Green Apples and Unfinished Things

HERMIONE

It is a curious thing, how the night air feels colder when one has recently insulted two people, broken up with her boyfriend, threatened a well-connected witch in a pub lavatory, and ditched her former almost-lover with the check and a couple glasses of untouched wine.

Hermione Granger wrapped her coat tighter around her and stepped into the evening with all the grace of a woman who knew the universe was testing her patience and had decided, quite firmly, not tonight.

Ginny walked beside her, heels clicking against the cobbled path like a metronome for the evening’s descent into chaos.

“You handled that well,” Ginny said, a little too brightly.

“Which part?” Hermione muttered. “The rejection of McLaggen, the psychological evisceration of Portia, or the bit where Draco drank from my wine glass like we were sharing communion?”

Ginny pursed her lips. “All of it, really. I was very impressed. You only looked homicidal twice.”

“Progress.”

The wind tugged at Hermione’s curls and brought with it the scent of roasted chestnuts from a nearby cart, which was tragically romantic and entirely inappropriate for her current mood. She squashed the temptation to indulge in metaphor. That was how women ended up crying into their chocolate frogs.

Ginny tugged her coat tighter around her as they stepped into the lamplit street. “Next time we go somewhere else,” she muttered. “Somewhere without ghosts, exes, or egos.”

Hermione snorted. “So… nowhere in London?”

“Fair point.”

They turned the corner, boots echoing against cobblestone. The buzz of the bar faded behind them, replaced by the rustle of trees and the hum of a distant lamppost flickering.

“You two always vanish like that?” came Theo’s voice, dry and amused. “If you wanted to be dramatic, Granger, you could’ve at least slammed the door on your way out. As it stands, you’ve only left behind a trail of wounded egos and one very confused barman.”

Draco, beside him, added with a drawl, “You also left behind your wine. Not that I’m suggesting I brought it, of course. That would be mad.”

Hermione and Ginny stopped walking at the same time.

Draco and Theo had emerged from the pub not far behind, both still in their coats, both entirely too calm for two men who had absolutely no business following them.

He held up the glass nonetheless, smug and ridiculous.

Hermione stared at it. Then at him.

He took a slow sip. “Tastes like poor decisions and repressed feelings. Delightful vintage.”

“Is this a new habit of yours, Malfoy, trailing after women when they leave the pub?”

Draco lifted a brow. “Only the interesting ones. Though, to be fair, I did once follow a Danish Arithmancer out of a lecture hall in New York. Wild night.”

Hermione scoffed. “Charming.”

“Oh, she was. Brilliant at probability theory. Absolutely rubbish at pillow talk.”

Hermione’s jaw tightened so quickly she nearly bit her own tongue. Something in her expression must have sparked—a flash of something too raw, too recognisable—and Draco, the bastard, caught it instantly. He stilled immediately and tilted his head in that infuriating way he did when he smelled blood in the water. She had to grip the strap of her bag just to stop herself from physically shoving him into the nearest lamp post. Or through it. A girl could dream. 

Naturally, her other hand twitched with the barely contained impulse to knock that smug look clean off his face, or at the very least relocate his wine glass to somewhere deeply inconvenient. Somewhere anatomical. She took a sharp breath and stepped back instead, as if distance could buffer the indignity of being read so effortlessly by a man she hadn’t officially forgiven for anything. Ever.

“Granger,” he said slowly, “are you… jealous?”

“I’m appalled,” she replied, far too fast.

Which was technically true. She was appalled—at him, at herself, at the bizarre mechanics of whatever this was. But not jealous. She didn’t get jealous. That was for melodramatic teenagers and protagonists in badly written novels.

It wasn’t jealousy, really. It was… awareness. Mild territorial awareness.

So when he said it now—Danish Arithmancer, probability theory, pillow talk, whatever idiocy he was peddling—of course her body reacted before her pride could intervene.

Because he had done it before. Dangled women like shiny baubles. Pansy Parkinson. Daphne Greengrass. Some other dimwitted pureblood witch from Slytherin. It had never been about affection; it was about power. And she hated that it still worked. That the flicker of imagined intimacy, even years later, still struck a nerve she had thought long dead.

He grinned, and it was ruinous.

Not the smug, calculated smirk he wore like cufflinks at formal events or the aristocratic curl of lip he used when he was bored during lectures. No, this was the other one—the forbidden one. The grin that slipped out when he forgot to guard himself, that crooked little marvel of vulnerability and irreverence, like trouble in human form. 

The grin she’d once trusted in the dark. The grin that meant, despite everything, he was still hers in all the worst, most irreversible ways. The one he’d only ever offered her in shadows and stolen hours. Completely devastating, boyish mischief trying on heartbreak like a secondhand coat. The grin that had once convinced her to break curfew, steal a kiss, and forgive him for far too many things he never deserved.

Her heart dropped. As if it recognised something before her brain could protest.

“Of course,” he said, all maddening ease. “My mistake. Appalled. Definitely not green-eyed fury hiding behind moral superiority.”

“I’m not jealous of your fictional Arithmancer.”

“Good,” he said, stepping just a little closer. “Because if you were, I’d have to reassure you that I don’t make a habit of kissing women who quote logarithms mid-climax. Bit of a mood killer.”

From the sidelines, Theo chimed in lazily, “He’s joking, by the way, if you can’t tell. He hasn't so much as looked at another woman like that since you, Granger. It's been two years of celibate gloom and aggressively alphabetised record collections of all of your boy—"

“Shut up, Theo,” Draco muttered without taking his eyes off Hermione.

Hermione ignored their bickering and stared at Draco, really looked at him—the way she had in school, in narrow beds with blackout curtains and bruised hearts. There was something maddening about how unchanged he was. Broader shoulders, perhaps. A little older around the eyes. But still that same aggravating mix of charm and damage she’d once been stupid enough to want.

“You got what you wanted,” she said. “A scene. A power play. A reminder. Congratulations. Now go home.”

Draco tilted his head. “You think that’s what this was?”

“I know that’s what it was.”

A pause.

Then, maddeningly: “You’re wrong.”

She clenched her jaw. “Then enlighten me.”

“I wanted to see if I still mattered.”

And that—well, that stopped her.

There was something disarming about how simply he said it. Not arrogantly. Not even confidently. Just… plainly. As though he were listing ingredients for a potion and accidentally said heartache instead of asphodel.

“You don’t,” she said automatically.

Draco’s mouth curved. “You're a liar.”

Behind him, Theo leaned against a lamppost like he was watching theatre. “If this turns into a duel or a shag, I’m calling for reinforcements.”

Ginny elbowed Hermione gently. “We could always leave him standing.”

“Tempting,” she murmured.

But her feet wouldn’t move.

Draco stepped forward with the wine glass still in hand, his expression unreadable. With a casual flick of his wand and a whispered charm, the glass shimmered and reshaped, petals blooming from crystal, deep periwinkle unfolding into delicate life. He reached out—carefully, reverently—and tucked the flower behind her ear. The gesture was maddeningly familiar.

Hermione froze.

His fingers brushed the curve of her cheek, just barely, but it was enough to feel the frantic flutter of his pulse against her skin. Her breath caught. She remembered fourth year. The greenhouse. The flower she’d worn behind her ear that had made him scowl for the rest of the lesson and insult her shoes.

He said nothing charming. No softly uttered cliché, no velvet-lined flirtation masquerading as sincerity. Instead, he simply adjusted the flower behind her ear, his fingers maddeningly gentle, as if she might shatter under the weight of the moment.

“Honestly,” he murmured, in a voice that carried far too much history for such a small stretch of cobblestone, “it’s ridiculous how well that still suits you.”

Hermione blinked. “What? The flower?”

“No,” he said, stepping back like it physically hurt to do so. “The part where you ruin me.”

And oh, didn’t that just split her wide open.

Because once—many onces, really—he’d said things like that before. Not always aloud. Sometimes in the way he looked at her across a crowded room. Sometimes in the way his hand trembled just before reaching for hers, like the touch would undo him. She remembered the time they got caught in a downpour a few months after the war and he spelled her hair dry before his own. The moment in the Room of Requirement, sixth year, when he whispered he’d memorised the sound of her laugh because he didn’t know if he’d ever hear it again. She remembered their first night together, post-war, where he traced constellations across her back and said, quietly, like a prayer and a confession all at once, "You ruined me and then built me back up again, piece by piece."

She sucked in a sharp breath as if to expel the memory from her mind. “You can’t waltz back into my life and expect me to melt,” Hermione said, low.

Draco, naturally, didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t expect you to melt,” he replied, voice calm, maddening. “I expect you to burn.”

It wasn’t so much a line as it was a challenge, and he delivered it like a man who’d already accepted the consequences.

He looked at her like he’d swallowed some unpalatable truth and was daring her to do the same.

Hermione wanted to scream. Or kiss him. Or hex him into the next fiscal quarter. Possibly all three.

The silence that followed stretched thin and taut, like a badly cast charm ready to explode.

She straightened. “You didn’t need to come out here.”

He shrugged, his coat rustling in a way that somehow managed to sound smug. “Didn’t need to. Wanted to.”

“Well,” she said crisply, “Don’t let us keep you.”

He stayed where he was. “I wasn’t sure you’d leave without saying goodbye.”

She huffed a dry laugh, the sound sharp and deliberately cruel. “You didn’t say goodbye either. Remember how that felt?”

Draco flinched but didn't move. And then, of all the godforsaken things the bastard could do, he reached for her hand.

Not dramatically. Not with flair. Just his hand, inching forward like it had a right to be there. Like touch could do the talking his cowardice had failed to manage.

As if her forgiveness might be lying casually in her palm like spare Sickles. As if a graze of fingers could rebuild a bridge he had personally set on fire and then walked away from without so much as a glance back.

Some small, battered corner of her, the one that remembered how perfectly his fingers used to thread between hers, twitched in response.

Her chest tightened.

And just like that, the dam cracked.

No. No, no, no.

She had been here before. Standing on the edge of one of his silences, waiting for a version of him that might never arrive. And she was not doing it again.

Not even for a hand that still, against all logic and common sense, felt like home.

“Don’t you dare,” she snapped. “Don’t you dare stand there, looking like a half-finished sonnet, and act like this is about goodbyes.”

She reached up and yanked the flower from behind her ear, fingers trembling, eyes blazing. “You don’t get to say things like that. You don’t get to talk about missing me when you spent two years being a ghost. You disappeared. You vanished. You made yourself an empty space I had to learn how to live around.”

With a sharp flick of her wand, the flower burst into flame, curling into ash in her palm. The light cast flickering shadows across her face, furious and heartbreakingly beautiful.

“You’re a hypocrite, Malfoy. You want to be seen, but you hide. You want to be loved, but you run. And you want me—but only when it suits you.”

Draco said nothing.

He just stared at her like she was the most impossible thing he’d ever wanted and never deserved.

Behind them, Theo was still chatting amiably to Ginny, doing what Theo did best: hovering at the edge of drama like it was a spectator sport.

“Alright, this is getting intense again,” he called over. “Should we all just go hex someone together? Maybe that Cormac twat?”

Ginny tilted her head. “Tempting.”

“I’m an excellent wingman in post-bar dueling,” Theo offered, entirely too cheerfully.

Hermione shook her head and took a step back. “No need. I’m leaving.”

Draco took a step forward.

He lowered his voice, just for her. “Let me take you home.”

“No.”

“Granger—”

“I said no, Malfoy.”

His jaw tightened. She could see it, that impulse to argue, to press, to do something reckless with his words.

“Is this how it’s going to be?” he asked, quiet.

She stared at the storm grey of his eyes and let the moment hang between them like a bookmark in a story they both refused to finish.

Then, softly: “It’s how it has to be.”

Behind them, Theo was waxing poetic about Ginny’s hex form, and Ginny was pretending not to be pleased.

Hermione turned to go.

This time, Draco didn’t stop her.

“I’ll see you soon, Granger.”

Hermione turned on her heel so sharply it would have impressed a ballet instructor or frightened a lesser man. Sadly, Draco Malfoy was neither. He stood beneath the flickering pub lamplight like some sort of tragic villain who’d read too much Tennyson and never quite recovered.

“Why do you keep saying that?” she demanded, gritting her teeth.

He blinked. Wind caught the hem of his coat dramatically, the sort of theatrical flourish that might have worked on someone less immune to drama. “Saying what?”

“'I’ll see you soon.' Like it's inevitable.”

He shrugged, the very picture of nonchalance. One shoulder, slow and smug. “Isn’t it? Aren't we?"

"Aren't we what?"

"Inevitable."

Her hands curled into fists, more from restraint than rage. Mostly.

“No, actually. We're not."

He stepped forward—not too close, but just enough for the air between them to feel overly familiar. Like a breath she hadn’t meant to hold.

His eyes gleamed. Sparkled, really. It was terribly distracting and deeply inconvenient. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” he said, “if you let me hold your hand.”

She scoffed, the most theatrical scoff she could manage without turning into a caricature of herself.

“Don’t pretend you’re not curious,” he said, laughing softly.

Her heart physically dropped. It used to do that often, back when that laugh was hers and only hers. She had catalogued it like a fool—stored it in the same drawer as their old train tickets and the letters he never sent. Could count the nights she cried herself to sleep about it.

“You’ve always been the curious type.”

Summoning all the strength she could, she said: “I was curious once. You cured that.”

His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. More the beginning of one. “Are you sure? Because you looked at me like you were two seconds from climbing over that table earlier.”

“I was two seconds from hexing you.”

“Is that what we’re calling foreplay now?”

She slapped his arm. Not hard enough to hurt. Just enough to remind him that proximity came at a price.

He didn’t even flinch. If anything, he looked pleased. The kind of pleased that made people rethink their wand licensing.

She turned away, furious at herself for indulging him, for letting the rhythm of their old banter seduce her into momentary familiarity. “I told you I’m not interested, Malfoy. I meant it.”

Draco’s voice dropped to something cooler. Less teasing. “Then why are you still standing here?”

The wind tugged at her coat, her hair, and perhaps her dignity.

“Because,” she said, “I wanted to look at you one more time before I remind myself why I left all of this behind.”

The smirk dropped from his face instantly. He scoffed like he hadn’t just been sucker-punched by a sentence.

“Well,” he said, way too nonchalant for her liking, "take a long look, love—I'm not leaving anytime soon."

Once—on too many nights, really—she’d dreamed of him saying something like that. Of him walking through the door like he’d never left. Of him holding her, apologising, promising that everything awful and empty had just been a mistake, a necessary detour on the way back to her.

She’d had dreams where he came back with flowers. Dreams where he never left at all.

But real life was never so generous. And now that he was here—smirking, maddening, alive—she couldn’t help but wonder: had he missed her? Or had America simply bored him? Had the ghosts grown tedious, the food too foreign, the Arithmancers too fluent in rejection?

Because the thing about longing was that it was only romantic when it was mutual. And she was starting to suspect that she had loved him in his absence far more fiercely than he had ever missed her in hers.

She looked at him then, and the question slipped out before she could stop it.

"Did you even miss me? Or did America just run out of things to teach you?"

For a moment, he didn’t answer. The glibness dropped clean from his face like it had never belonged there. When he finally spoke, it was low, almost disbelieving.

"Did I—Hermione."

Her heart twisted violently.

He took a breath, scrubbed a hand through his hair, and then met her gaze with something naked and raw.

"I missed you like lungs miss air. Like starving things miss warmth. I missed you so much I made a list of all the ways I’d say I was sorry when I came back. I rewrote it a hundred times. None of them were good enough."

She opened her mouth to speak, but he pressed on, voice tightening.

"Do you know what it’s like to walk through entire cities and look for someone’s face in every crowd, even though you know they’re not there? Do you know what it’s like to hear a laugh that almost sounds like yours and having to sit down because my knees give out? I missed you in every time zone. I missed you in dreamless sleep and in nightmares. I missed you when I was alone and when I wasn’t, which was worse."

His voice cracked then, just slightly.

"I missed you until I hated it. Until it felt like a weakness. Until I made myself stop thinking about you just so I could breathe."

Hermione stood frozen, the wind tugging at her coat, at her heart, at every rational reason she had not to step forward.

Draco looked down, then back up, as if the truth had scorched a hole in his lungs.

"So yes," he said, quieter now. "I missed you. More than I thought was survivable.”

“You have a funny way of showing it,” she said.

“I’m not a funny man,” he replied.

“You’re a coward.”

That landed.

He inhaled like the word had caught in his lungs.

“I was,” he admitted. “You scared the hell out of me. You always did.”

Hermione blinked. “Why?”

“Because you saw me. And I’ve spent most of my life making sure no one did.”

He recoiled from the honesty almost immediately, taking a step back like he’d said too much. Hands back in his pockets. Sneer at the ready.

“But don’t worry,” he added, breezily. “I’ve had years of therapy and bourbon to work through all that.”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “You’re a walking contradiction.”

He laughed again. Soft and amused. She wanted to bottle up the sound and hoard it in her cupboard. “Be honest, Granger, was it ever boring?”

Hermione’s heart thudded once—a dull, traitorous thing. That word: boring.

He had said it like a test, she thought. Like he expected her to agree, to nod, to fold up the years between them and tuck them into the drawer of forgettable things.

But she remembered everything. Every tiny, trembling moment.

She remembered the way his voice had sounded in the mornings, all velvet and gravel. The ridiculous way he used to tuck the quilt around her shoulders like she’d fall apart without it. The first time he kissed the back of her hand just because he felt like it, and how she’d pretended not to melt, just to spite him. She remembered losing her virginity in his bed—in their bed, she had once called it—not to Ron, not to some expectation wrapped in Gryffindor red, but to Draco Malfoy, who had touched her like she was fragile and fierce all at once.

She remembered the time he said he loved her. Whispered it like a secret in the corridor still dusted with ash from the final battle. She hadn’t said it back. Not then. But she had two days later, when he collapsed in her lap and wept, and she finally realised that love wasn’t something you fell into. It was something you chose. Every day.

She remembered the way he kissed her behind the suit of armor on the seventh floor and the way he looked at her the first time he held her hand, like he couldn’t quite believe it was allowed. She remembered the second-year clue in the library about the basilisk, and how, years later, he admitted it had been for her. She remembered the time they cried together on her sitting room floor. And the time he said, very quietly, that he didn’t want to cry alone anymore.

None of it was boring.

She felt her eyes sting and hated it. Hated that she could still feel so much. That the marrow of her still answered to his name.

So she did the only sensible thing left: she declared war on her own heart.

She committed, in that moment, to never speaking to him again. To never reopening that door. To never letting herself believe that a man who could abandon her could also be the boy who once memorized all of the curves of her body in the dark.

She opened her mouth.

Closed it.

And that, apparently, was all the answer he needed. Draco Malfoy had always had a dreadful sense of timing.

Which is why, naturally, in the precise moment Hermione Granger resolved—firmly, irreversibly, down to her marrow—that she would never speak to him again, Draco Malfoy reached out and seized her arm.

Firm. Warm. Uninvited.

"Don’t—" she started, which was optimistic of her.

The world yanked sideways in a distortion of sound and magic.

Hermione landed hard on old cobblestone, knees bending with muscle memory, hand flying to her wand like a reflex. She might have hexed first and asked questions later—if not for the sharp pang of recognition that settled in her chest before her vision had fully cleared.

The scent of damp ivy. Rain-slicked stone. The weary groan of ancient walls pretending they weren’t collapsing. A fountain listing heavily in the background, now colonised entirely by moss and bad decisions.

The Beaumont Ruins.

She hadn't been here in years.

Draco, who never did anything by halves, had transported her to a memory.

“You remember this place,” he said quietly, standing just behind her like a man hoping sentimentality could act as a shield.

She did.

Of course she did.

They’d come here once, long ago. A summer evening stolen from the aftermath of war and tossed like a coin into the night. They’d sat on the fountain’s edge with firewhisky and exhaustion, saying things they shouldn’t have said and meaning them more than they admitted.

It was the first time she’d stopped pretending he didn’t matter.

“I haven’t been here since—"

"I know,” he said. “Neither have I.”

Hermione turned slowly, narrowing her eyes. “Why would you bring me here?”

He shrugged one shoulder, but it was not the lazy, careless shrug of a man being charming. It was the tight, defensive sort. The shrug of someone trying to feign indifference while mentally editing a speech they’d rehearsed six times.

“Seemed like the only place I wouldn’t say something regrettable in front of witnesses.”

“So naturally, kidnapping me was the logical alternative.”

“You could’ve pulled away.”

She hadn’t. That was, indeed, the problem.

“I should hex you.”

“You should,” he agreed amiably. “But you won’t.”

Hermione sighed. The moonlight filtered through the broken arch above them like dramatic lighting designed by an overenthusiastic stage manager.

“I thought you were going to let me leave.”

Draco was silent.

Then: “I almost did.”

She looked at him properly now. He wore his black coat like a suit of armour stitched from regrets and well-cut lapels. Jaw clenched, eyes tense, posture immaculate—as though good tailoring could save him from the weight of her disappointment.

“You don’t get to do this,” she said, soft but firm. “You don’t get to conjure nostalgia and expect it to patch the damage.”

“I’m not asking it to,” he replied. “I just needed you to remember it wasn’t all damage.”

She hated how steady her feet remained. How her body betrayed her with its stillness.

“You left,” she whispered. “No note. No goodbye. I checked for you. I thought… I thought I’d made it all up.”

His eyes met hers, sharp and sure. “You didn’t.”

“Then why—”

“Because if I’d said goodbye, you’d have asked me to stay.” He swallowed. “And I would’ve said yes.”

She stopped breathing for a moment.

“And if I had stayed,” he continued, stepping closer, “I would’ve wrecked us. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t—me. Not yet.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And you think you are now?”

He didn’t smirk. Didn’t hedge. Just nodded.

“I think I’ve spent two years becoming the version of me who wouldn’t run from you again.” He stepped forward again. Closer. Braver.

“Two years working on becoming a better man who could try to be worthy of you—because, well, I don’t think any man is truly worthy of you.”

The words floated between them like fog, stubborn and impossible to ignore. She inhaled a sharp breath, holding back tears.

“You can walk away. I won’t follow. But I had to say it here. Somewhere that meant something.”

Hermione stared at anything that wasn’t him. A bit of ivy. Her own boots. The bloody sky.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she whispered.

“Nothing,” he said. “Except the chance to matter again.”

She laughed—a short, bitter sound. “You already mattered. That was never the issue.”

He stepped closer, until she could feel his breath and hear the ache in his voice.

“Do I still?”