“Draco,” she says through hitching breath. “Don’t stop.”
“I’ll hurt you,” he says. “I can’t . . . I shouldn’t-”
She thrusts back against him, impaling herself on him. He cries out and holds her fiercely tight. He knows that she will have bruises from his fingers in the morning, but at the moment he can’t make himself care.
“Do what you want,” she tells him, “not what you should.”
He takes her at her word and pushes her down on the mattress. She props her weight on her elbows, but soon her fingers are digging into the sheets and the edge of the mattress as he thrusts into her hard and fast. Her head is bent forward, pressed against the backs of her hands, and short little screams fall from her lips, but he doesn’t stop. He couldn’t stop now even if he wanted to. He’s so close. So close.
She senses it in the tightening of his stomach muscles and the uneven hitch of his breathing and turns her head as much as she can from her position to watch his face. Their eyes lock for a moment, silver and amber, and he tries to hold it, but he can’t. Pleasure rushes through him like liquid magic and his back arches. He is riding the last wave of his orgasm when she has hers. Her whole body tightens, inside and out, and she screams with her mouth pressed into the sheets.
He slumps forward and rests his head on her smooth back. They are both trembling violently and trying to catch their breath. He brushes a soft kiss against the damp curve of her back and she twitches.
She is so beautiful, this woman of his. He has given up everything for her; betrayed his blood, renounced his heritage, all for her. She who is everything he was once taught to hate, and now . . . now he cannot even look at her without wanting to touch her, hold her, kiss her, fuck her, and tell her in a hundred different ways how much he loves her. Yes, loves. Though he has never said the words, those patent, over-used words that every woman wants to hear, he does love her.
“Draco,” she says.
He reluctantly pulls out of her and lies back on his side. She relaxes beside him and stares up at the ceiling of their room. It is dark with only the single lamp to cast a faint yellow glow on the surface, but he knows that she is seeing the mural of animals and stars painted there. They are sleeping now, as most of the innocent, sane, untroubled world is, but in the morning light, they march across the flat walls, roaring and dancing.
“Draco, I’m pregnant,” she says.
He thinks he sees a dragon lift its head and look back at him. “Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah,” she says. Then, “Are you angry?”
“No.” He doesn’t even have to think about it. “No, I’m not angry.”
She finally turns to look at him. He can smell himself on her, and her on him. The scent of sex is heavy on the air, but it’s a good smell. It makes him smile.
“Are you happy?” she murmurs, running her slim fingers lightly over his belly. It is a caress meant to soothe, not arouse.
He lays the palm of his hand on her flat stomach and wonders. There is life in there, in her. It’s strange to know that life can spring from destruction and chaos, in the midst of death and so much that strives to snatch life away and crush it out. Yet here it is, resting just under the palm of his hand, no larger than the tip of his smallest finger, but every day, growing. It is the very best kind of magic.
“Yes, I’m happy,” he says, partly because it is true, but mostly because it is what she wants to hear, and he will give her anything she wants. “Do you want to get married?”
She looks at him for a long time, not moving, then shakes her head. “Do you?”
He picks up a lock of her tangled, curly hair and twists it around his finger. “If it’s what you want.”
She stills his hand in her hair and lifts it to her mouth. She kisses the backs of his fingers, then sucks and nibbles lightly on the tip of his middle one, watching his eyes go dark and smoky. “Not yet,” she says. “Maybe . . . later. Maybe someday. But not yet.”
He swallows and looks away from her. “You know that I love you,” he whispers.
It is the first time he has ever spoken that word to her, or any woman, and it startles him to hear her laugh. He looks at her, already a little hurt and ready to be angry.
She is smiling, the gold flecks in her eyes shimmering with amusement. She lifts a hand and caresses his cheek. “I know.”
********
Part III
When he is with her there is no dark and there is no light; there are only shades of grey. He has a way of chasing the shadows from her eyes and sheltering her from the heat with a lingering look or a gentle touch.
So many people ask her now, now that it’s all over, ‘How do you live? How do you move on? How do you stay sane?’ They always ask it like it is a redundant question, so she doesn’t feel the need to answer, and just smiles and shakes her head and doesn’t say a word. They don’t want to hear the truth; they want her to assure them that they are talking to someone like them. But she’s not like them, and neither is he, not anymore. And the answer to all of their questions; ‘How do you live? How do you move on? How do you stay sane?’ The answer is very simple; they don’t.
Their one consolation is that they love, and it is a love made all the more precious because it was snatched from the jaws of death. She doesn’t tell them this either. Not only would they not understand, but they would not want to.
There are no two people imaginable who are less alike than they; outwardly Draco is everything light and golden and pale, but inside he holds more secrets than the most ancient and twisted labyrinth. His every word and deed seem to contradict each other, and what he says and what he thinks are often not the same thing at all. She is his opposite in every way; she is dark and wild and joyous. She has her moments of silent contemplation, but if he asks her what she’s thinking, she tells him and feels no need to lie.
They were never meant to be what they are. They defied the expectations of the world and the laws set down by fate to be together. Fate and the world would make them enemies, and for some time, that is what they were. How they changed that is something that even they are not entirely sure about. Can a moment of rough passion unbalance the scales of destiny?
So it would seem, because here they are, five years after that lonely night when he threw her down on the table, and four years after she accepted the role of an outcast to save his life. She killed Harry Potter, the boy hero of the world, to save an expendable double-agent, and even four years after the fact, the world has not forgotten. Her name is in all of the history books, but not for the reasons she might have hoped. She thinks maybe she should have gotten used to it by now, or at least become numb to hearing it wherever she goes, but she hasn’t. And standing here today, what she has given up for him, what she is still being punished for, suddenly hits her and she looks around.
They are getting married today. Four years after he first asked her, they are finally doing it.
She doesn’t know why they decided to do it after so many years together, but she thinks maybe it is because of their daughter, Lily. She is small now, and she looks so much like her daddy, and nothing at all like her mum, and she is so innocent. But Hermione is not, and she hears the whispers of the old ladies at the market place and sees the look in the eye of the witch at the candy shop when Lily laughs with the other children, and she cannot let that hate and hypocrisy touch her baby. Lily doesn’t notice it now, but one day she will, and she will ask her mum why, and Hermione dreads that day more than her own death. If it were only the two of them, herself and Draco, they could ignore it, but it is not only them anymore, and they cannot ask their child to pay for their sins.
But those people are not here today. Today of all days, they can shut them out of their lives and not care what they think about it. Her parents are here, looking excited and a little out of place, and his mother, Narcissa, is there beside them, though the way she is frowning Hermione half suspects her son forced her into it. Fred is also here, holding little laughing Lily in his lap and conjuring glowing butterflies with his wand to tickle her nose. Beside him is Neville, looking fidgety and uncomfortable in his new dress robes. It is a small gathering, but that is the way they wanted it. These people are friends and family, and when they look at her and Draco, the first thing that comes to their minds is not the tattoo on Draco’s arm or Harry Potter laying dead in a field. They will never look at Lily and think the word ‘bastard’.
She loves Draco, more than she’s ever loved anyone in her life. Sometimes she thinks that she might even love him more than she loves her own daughter. But love is not the reason why she’s marrying him. She is doing it to protect her child, to keep her innocent just one more day, and she is doing it because she has run out of reasons to say no.
The old wizard who has been droning on about duty and commitment for the last twenty minutes finally falls silent and looks at Draco. They have written their own vows for this, because this, like so many other things, is theirs alone, and something out of a book that has been said a thousand times by a thousand different people just won’t do.
He takes her hand, looking sullen and a little embarrassed about the whole thing, and says, “I love you, Hermione Granger,” and slips the little filigree ring on her finger, and that is it. The old wizard looks at him strangely and asks him if there is not something more he wishes to say to his bride. He looks her in the eyes and his mouth twitches in an amused smile. “No, that’s it,” he says.
It is so simple and so right. It is without pretension, and she finds herself throwing away the elaborate declaration of love that she had prepared for this moment and read over and over again so that she would not forget it now. She happily casts it aside, because there is no room for such nonsense between them, and there never has been. It would make a mockery of what she feels to start spouting poetic drivel now. It would be dishonest. So instead, she smiles at him as he closes his fingers over hers and says, “I love you, Draco Malfoy,” and that is all. She means it, and he knows, and that is all that matters.
The old wizard conducting the ceremony looks a bit perplexed, but he smiles when he declares them man and wife. They are Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy now, and Draco laughs when Fred claps him on the back and tells him how lucky he is that he’s not walking out of the hall as Mr. Granger. Fred ducks a bat-bogey hex that she shoots at him and it hits a potted tea rose, splattering Narcissa Malfoy’s baby blue robes with soil.
Lily pulls away from Hermione’s mother and runs to Draco and he lifts her up on one shoulder and twirls around so that she shrieks and giggles.
It is a happy time, and they have not had many of those. Not outside of their home, with friends and family. Because there is always the chance that some evil-tempered old wizard will spit at them as they pass, and Fred still has a hot-temper and a wicked fast wand hand, and her parents, being muggles, still do not understand. They would understand it even less if Fred cursed the old goat and sent him home with a watermelon for a head.
Neville comes over, still looking uncomfortable, and says that he’s happy for them. He blushes when Hermione kisses his cheek and sputters when Draco mockingly threatens to put him in a full body-bind if his hands should wander.
Narcissa congratulates her son, though they can both see that her heart is not in it. Draco tells her that she doesn’t have to bother when she leans in to give Hermione a kiss on the cheek, and she looks intensely relieved. Though time and Lily have softened her heart a little, she still looks at Hermione and thinks ‘mudblood’, and considers her to be beneath her son.
Fred slings one arm around Neville’s shoulders and the other around Draco’s as everyone is leaving.
“So where are we off to now?” he asks Draco.
Draco gives Hermione a lingering look, and she grins. “Home,” she says and he nods.
“Well then, let’s go,” Fred says.
“Shove off, Weasley,” Draco says. “You’re not invited.”
Fred pretends to be wounded by this, but he happily agrees to take Lily for the night so that they can be alone. Fred and his wife have become very fond of Lily, and she calls them ‘Uncle Fred’ and ‘Aunt Tilly’, and has since she first learned to talk.
They say goodbye and make arrangements for Hermione’s parents to get home. In a taxi because floo powder makes them nauseous.
Then she and Draco are left standing alone outside the great party hall where they were married minutes before. He puts his arm around her waist and she puts her arm around his and they stand there silently for a few minutes. Finally he says, “You were beautiful.”
She smiles and rests her head against his shoulder. “So were you.”
They walk a little way down the street, her in her white gold-embroidered robes, and he in his black ones. No one hisses at them as they pass or curses at them. They probably don’t recognize them. As they walk, they tease each other, her calling him ‘Mr. Malfoy’ and him calling her ‘Mrs. Malfoy’ like a couple of old people who have been married forever and fallen back on formality.
When they get bored with this, they walk in silence, smelling the sweet smell of candy from Honeydukes, listening to the sound of children chasing each other on their older sibling’s broomsticks, and thinking about nothing in particular. It is a happy time, one of very few that they have enjoyed outside of their own home in too long.
Hermione realizes she is crying when he leans down and kisses the corner of her eyes, licking her tears away. He doesn’t ask her what is wrong-he knows-he just suggests that they leave now. The unspoken implication is there in his eyes and she feels her heart speed up just a little. Five years together and he can still do that to her without a touch or a word. It’s rather humbling.
“Let’s go home,” he murmurs against her ear.
Her blood heats and she trembles just a little. “Alright,” she says. “It is our wedding night, after all.”
“Yes it is,” he says, and holds her tight while they disapparate.
********
Part IV
“Tell me,” Draco whispers against her ear.
Hermione arches her back, her fingers clutch the wrought-iron of the headboard as he moves inside her with slow, deep strokes.
She made the mistake of admitting that she wrote down vows different from his that she did not say at the wedding. She should have known better.
“Tell me, Hermione,” he persists. He watches her face as he thrusts inside her slowly, almost gently, with a rhythm that he knows will drive her mad. “What were you going to say? What didn’t you tell me?”
“Nothing,” she whimpers.
“Don’t be coy with me, luv,” he says. He flicks his tongue lightly into the hollow at the base of her throat. “There’s no one else here. Just us. Tell me.”
“You evil …arrogant-” She cries out as he thrusts once, hard and deep enough to bump her cervix.
“Those don’t sound like love words to me,” he murmurs with a mischievous gleam in his eyes.
She pants and lets go of the headboard to thread her fingers through his hair. She presses her lips to his neck just below his ear and whispers, “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
He lets out his breath in a rush and his fingers dig in to her hips.
She licks the curve of his ear and tightens her legs around his waist. “But that’s not why I love you,” she says.
“Why do you?” he asks, pressing his mouth to her shoulder and kissing it tenderly.
“I love who… you are,” she tells him. “All of who you are.”
He rolls on the bed so that she is astride him, and it’s deeper from this position, sharper, almost too much. She moans and a small cry escapes her as she bows her back and rolls her hips.
“It is love formed by …a thousand touches ...a hundred conversations …a million shared looks,” she says, her breath catching with pleasure as she moves over him.
She throws her head back and lets her eyes fall shut, her palms pressed flat to his chest, her hips swaying slowly over him, taking him with agonizingly slow thrusts, and a level of consummate skill learned through years of doing this very thing. She knows every touch that will make him quiver, every word that will make his breath come faster, every way to move that will bring him to the keen razor’s edge of pleasure and have his blood running hot and fast through his veins.
He knows the same things about her, and he learned them the very same way.
He slides his hands up her thighs to her hips, where he holds on and helps her to move, guiding her just a little.
“What else?” he whispers. “Tell me the rest.”
“Shared perils…” she gasps. “Enemies vanquished.” She opens her eyes and looks straight into his silver ones. “I would never change you …even if I could.”
He smiles and laughs a little breathlessly, thrusting up to meet her. “Not even … a little?”
“No,” she says, and he sees that she means it. “You are an arrogant ass …sometimes …most of the time. If I took that away …it would make you …someone else.”
Draco laughs again. It’s not everyday that your wife calls you an arrogant ass as she fucks your brains out, he thinks with amusement.
“I’m serious,” Hermione says, cupping his face in her hands and leaning down to kiss him.
“I know you are,” he says, his eyes still laughing at her. “That’s why it’s funny.”
“I want you,” she breathes against his lips.
“You have me,” he says.
“Not just for sex,” she says. “For everything.”
He pushes up against her, feeling the first light fluttering contractions that herald her orgasm. “I know,” he tells her, and he does. They spend a good deal of their time together in bed, or fucking wherever they happen to be, but there has always been more between them than just that. If it was just sex, she would have let him die years ago on the battlefield.
She moans and arches her back, her sable curls falling down her back to her waist like a waterfall, and her orgasm takes her softly, with gentle pulsing fingers. She slumps forward onto his chest. “I want to grow old with you,” she whispers against his damp skin.
Draco grits his teeth as the last fluttering spasms of her climax tip him over the edge and her muscles milk him, drinking him in. He smoothes his palms down her back, inhaling the light tang of her sweat and perfume as he tries to catch his breath.
“If we grow old,” he whispers against her ear, “we’ll do it together.”
She sighs and nuzzles his chest, feeling sated and content. “Don’t make me any promises you can’t keep.”
“I make no promises,” he says. “That’s why I said ‘if’.”
Hermione pinches his nipple and he hisses out a breath. “Arrogant ass,” she murmurs, but she’s smiling.
********
Part V
Most people think that they named Lily after Harry’s mother out of some twisted kind of spite. Or they think that Hermione insisted on it as some desperate means of seeking atonement.
Because of Harry Potter, that name, like ‘Harry’, ‘James’, ‘Sirius’, and even ‘Ronald’, should have become very popular among wizarding families and expectant parents. That it did not is a testament of how deeply the wizarding community can hold a grudge, and for how long.
Lily Malfoy is the only child of her generation to bear that name. It has become anathema, just as Hermione herself has; something that is shied away from by ‘decent’ folks.
When they took Lily to the train for her first day at Hogwarts, Hermione clung to her daughter’s hand until she boarded and cried into Draco’s collar when the express pulled out. She was so afraid, so very afraid that something would happen to her child. The sins of the mother vested on the daughter, or something of the like.
She was relieved beyond measure when they received the owl from the headmistress informing them that Lily Malfoy had been placed into Slytherin house. It seems that Lily did not just inherit her father’s grey eyes and flaxen hair, but his temperament as well. Slytherin would protect her. In Slytherin, Lily would learn how to defend herself and not worry about morality or right and wrong-things that can get her killed if she hesitates because of them. In Slytherin, Lily would be safe.
Also, in Slytherin more than any other house, Lily was looked upon with a little awe as the daughter of one of that house’s most infamous members.
What the world does not know is that it was Draco and not Hermione that suggested the name ‘Lily’ when their daughter was born. But then, what the world does not know about things in general, and the Malfoy’s in particular, could fill an entire ocean with tears.
Sometimes Hermione cries over the things that she has done. Sometimes, when it is too much, the tiniest thing can trigger an outburst. She is walking down the street, carrying books, or robes, or potions ingredients, or just groceries, home from the village, and two spinsterish women recognize her and put their heads together, whispering and pointing. She is sitting in the library with scrolls of parchment spread out before her, doing research on something that has piqued her interest, and the librarian comes over and asks her to leave because she is disturbing the other patrons. She opens the Daily Prophet to see her own face smiling back at her with another article speculating about her and Draco’s sex life. These articles always sound nasty and superior, like they spend their entire time in bed doing scandalous things to each other and laughing about Harry Potter. Sometimes these things make her cry, sometimes they make her laugh, and sometimes she pretends that she doesn’t care just long enough to get home and start a fight with Draco.
She has heard every insult that the human brain can possibly conceive of; Jezebel, Harlot, Traitor, Whore-one kindly-looking little old man with round gold-rimmed spectacles even called her The Whore of Babylon once. It has not escaped her notice that most of these derisive names and taunts concern themselves primarily with how many people she is fucking and how often. Usually they just strike her as tiresome and entirely unoriginal, but every once in a while, it matters. She hates that it matters. It shouldn’t matter. She knows that she had no choice. She knows better than any of them what really happened on that field and why. And she knows that the only man to ever touch her in that way is her husband. There has been no other, and she cannot even imagine there ever being another. He is her heart and soul.
But sometimes she resents him, just a little.
She resents his sarcasm. She resents that Lily has his face, his hair, his eyes, and his laugh. She resents it when she is tired and he makes her tea, even though it is always perfect. She resents it when she kisses him and he leaves the flavor of smoke and whisky on her tongue. She resents it when she cries, and he holds her like he would protect her from the very air around them if she requested it. She resents it when she tries to pick a fight, and he just won’t let her. She resents it when he does let her, and he wins. She resents it even more when he lets her win.
All of these things are reasons to hate him, but they are also the same things that she loves so fiercely about him.
They spend their holidays at the Manor, because it is bigger, and the Weasley’s do not have house elves. Fred had one to run his shop in Hogsmead, but the poor creature banged its head too hard against the wall one day to punish itself for stepping on a misplaced pygmy puff and he hasn’t had the heart to replace it. Fred told them that Tilly cried when the house elf died, and Draco laughed so hard that he had to excuse himself.
The Weasley’s do not have children, which is odd, coming from such a large family. They love Lily, and spoil her terribly, but they have none of their own. Hermione believes that they do not want children because Fred and Tilly both come from families with loads of siblings and they know just how hectic it can be. Draco thinks Tilly is barren.
Because Fred and the Malfoy’s are such good friends, despite the war and Harry Potter, Fred is not that close with Ron and Ginny anymore. Ron tells him he is disloyal. Fred says loyalty is overrated.
The things they’ve learned from the war are not nice things, but they are true, and war is rarely ever nice, even in the aftermath. Probably especially in the aftermath.
Lily comes home to the Manor for Christmas and summer, but she’s twelve now, and she has friends of her own despite her notorious parentage, so it feels more and more like she is visiting. Every time Hermione and Draco see her, she seems to have changed a little. She is beautiful-with Draco as her father, it was almost inevitable that she would be-but, unlike the young Draco Malfoy, she seems blissfully unaware of it.
On her twelfth birthday, she received an owl from a famous Argentinean wizard proposing marriage. Draco ripped it to pieces and broke a tea set before Hermione could calm him down enough to content himself with sending the perverted man a Howler. His first impulse had been to Apparate there immediately and start tossing Unforgivable Curses like firecrackers-a course of action she secretly supported-but Hermione had reminded him how much the Ministry would have loved that. They are always waiting for either of them to do something so they can punish them. They do their waiting patiently, in a tolerant and infuriating manner that suggests they consider it to be inevitable.
Lily thought the whole betrothal thing was a lark and did not give it much thought. She put down Draco’s temper tantrum to something her mother had said and forgot about it.
Just as well. Lily has a wicked sense of humor; she very well may have accepted the proposal just so she could see what would happen.
If she had known that it was serious, she would have sent the man a Howler of her own, and likely filled the envelope with Instant Darkness Powder in the hopes that when the Howler started screaming, he would get sprayed in the eyes with the stuff and be struck blind. There is more than one reason why Lily Malfoy is a Slytherin.
For two people completely and hopelessly in love with each other, Hermione and Draco fight a lot, and quite violently. These arguments often end with one or both of them being hexed, and at least one of them in tears. Hermione is usually the one in tears, but Draco is usually the one hexed.
Their fights are so loud and so passionate that it has become something of a joke among their friends and acquaintances. Everyone assumes that they have really excellent make-up sex.
For Hermione and Draco, it is not a joke. They rarely find their arguments funny even after the fact, even if they do have really brilliant make-up sex.
Everything is not bliss between them. Far from it. They’ve had some whoppers, and come close so many times to just ending it and walking away. There have been times when the words that would end it are on the tip of their tongues, ready to fall, when they have reached the point where to say or do one more thing would be too much, but they have always stopped. One or both of them realize it in time and refuse to let it go further.
It bothers her more; the negative attention. It might not disturb her so much if the world would just let it alone, but they won’t, or can’t, and so every time she turns around, she is confronted with another flyer, or witty little saying, or a book that claims to be the definitive work on a subject the author knows almost nothing about.
It bothers her more, but he sees it, and that bothers him. He knows that sometimes, in the lowest depths of her despair, she hates him a little. It is at these times that the corpse of Harry Potter lays between them like a monolith, like the statue of some long-dead pagan god, and he can almost see the regret that he believes she carries with her shining in her eyes. Though he will never tell her, he waits for the time when he will look at her and finally see that what she has had to endure to be with him has finally broken her. That the cost has outweighed the value of the prize, and love is no longer enough.
Not being a particularly religious man, he prays to whatever gods are listening, whatever spirits know his name, that that day will never come.
/Fin/