Green Apples and Unfinished Things

HERMIONE

There are very few things in this world that truly prepare you for the sight of a former almost-lover standing in your bedroom eating an apple. A Hungarian Horntail, maybe. A cursed Ministry memo that sings. A sixth-year Potions final. But not this.

Hermione had just finished fluffing the couch cushions and lighting a candle with the kind of determined flourish that only a woman feigning enthusiasm for a lukewarm date can summon, when she remembered the blanket.

A crucial element, the blanket. Essential for warmth, comfort, and—if necessary—a tactical barrier between herself and her cousin’s very safe suggestion of a boyfriend.

She was halfway through mumbling to herself about which throw best communicated “I’m emotionally available but still a little mysterious,” when she opened her bedroom door and let out an entirely justifiable shriek.

“Malfoy?!”

Draco Malfoy, of all the infernal beings to grace the plane of existence, stood nonchalantly near her window, backlit by the golden blush of evening, as if he were auditioning for a particularly moody cologne advert. He held one of her apples in one hand—a Granny Smith, no less, her favourite—and was crunching into it with an expression that said he was thoroughly unimpressed by her duvet choice.

"You’ve redecorated," he said, glancing at her bookshelf. "Very... beige."

“I—what—how dare—” Her indignation came out in staccato syllables, like a hex misfiring. She grasped at the doorframe for support, equal parts scandalized and homicidal. “You vanished off the face of the Earth and now you just—appear—in my bedroom—and eat my fruit?!”

“It’s a lovely apple,” he remarked, inspecting it. “Bit bruised on one side, but that feels poetically apt.”

Hermione, without thinking, grabbed the nearest pillow and hurled it directly at his stupid, angular head.

He caught it with one hand. "Is this how you welcome all your ex-lovers? Because it’s oddly arousing."

“You absolute plague rat,” she snarled, flinging a second pillow. This one bounced off his shoulder with a satisfying fwomp.

“I see your vocabulary hasn’t suffered in my absence,” he said, casually stepping aside as a third pillow sailed past him and collided with her bookshelf. “Neither has your throwing arm. Are we done yet, or shall I surrender now and save the lamps?”

She cast a silencing charm on the bedroom door. “You have ten seconds to explain what you’re doing in my house before I start throwing hexes.”

“Is that the welcome I get after two years?” he asked, as though they were estranged pen pals reunited over tea, rather than war-scarred ex-almost-lovers mid-domestic skirmish.

“No,” Hermione snapped, eyes sharp as spellfire. “This is!”

She hurled another pillow. With remarkable precision, it struck him squarely in the shoulder. He looked mildly offended, but also faintly delighted, which infuriated her more.

“I would’ve knocked,” he said, examining the bite in his apple with all the gravity of a bored aristocrat, “but I feared you’d weaponise the doormat.”

“You’re not even supposed to be in the country!” she shouted, launching another cushion with admirable force. “Last I heard, you’d fled to New York to ruin coffee and develop a suspicious accent!”

This one hit him in the chest. The bastard looked pleased.

“And yet,” he replied, flicking a feather from his shoulder like it had personally insulted his lineage, “you’re dating a man who wears boat shoes indoors. So really, we’ve both failed Britain.”

Her ears were ringing now, but it might have been the sound of her blood pressure breaking Ministry health regulations.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to look like that. And she certainly wasn’t supposed to feel like this—like she’d opened a book she’d sworn she’d burned.

Hermione grabbed another pillow. It was velvet and heavier than it looked.

“I haven’t heard from you in two years, Malfoy! I thought you were dead,” she hissed. “Or in a dungeon somewhere! You disappear to America without a word, no letter, no owl, no nothing, and now you just—what—break into my house and eat my fruit like it’s just another Friday?”

"Technically, I apparated onto your landing," he said, dodging another pillow. "You left your wards pathetically open. I could’ve been anyone. A deranged stalker. Or worse, a Gryffindor."

"You are a deranged stalker!"

"Only mildly deranged," he said simply, taking another bite. The crunch was, somehow, infuriating. “I would say you need to update your wards, but I’ve already gone ahead and done that for you.”

“What?! I—how dare—do you live to ruin my life?”

He didn’t answer right away. Just looked at her, gaze flicking down to her socks (mismatched), then to the faint line of tension at her jaw.

“Not exclusively,” he said with a smirk. “But you’re in the top three.”

Her lips curled in disbelief. “You are unbelievable.”

“Not the first time you’ve said that. Although last time, you were considerably more breathless and significantly less clothed.”

“Don’t.”

“What? You brought it up.”

“You do not get to waltz back into my life,” she snapped. “We are not on speaking terms. We are not on any terms.”

“Hence the surprise visit,” he said, maddeningly reasonable. “I heard you’d started seeing someone. Thought I’d conduct a field inspection.”

“Inspection?!”

“Footwear analysis. Risk assessment.”

“You are insufferable.”

“And you,” he said, dodging another pillow with graceful, post-Auror reflexes, “still date men who wear ironic t-shirts. So really, who’s suffering?”

Hermione made a sound that may have once belonged to a banshee, then hauled another pillow at his face.

“And you,” she said through gritted teeth, “are still an arrogant bastard.”

Her hands curled into fists at her sides. She could practically feel the heat rising up her neck, the tension of old wounds and older memories tightening around her like an old jumper she'd outgrown but kept out of nostalgia.

It wasn’t just his sudden reappearance. It was everything it dragged back with it.

They had never been together, not really. Not in the way people used the word. No labels, no promises. Just late nights and locked doors and whispers in corridors when they were sixteen, when the war was looming and they were too young and too damaged to understand what it meant to want something that felt dangerous and necessary at the same time.

After the war, it had started again. Quietly. Briefly.

An affair that neither of them could name. Messy, sharp-edged encounters that felt more like exorcisms than romance. They met in shadowed alleys and spent their nights wrapped in satin bedsheets, sometimes fighting, sometimes not even speaking, just unraveling each other in silence like they didn’t know how to breathe otherwise.

Then he became an Auror, and had left Britain without a single word.

She had heard about his departure from Dean Thomas in the Auror archives, months after he’d already gone.

Two years. Not a single letter.

“I asked around, you know,” she said, voice tight as she stepped closer. “No one could tell me exactly where you were. I had to stitch it together like a ridiculous conspiracy board. Fieldwork in New York. Magical crimes in Baltimore. Some incident with a banshee in L.A. All from people who didn’t know we—”

She stopped herself.

Didn’t know what?

That she’d once traced the scars on his ribs like lines in a language she couldn’t speak? That she’d memorized the sound of his breath when he slept beside her, which was always light, as if he never really trusted rest? That for a short, brutal window of time, she had been the only person who knew where to find him?

He had the audacity to interrupt her stream of thoughts with: “How many unworthy men have you been with in an attempt to replace me?”

She hurled another pillow. This one hit him square in the face.

He let it drop slowly. “Still throwing things when you’re emotional. Charming.”

“Get out.”

“Not until you tell me why you’re dating someone who wears socks with sandals.”

She shrieked and reached for the final pillow.

He backed up, hands raised. “Alright, alright. Truce.”

Her breathing was shallow. Her pulse refused to settle.

“I’m serious, Malfoy.”

“So am I,” he said coolly. “I’m not here to ask for your forgiveness, Granger.”

“Oh, of course not,” she snapped, arms crossing tightly over her chest. “You’d never do something so gauche as apologize.”

He gave a slow, lazy shrug that somehow managed to look expensive. “Didn’t think you’d want one.”

Her mouth fell open. “You didn’t think I’d want one? After two years of nothing?!"

“I figured you’d prefer to hex me than watch me grovel,” he said evenly. “And from the looks of your throw pillows, I stand by that.”

“You’re not funny,” she said, voice low.

“Didn’t say I was.” His gaze dipped to her mouth. “But you always liked me better when I was a bastard.”

“I was young,” she spat. “And stupid. And so wrecked from the war I couldn’t tell the difference between love and trauma bonding.”

“Ouch.” He winced. “You’ve been rehearsing that one?”

“Get out.”

Undeterred, his voice dipped, intimate, almost cruel in its tenderness. “You still sleep on the right side of the bed. You still sleep with your wand underneath your pillow. Still read yourself to sleep with those pretentious novels you pretend not to cry over.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not observant, Malfoy. You’re intrusive, a deranged stalker, and you're not welcome here. Get out."

“Call it what you like.” He leaned in, close enough for her breath to hitch. “You’re still mine.”

“I’m not yours,” she said, fierce and shaking. “Not anymore.” Her palm collided with his chest, a firm pressure against hard muscle. She could feel his pulse flutter beneath her fingertips.

“What do you want, Draco?” she said, quieter this time.

She hadn’t called him that in years.

He blinked, and something flickered across his face. It was gone just as quickly as it came.

“Wanted to see you,” he said, and his voice was lower now. Rough. “Two years is a long time.”

And, regrettably, her heart responded like a traitor. Skipped a beat. Raised a flag. Fired a canon.

She tried not to let it show, standing straighter as though posture could defend against ghosts wearing tailored coats.

Of course she remembered.

Who could forget a post-war not-quite-affair with Draco Malfoy? Not her. Not her inner circle. Certainly not her therapist.

She remembered the nights they never talked about. The tangled limbs and whispered curses. The brief months after the war where they'd been something nameless and unholy, too raw to call love but too consuming to call lust.

He leaned forward and placed the apple on her desk as if offering penance via fruit.

“You know I thought about you,” he murmured, which she was fairly certain was the opening line to several restraining orders.

“Liar,” she said, breath catching.

“Every time I saw someone put sugar in their tea,” he said, stepping closer. Her back was nearly against the wall. “Every time I heard bad Latin and worse logic.”

“You’re full of shit,” she said, but it lacked any real bite.

He tilted his head in that aggravatingly elegant way of his—the sort of movement that suggested he spent weekends judging wine competitions and still had time to chase dark wizards in a leather harness. 

“Am I?”

He was too close. That should have been illegal. Or at least subject to a Ministry-imposed proximity restriction.

He lifted a hand—tentative, almost reverent—and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers brushed her jaw like they remembered the shape of her better than she did.

“I never stopped—” he began.

She slapped him.

It was not a polite slap. Not a cinematic slap. It was the sort of slap that belonged in memoirs and cautionary tales.

He blinked. Staggered back half a step.

And then—of all the ludicrous, infuriating things—he laughed.

Not cruelly. Not even smugly. But soft, familiar, as if she’d just reminded him who he was and why he’d loved her in the first place.

“I missed this little temper of yours,” he mused, touching the spot like it was a keepsake.

Then, as if the whole scene hadn’t already crawled into her bloodstream like a fever, he had the audacity to lift his hand again—slow, soft, entirely unwelcome—and tilted her chin upwards.

“That’s my girl.”

She didn’t flinch. That would have been polite. Instead, she stared at him as if trying to telekinetically turn him into furniture.

“No,” she said, voice made of stone and better decisions. “I’m not your anything.”

His smile faltered. Just a flicker, barely there.

“Right,” he muttered, letting his hand drop.

He looked around her bedroom again. His gaze landed briefly on the stack of books by her bed, the wine glasses on the dresser, the soft blanket folded at the edge of her mattress.

Then he looked back at her.

“Are you happy?” he asked, and for once, he didn’t sound like he was trying to win.

The question settled in the air like a stormcloud. Heavy. Real.

Hermione stared at him. At this man who had left her with silence and absence and ache, who had walked out of her life without so much as an apology, and now stood in front of her like he hadn’t set fire to every ounce of peace she’d built since.

She let out a slow breath.

“You don’t get to ask me that.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“Because you don’t know me anymore.” Her voice shook, but she didn’t back down. “You forfeited the right to ask when you left without a word. You disappeared like I was—what? A phase? An inconvenience? A secret you couldn’t bring with you to your new, shiny life in America?”

He winced. Possibly at the metaphor.

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, jaw tense.

“Then what was it like?” she snapped. “Because I’ve spent two years trying to make sense of it. Trying to believe it didn’t mean as much as I thought it did. That maybe I imagined how you looked at me, how you held me, how you never said goodbye—because if it meant anything, then you wouldn’t have vanished like a bloody coward.”

He looked like she’d slapped him again.

Good.

“I had orders,” he said, quieter. “No contact. Deep cover. You know how it works.”

“No, I know how you work.” Her eyes burned. “What you had was an exit plan and a habit of cowardice. You always run. The second things feel too big, too complicated, too real—you run. And you’re not going to pretend that this was about duty. You didn’t leave because you had to. You left because it was easier than staying.”

He didn’t argue. That told her everything.

Hermione folded her arms over her chest, guarding herself from the pull of him.

“I built something,” she said, voice level. “From the ashes you left. And I won’t hand it back to the man who lit the match.”

He breathed out slowly. “Is that all?”

Her words were sharp and unapologetic: “I deserve better than you.”

He didn’t move. Just stared at her like he was memorizing the lines of her face.

Then: “Is he better?”

She blinked. “What?”

“Your little boyfriend downstairs,” he said, jaw tightening. “Is he better?”

She didn’t answer. Not because she didn’t have one. But because that wasn’t the point.

“Get out, Malfoy.”

He hesitated, just long enough to break her heart all over again.

“Do you love him?”

She stood still, trembling and furious, her pulse thundering in her ears. She hated him. She hated him and she wanted him and she loved him—of course, she loved him—and she would rather eat her wand than admit that to either of them.

The silence between them had always been like this—heavy, not empty. A kind of language made up of breath and tension and all the things they refused to say out loud.

Draco stepped back first.

He glanced at the scattered pillows on the floor, then at her again, gaze sweeping over her like a man memorizing a place he knew he’d be returning to.

“Don’t worry,” he said, voice too light to be innocent. “I won’t make a habit of breaking into your bedroom.”

Hermione crossed her arms. “You better not.”

“Not without bringing wine next time, at least.”

“There won’t be a next time, Malfoy,” she said, flinching when he reached for her hand.

She should’ve pulled away. She didn’t.

He took it gently, like it was something fragile. Something precious. Brought it to his mouth with the same arrogant ease he’d used to disarm Death Eaters and diplomats alike. And then, without breaking eye contact, he pressed a kiss to the back of her hand, soft, slow, entirely devastating.

Hermione’s breath caught.

His lips were warm. His mouth familiar. His touch far too dangerous for a woman who’d worked so hard to forget.

“I’ll see you later,” he murmured against her skin.

And before she could curse him, slap him again, scream at him to never come back, he was gone in a rush of wind and magic, leaving her standing alone in her bedroom with her heart in her throat and his kiss burning on her skin like a ghost she couldn’t shake.

Leaving behind the scent of green apples, the sting of old wounds, and the godforsaken ache of unfinished things.