I
“If magic is a force of will, then it has memory. If it has memory, then it must have language. And if it has language-” She’d paused, eyes bright as she looked at him over her glass. “-then surely, surely, we can speak back.” Her Codex project, she’d called it. Fascinating stuff, admittedly, but it was sure to consume everything she had.
Granger’s triumphant self-assuredness terrified Draco. Her need to keep pushing to higher heights, regardless of the consequences - it shook him to his very core. Because he saw her far too often, lingering in his waiting room looking pleased with herself, despite the blood she was losing or the appendage she had in a bag, ready for him to reattach. It scared him because she smirked at pain. She looked at fear and laughed. That scared him because it reminded Draco of himself, all those years ago when he had been in the midst of spiralling down to a place where he could never find redemption. He’d never wished that particular defence mechanism on anyone, least of all her.
At some point, he’d started bracing himself to see her, spending all day on edge - his heart in his mouth as his anxiety relaxed and peaked all at the same time when Healer Kemp knocked on his office door, deadpan and holding a singed tea towel.
He nodded, closing the folder he’d been pretending to read for longer than he cared to admin and made his way to her assigned room. He’d seen fit to give her one - it was simply efficient.
Granger was sitting on the examination bed like she owned the place, elbow on one knee, chin in her hand. Her other hand was burnt, and had presumably been wrapped haphazardly in the tea towel before Kemp had confiscated it. Her wand lay beside her, faintly smoking at the tip.
“Granger.” He said by way of greeting. His tone betrayed how tired he was of this.
She looked up, smiling like she found this all so amusing. “It’s a bit tingly.” She said, lifting the damaged hand. “Possibly cursed? I wasn’t paying much attention.”
He nodded. Of course she hadn’t been. “Show me.”
She lifted it a second time. The skin was blistered - red and angry, spreading down from the base of her thumb like veins of burnt parchment. She’d been casting with a frequency tracker - he could see the faint runic markings scorched into the edges of her palm. It wasn’t deep, not yet, but it was messy and raw. He drew his wand and began the diagnostic without asking.
“You’ve been working on that bloody project again.” It almost came out as an accusation. Maybe he’d meant it as one.
She grinned wider. “Word gets around.”
“More like the burn marks you leave on half your magical equipment.” He muttered. She let him work in silence for a moment. The spell drew the heat out of the burn, leaving her skin pale and tacky. The scent of scorched magic lingered faintly between them. “You should be more careful.” He said, when it was finished.
“Mm.” She hummed, like she’d heard him but didn’t plan to listen.
“I mean it, Granger.”
That earned him a look - sharp, assessing, faintly amused. He hated how much he liked it when she looked at him like that.
“I don’t make promises I can’t keep, Malfoy.”
It wasn’t flirting exactly. It was sharper than that, more dangerous. The kind of thing someone says when they really, truly believe they’re indestructible. Or when they don’t care if they’re not. It was the sort of thing he used to say.
He watched her re-wrap the hand - properly, this time, with the bandages he gave her - and wondered when she had started mattering in ways that terrified him. When had she become different from all the other reckless morons who stumbled through his ward with half their eyebrows missing or hex burns across their arms? Maybe it was the smile. Maybe it was the fact that nobody else looked at him the way she did - like he was part of the furniture. Not a Malfoy. Not infamous. Not particularly important. Just someone she tolerated.
He loathed how easily she could turn his irritation into something softer.
Kemp had returned her tea towel at some point. It was rare that Draco wasn’t entirely aware of his surroundings, but Granger consumed him. He watched her sling her bag over her shoulder and grab the tea towel, tossing it into the bin as she left.
“See you around, Malfoy.” She called cheerfully. Draco felt like he might be sick.
II
Draco was already pissed off when the call came through. Somebody had knocked over the coffee in the break room, and Draco had been the one to clean it up.
Because of course he had. Because this was his life now - minor catastrophes and an endless parade of witches and wizards who treated their lives like something disposable. Including, apparently, Hermione Granger.
The Ministry Archives were echoing with the whistle of containment charms by the time he arrived. He pushed past a group of stunned interns, not bothering to offer more than a sharp look.
“She just collapsed…I-” One of them stammered.
Of course she had. Because this was the pattern. The pattern he’d spiralled down throughout the war, the one he was watching her spiral through after him. Like she was retracing his stupid, misguided steps.
She was curled awkwardly on the stone floor, her wand still clutched in a hand scorched with faint magical splinters, bright threads of energy clinging to her skin. For half a second, his heart stopped, before it abruptly slammed back into motion, hard enough to make his vision blur around the edges.
“Granger.” No response.
He dropped to his knees beside her, already casting diagnostic charms. They flared bright green, crackling against the ambient magic still clinging to her like cobwebs. Her pulse was erratic but, thankfully, present. Her respiration was shallow, her magical core wildly unstable.
“Stabilise.” He muttered under his breath, needing to hear the word aloud to remember what he was meant to do. He drew a grounding rune in the air above her chest.
The spell pulsed once before dissolving into her skin, anchoring her magic back into her body with what was likely a painful shudder. She gasped awake, and he let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding.
Brown eyes, dazed and foggy, blinked up at him. Oh, he was fucked.
“Oh.” She rasped. “You again.”
Draco dragged a hand down his face. “Yes. Me. Once again summoned to stop you bleeding out in public.”
She shifted, grimacing as the splinters caught against her skin. “I was fine.”
“You collapsed.” He deadpanned.
“Briefly.”
“You seized.”
“For twenty seconds.” She shot back.
He glared at her. “That is not the defence you think it is.”
She let him guide her to sit upright, even though her hands trembled. She winced as he started carefully extracting the glowing splinters from her palms. He worked in silence, jaw tight, before the words he needed to say clawed their way from his chest.
“You do know casting unknown incantations without containment protocols is reckless idiocy, yes? Casting unknown incantations alone is suicidal.”
Her lips twitched. Tired. Bloody impossible. “You sound like McGonagall.”
Draco closed his eyes very briefly. “For fuck’s-”
“You’ll run out of things to scold me for at this rate.” She added, voice dry.
He met her gaze. “You’ll run out of skin to tear up.”
She paused for a moment, before grinning. His stomach twisted. “Not yet I won’t.”
It hit him then, as his anger dulled into something far worse, that her chaos was becoming lodged under his ribs. He was worriedabout her. Her brilliance and blatant disregard for her own wellbeing, it forced him to care. More than a patient, or even a friend. This was something far more permanent.
He wrapped her hands in clean bandages, perhaps a little tighter than necessary.
She left with a careless wave and a ‘Thank you, Healer Malfoy’ tossed over her shoulder like a joke. He didn’t watch her go, he simply stared at the floor where she had been lying. He didn’t turn until it was too late and she was already gone.
III
Draco hated Hogwarts. He had no good memories of the place, not when the bad were so all-consuming. His latest visit to the place would likely add yet another fixture to his roster of nightmare material.
The castle was alive - always had been - and so he could feel how angry it was. The walls vibrated beneath his boots as he stormed through the corridor towards the flare of uncontrolled magic ahead. Someone - a fucking reckless idiot - had tried to link themselves to the wardstone. The rending of his heart from his body told him who it was.
He came around the corner just in time to see the tether snap. Magic recoiled with a violent ripple, and her body dropped. Hermione Granger - bloody, unconscious, stupidly and relentlessly brilliant - crumpled to the floor like a broken marionette. Like the strings holding her had been cut.
He was at her side before reality had really set in.
“Granger.” He muttered, bitter and shaking more than a competent healer should.
Her breath stuttered, thin and alarmingly shallow. Diagnostics spilled from his wand in a stream of near-panicked incantation. The results didn’t abate his worry - fractured left femur, three cracked ribs, internal bruising, magical core unstable again, hairline skull fracture from her fall.
He could feel the resonance of the tether still clinging to her skin, ancient magic nobody their age had any right to be anywhere near. The castle still made its displeasure known, thrumming beneath his knees.
“Why do you have to be like this?” He muttered, needing to berate her even if she couldn’t hear him. He knew the answer, though. They were words for the sake of it.
Her eyelashes fluttered. “We need to stop meeting like this, Malfoy.” She rasped, her voice faint and her throat dry.
His vision blurred with fury. “Yes.” He pressed stabilisation runes into her sternum, grounding her magic to him instead of the stone. It wasn’t anything close to standard procedure, but people didn’t often go around tethering themselves to sentient castles so she’d forced him to improvise. “I see you’ve taken leave of your senses again.”
She coughed, immediately wincing as her ribs presumably made their state known. “What… what’s the damage?”
“Left femur fracture.” He said shortly. “Cracked ribs. Core instability. And your dignity - which I regret to inform you remains critically low.”
That earned him the ghost of a smile. He hadn’t wanted that.
As he worked, he didn’t look at her. Not until she whispered, more to herself than to him.
“It was worth it. The castle remembers everything.”
He exhaled slowly through his teeth. “You don’t have to kill yourself to prove magic thinks you’re clever.”
It landed harder than he meant it to. Sharper. Like Draco of old. There was a beat of silence before she spoke, so quietly he almost missed it.
“It’s not for magic.” Another pause. “It’s for me.”
His hands stilled. Of course it was. This was never about the work. Not really.
This was about her, about the girl who had been told since she was eleven that being extraordinary was the only currency she had. That being enough was conditional. That survival wasn’t impressive. Salazar, he’d made damn sure she felt the need to keep pushing herself. This was his fault.
He pressed his hands to the newly healed skin of her ribs - feeling the faint, unsteady rise and fall of her breath.
“You don’t have to keep proving anything.” He said softly, not remotely enough to make up for the years he’d spent telling her the exact opposite. His voice broke slightly, and she definitely heard it. He cringed.
When her eyelids slipped closed again, and her lips moved in barely-there reply, it wasn’t to him. It was to herself.
“I do. To me.”
He should have left. Merlin knew there were patients waiting, charts to update, things to fix. But his feet wouldn't move. His hands were locked in place, pulse fluttering beneath his fingers. When she woke up later - surrounded by sterile walls and soft light - she would remember nothing of the way he had held her wrist in shaking hands like it was his only tether to the land of the living.
IV
When they said her name, something in his chest stopped.
Hermione Granger. Level three magical rebound. Unconscious. No pulse on arrival.
He didn’t even think. His body moved before his brain caught up.
By the time he reached Spell Damage, the air was thick with magic - wild, uncontrolled, tearing at the edges of the containment field they'd thrown over her. He could taste it, metallic and ancient.
She was pale and still. Magic bleeding from her skin like steam, thick pulsing waves of light curling from her fingertips.
She was losing too much. She’d given too much - no, demanded too much. She’d pulled the whole world into herself, expecting that to be a thing she could just do.
His hands were moving before his thoughts could form properly.
"Clear the ward." He said, flat, cold and unarguable. People listened, because he was Draco Malfoy, and when he spoke like that, nobody stayed to argue.
Diagnostics ran off his wand in a constant loop. Internal burns. Core fractures. Nerve trauma. Pulse absent. Respiration shallow, failing.
There was no room for fear. No room for anything except perfect, brutal efficiency.
His body worked faster than his mind - setting stabilisation grids, overlaying runic fields, calibrating the flow of magic to force it down, to force it back. It was like holding lightning in his bare hands. How she’d thought she could hold this alone was beyond him.
Her pulse dipped again. Flatlined.
He bent over her - leaned in so close only she could hear it, even if she wasn’t conscious enough to know. He spat the words, low and vicious.
“Don’t you dare.”
Not like this. Not when he’d fought for every splinter of her. Not when he’d rebuilt her more times than he could count. Not when she was herself - all brilliance and sharp edges and bloody-minded recklessness - the only thing in this cursed world that had ever made him feel alive again.
"Don’t you fucking dare."
For hours, he didn’t sit down. He didn’t eat or drink. Barely blinked. He just worked.
He reworked every field when it failed. Redrew every rune when the magic bucked like a wild thing beneath his skin. Nobody else touched her. Nobody else would.
And when her pulse finally steadied, he still didn’t stop moving. He set the final charm over her ribs with the softest breath of magic, like a hand smoothing down her hair.
He didn’t look at her when he left the room. Looking meant crumbling. It was safer not to.
Not because he was angry, but because she didn’t know, couldn’t know, how much of him died every time she broke.
When she woke hours later, blinking against the sterile light, he was gone.
But not far. He hadn’t even left the hospital. He didn’t trust that the danger had passed.
The nurse straightened her notes beside him. “She asked for you.” She said gently.
He didn’t move. Didn’t even look up. “Let her rest.” He said.
He sat outside her room for a few hours more - elbows on knees, head bowed, exhaustion carved deep under his eyes - a man who had survived a war only to lose one battle at a time to the girl who didn’t even know she was winning.
He felt her magic in the building long before she appeared. It was like clockwork now - muscle memory carved into his ribs.
Granger - another injury, more recklessness. Another bloody page in the bloody book of how far she could push herself before the world broke first.
He didn’t even ask what it was. Didn’t need to. The intern logged it quietly at the front desk.
Sprained wrist - Minor and fixable and forgettable.
She would live. For once - for the first time since this whole thing began - Draco did not move. He didn’t go to her.
He sat behind his desk, staring at a patient file he wasn’t reading, knuckles white around his quill, heart thudding like someone had shoved their hands into his chest and started pulling.
He waited.
The knock came eventually - sharp, furious. She stormed in without waiting. Her wrist was bound in clean bandages, somebody else’s work. Merlin, he’d never hated himself more.
"You passed me off." She bit out - no hesitation or sarcasm, just betrayal. “Like I’m nothing.”
He stood. It was too fast, and his chair scraped on the floor.
"I passed you off." He repeated, his tone flat. "Because I can’t wash your blood off my hands again."
Silence.
She looked like he’d slapped her. He didn’t stop.
"You think this is a game?" His voice cracked. He wasn’t shouting, but it hurt all the same. "You think I’m angry because you’re reckless?" He stepped toward her. "I’m not angry, Granger." He said, quiet and ruined. "I’m terrified."
He let the word hang there. Let it hurt her like it hurt him.
“I’m terrified because you’ve spent so long surviving that you’ve forgotten how to live. And I know what that looks like. I wore that face for years. I had to.”
He paused. Huffed out a resigned breath. “Looking at you is like looking in a mirror. And I need you to stop, Hermione.”
She flinched like it had landed straight in the centre of her chest.
"You can’t tell me to stop being reckless-" She whispered, shaking. "-when that’s all I’ve ever been."
He laughed. Bitter and dry and broken. "Then you’ll die for it."
She stood there a moment longer, staring at him like he was a stranger. There were no dramatics, no last words. She simply turned and left.
He didn’t follow her. He couldn’t. He had nothing left.
Hermione walked past the interns and the waiting rooms and the awful white walls that smelled the same as he did - like clean linen and antiseptic and an impossible level of care.
She didn’t cry, even if she felt like she could. She didn’t look back.
As she reached the door to apparate away, her hands trembling, she realised something that hit harder than any of her injuries.
Draco Malfoy loved her. And the bastard was right. Hermione didn’t know how to stop.
V
It had been twenty-two days since she last saw him.
Not that she was counting. Not that the empty ache in her chest, in her bones, in the rhythm of her life, had anything to do with the man who had put his hands over her heart and forced it to keep beating. Not at all.
Her flat was quieter now. The Codex Project was shelved.
Not burned. Not destroyed. Just put aside. Like an old book waiting for someone else to read it. Like something that didn’t need to define her.
There were notes in a new journal, not frantic spells or theoretical rune work, but plans.
With boundaries, safety measures, hired assistants who could stabilise any experiments. Spell catchers and magical dampeners and core buffers.
The precautions weren’t because she was afraid - they were because she wasn’t anymore. She didn’t need to die to feel like she was doing enough.
And Merlin help her, she missed him. She missed his quiet competence. His sharp-edged voice when she pushed too far. His deadpan stare over a glass as Theo forced him to join her and Harry at the pub on the days she dragged herself out of work at a reasonable hour. The way his hands didn’t shake even when his heart did.
When she finally apparated to St Mungo’s, for once it wasn’t an emergency.
It wasn’t blood-soaked desperation. It wasn’t a collapse. It was just her.
He wasn’t on the ward, she found him in his office - head down, writing, sleeves rolled. Looking tired. Looking like someone who didn’t know if he could bear seeing her again.
He looked up when she knocked, and his eyes gave everything away. Relief. Exhaustion. Caution.
Hope.
She stepped inside and spoke before he could.
"You said something to me." She began in a steady voice. He waited for her to continue. "You’re the first person who’s ever told me I’m enough. I didn’t know how much I needed to hear it until you said it.
A pause. A breath she’d earned.
"I didn’t change for you." She said, quiet but fierce. "But you gave me a reason to want to."
She stepped closer, her heart thudding as her walls came down.
"I want to come home at the end of the day." Her throat tightened but she didn’t stop. "And I want you to be there."
Not because she needed saving. Not because she was broken. But because she wasn’t. Not anymore.
The silence between them wasn’t sharp anymore. It was soft and warm. Safe.
He stood slowly, as if he didn’t dare believe her. As if she was something fragile.
But when he crossed the room, when he stood in front of her, when he said - rough, wrecked, hopeful.
"Then come home, Granger."
She smiled. And for the first time in her life, she let herself rest.
He had a teacup balanced haphazardly on a stack of files, a habit he’d acquired from being around her a little too much. Hermione stood in the doorway, watching him scowl at it like it had personally offended him.
His sleeves were rolled as they always were, pale forearms inked with faint rune-ghosts from a dozen healing charms already cast today.
It was almost comical. The most terrifying boy she’d ever known - once sharp enough to cut glass - now frowning at tea and muttering to himself about stubborn old charms.
She smiled as something in her chest settled.
She didn’t knock, didn’t need to anymore.
When she crossed the room, when she slid her arms around his waist from behind, he barely startled. Just let out a faint breath like he’d been holding it for hours.
His hand covered hers without hesitation. Like muscle memory.
"You’re early." He murmured, dry, but faintly pleased.
"Missed you." She replied easily. He huffed, a sound dangerously close to being fond.
There was a soft knock on his door. Healer Kemp’s voice was low.
"Sorry, sir, but Mr Alder is asking for you again. Won’t see anyone else."
Draco’s eyes closed for a moment. Never irritated at his patients, just tired.
Hermione went with him, side by side as they walked the familiar corridors.
Mr Alder was ninety odd - sharp as a tack, despite the potions lined up neatly on the side table. His face split into a grin the second he saw Draco.
"There he is. I told them only you had the right hands for these old bones." The man rasped, eyes crinkling. Draco’s mouth twitched - that rare, rare almost-smile he gave to people who’d earned it.
Hermione watched him kneel beside the bed - gentle, patient, grounding the man’s magic with careful hands. There was no scolding or sharpness, only steadiness and care.
Mr Alder squinted past Draco after a moment, catching sight of Hermione lingering by the door. His grin widened.
"Oh, and is this your lovely wife, then?" He asked, all warmth and easy mischief.
Draco stiffened. Hermione felt herself flush. Before she could answer and laugh it off, the old man continued, almost conspiratorially.
"You’re a lucky young lady, you know. This one’s kindness itself. Never met a man with steadier hands or a softer word when you needed it." Hermione’s throat went tight. Because she knew all that already.
She caught Draco’s eye over the old man’s shoulder. Smiled, soft and certain.
"I know." She said simply.
And for the first time in a long time, Draco Malfoy smiled back.
There was no deflection anymore, just quiet acceptance. He believed her. He could have this. They could have this.
Him and her. Home.