Green Apples and Unfinished Things

HERMIONE

It was a singularly awful evening, the kind that wraps around a person like damp wool—cloying, vaguely humiliating, and full of all the wrong kinds of tension. Hermione Granger Apparated home with a sound like cracking knuckles, arriving just beyond her wards in the dark lane outside her terraced house. She landed with a jolt and a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, the stone pathway beneath her boots cold and stubbornly real.

Her coat was askew, her curls a wild, undignified halo about her face, and her lipstick was thoroughly and inconveniently smudged. She adjusted her scarf with excessive dignity, as if that might erase the last thirty minutes of catastrophic emotional entanglement.

Her hand was halfway to her front gate when a voice drawled lazily to her left: “Well, well. If it isn’t the woman of the hour.”

She froze.

Spun.

There—leaning casually against her wrought iron fence—was Theo, looking irritatingly comfortable with his coat collar up and his ankles crossed like this was a planned appointment.

Beside him stood Ginny, arms folded, hair slightly windblown, smirk already in place.

Hermione blinked. “What are you two doing here?”

Ginny shrugged. "I could ask you the same thing. You vanished in the middle of the night without a word, and I figured you’d need moral support—or bail money—depending on how things went.”

“I thought you went home.”

“I was going home,” Ginny said cheerfully. “But then I saw you vanish with your favorite mistake, and I thought… she’s going to need someone.”

Theo glanced at Hermione, eyes flicking over her quickly—messy hair, flushed cheeks, the look of someone who’d just made out with her past and remembered why it had to stay buried.

“Go home, the both of you," Hermione snapped, unlocking the gate with a flick of her wand and a grim sense of ceremony.

"You kissed him, didn’t you?" Ginny asked, trailing behind her.

Hermione hesitated. Just long enough.

Theo let out a low whistle. "That’s a yes."

She turned to glare at both of them. "I’m going to bed. Possibly forever."

But then Theo’s phone buzzed in his coat pocket. He fished it out with the laziness of someone who only ever answered calls from two people—his tailor and the person currently calling.

“Wait, is that a Muggle mobile?” she asked.

Theo glanced at her like she’d asked if he were wearing shoes. “Obviously.”

“You own a mobile phone?”

“Several,” he said, answering the call with a dramatic sigh. “Hello?”

Ginny leaned over his shoulder. “Ask him if she punched him.”

Theo held up a finger. “Mm-hm. Yes. Still with Weasley.”

His eyes flicked to Hermione, amused. “Yeah. Granger’s home.”

Hermione took a step forward, brows furrowed. “Is that—is that Malfoy?”

Theo grinned, nodding slowly. “Mm. Sounds breathy. I’d wager post-emotional spiral.”

“Give me that,” she snapped, reaching for the phone.

He yanked it out of reach. “Ah, ah. Private call.”

“You’re telling me Draco Malfoy—traditionalist, bane of modern convenience—uses a Muggle mobile?”

Theo arched an eyebrow. “He’s evolved. Slightly. Still types with one finger, though. It’s tragic.”

“Why—how—what?”

“He got it in America,” he explained, shrugging. “Apparently he was tracking some black market, dark magic smuggling ring. As it so happens, burner phones were easier than enchanted journals. Also he finds texting more efficient for threatening people.”

Hermione just stared. “You’re all deranged.”

“I take that as a compliment,” Theo said. Into the phone: “She’s giving me the face, mate. You know the one.”

Ginny cackled. “He means your ‘I’ll hex you into oblivion and feel no guilt about it’ face.”

Theo listened a second more, then rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’ll tell her. No, I won’t pass that on verbatim. Because I value my life, Draco. Honestly—”

Hermione crossed her arms. “Tell me what he said.”

Theo lowered the phone slightly, smirking. “He says—and I quote—‘tell her I shouldn’t have kissed her, but I’d do it again, and next time she’ll beg me not to stop.’”

Hermione blinked.

Ginny let out a long, slow whistle.

Hermione turned. “I’m going to bed.”

Theo called after her, phone still pressed to his ear. “Want me to schedule the next emotional ambush? I’ve got next Thursday free!”

She flipped him off over her shoulder.

He laughed and shared a look with Ginny, then with identical shrugs, followed her up the walk.

Hermione unlocked the door with a grumble and stalked inside.

“You're not seriously coming in—” she began.

“Too late,” Ginny said, breezing past her.

Theo followed, already unwinding his scarf. “If we're fixing the mess, we might as well be warm while doing it.”

Hermione let out a strangled sound that could have been a protest—or indigestion—but didn’t bother to throw them out.

She collapsed gracelessly into her favourite armchair with a theatrical sigh, kicking off her boots like they were the true villains of the evening. Ginny took the settee, curled up with the familiarity of someone who’d claimed it months ago in a diplomatic accord. Theo hovered for a moment, then helped himself to the arm of Hermione’s armchair, draping one leg over the side table as though he’d been summoned there by Parliament.

Hermione said nothing. Her expression was somewhere between “murder” and “emotional hibernation.”

Ginny gave her a moment.

Theo did not.

“Right then,” he said, plucking a biscuit from the tin on the coffee table and biting into it with gusto. “Draco’s not going to tell me anything, the broody little bastard, so that leaves you. Spill.”

Hermione glared at the biscuit tin like it had betrayed her. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Of course you’re not,” Ginny said gently. “That’s why you need to talk.”

Theo nodded sagely and reached for another biscuit. “Verbal purging. Very therapeutic. Also, it’s the only way we’re going to make sense of whatever disaster just occurred.”

Hermione groaned, burying her face in her hands. “He said—he said the reason he left was because he felt unworthy. Because he needed to prove something. To me. To the Ministry. To the wizarding world. Like some emotionally stunted martyr.”

Ginny blinked. “That tracks.”

Theo hummed sympathetically.

“He said,” Hermione continued, voice rising slightly, “that he needed to be ‘better for me.’ Like I was some divine bloody reward he could only claim after two years of international brooding and noble suffering.”

She snatched the biscuit tin and took one furiously. “And then—and then—he had the audacity to joke about how he slept with women who reminded him of me. Brunettes with control issues, he said.”

Theo nearly choked.

Ginny raised an eyebrow. “Did he live to tell the tale?”

“Barely,” Hermione muttered. “And then—Merlin—I kissed him. Or he kissed me. I don’t know. It was mutual. It was reckless. It was—”

“Amazing?” Theo offered.

Hermione hurled a cushion at his head. He caught it easily, stuffed it behind his back, and grabbed another biscuit.

"He told me," Hermione said suddenly, tone sharp and brittle, "that you used to tell him he didn’t deserve me. All the time."

Ginny didn't even blink. “Obviously.”

Theo nodded with a shrug. “You should’ve heard the way he used to go on. It was a full-time job talking him out of sulking off cliffs.”

Hermione stared at them like they’d both personally contributed to her undoing.

“And,” she went on, jabbing a biscuit at Theo like it was a wand, “he said he kept track. Of everyone I dated. Every man. Every fling.”

Theo winced. “Yes. He has a ledger.”

“A ledger.”

“Organised alphabetically. By surname. With colour-coded annotations.”

Ginny’s jaw dropped. “Wait—you’ve seen it?”

Theo reached for another biscuit, looking far too comfortable. “I helped him format it.”

Then, with a shrug so casual it was nearly insulting, he added, “Draco’s loved you for years, you know. Painfully. Loudly. In silence. It’s honestly exhausting to witness. If he put half as much energy into his emotional development as he does into memorising your schedules and pretending not to care, he’d be… well, he’d be a lot less annoying.”

He tossed the biscuit tin lid aside with a clatter. “He called me the second he landed, by the way. Before he even saw his own parents. Said he was going to find you. Went to your flat first. You weren’t home. So the idiot goes to St Mungo’s, flowers in hand, looking like a character from a particularly weepy French novel.”

Ginny blinked. “He brought her flowers?”

Theo nodded solemnly. “Handpicked. Said something about fourth year Herbology class. Waited in the bloody waiting room the entire length of her shift, clutching them like he was auditioning for heartbreak. And then, right as she gets off work, Adam shows up and kisses her.”

Hermione froze.

Theo, watching her closely now, finished softly, “He said it felt like drowning in his own lungs." Theo sighed. “And then—because he is, in fact, a lunatic—he broke into your home and waited in your bedroom. I tried to talk him out of it! Told him it was criminally insane and he said—and I quote—‘At least I’ll know she won’t shag him while I’m there.’”

Hermione made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob, choked on both, and buried her face in her hands again. Her shoulders shook, and for a moment, neither of them were sure whether she was about to hex the room or start crying.

Ginny reached over and rubbed her back gently, while Theo’s expression, for once, softened with something resembling guilt.

The two shared a glance over Hermione’s head—a silent conversation between co-conspirators who had gone one step too far.

Theo stood. “Right. That’s our cue.”

Ginny followed suit. “We’ll give you some time to decompress.”

Theo paused at the door, throwing one last look over his shoulder. “He’s an idiot, Granger. But he’s your idiot," he said, before closing the door shut.

That, apparently, was the line.

Hermione Granger, contrary to popular belief, did not cry easily. She was a firm believer in suffering silently, in the dark, with a cup of lukewarm tea and a sense of moral superiority. Crying was reserved for deaths, injuries, and extremely moving literature. Or weddings where they released live butterflies. That sort of thing.

So it was rather annoying to find herself crying now.

Even worse, she hadn’t done it stylishly. There had been no slow, cinematic tears. No noble collapse. Just an ugly little gasp in the hall, somewhere between her third mental curse at Draco and the exact moment the lightbulb above her entryway flickered, sputtered, and went out with a fizzling pop.

It was a spectacularly timed betrayal. One final insult from the universe, as if to say, "Yes, actually, this night can get worse."

She didn’t even summon her wand. Just stood there, half-lit and wildly undone, and let the darkness settle in with all the weight of memory and unresolved desire. She wanted to feel the mental and physical anguish of being so blindsided by a kiss from Draco Malfoy, former almost-lover, in its entirety.

When she finally got up the stairs, she threw her jumper over a chair and her dignity somewhere less convenient, possibly the bin. Her shoes stayed on because even in despair, Hermione couldn’t stand cold feet, and she made her way down the hall like a woman climbing toward an execution—pausing only to kick a stack of unread post out of spite.

Then, like some awful magnetic pull from the universe—or, more likely, her own worst instincts—she opened the hall cupboard.

It was the worst cupboard in the house. Everyone has one. The place where all the things go when they can’t be thrown out, but are too emotional, too cursed, or too stupid to be put on display. The graveyard of past versions of oneself.

And there it was.

The box.

She hadn’t labeled it, of course. She was too sentimental for that. (Or, more likely, too cowardly.) But it sat on the second shelf with the quiet menace of something waiting to be rediscovered.

She pulled it out, dusted it off like it had personally wronged her, and carried it to the sofa like a cursed artifact in an Indiana Jones film.

Inside: chaos.

Photographs, ticket stubs, two owl feathers (black, unmistakably his owl’s), a Slytherin scarf she swore she had returned, and—most damning of all—a folded napkin from a Parisian café with Draco’s handwriting on the back:

This place is terrible. You’d hate it. I’m bringing you next time.

She stared at the napkin like it might sprout legs and dance across the room. Or burst into flames. Either would have been preferable to what it actually did: nothing at all.

It had been their thing, sending snide letters via enchanted parchment, enchanted socks, enchanted anything. Once, he’d sent her a lemon tart in a Transfigured quill case. It had exploded in her bag. She’d laughed for a week. Then kissed him behind the Ministry atrium.

Her fingers moved through the box like they weren’t hers. Like they belonged to some other version of Hermione—the one who believed in second chances and poetic justice and men who left and came back whole.

A photograph slid loose.

She picked it up with trembling fingers.

It wasn’t posed. It had been taken without either of them knowing, probably by Theo. She was reading, brow furrowed, and Draco was lying beside her on the grass, head tilted toward her like he was listening even though she hadn’t said a word.

His storm grey eyes as he looked up at her: twinkling and pure, adoring and loving.

Promising and devastating.

And suddenly, the ache rose like a storm. Her chest burned. Her face crumpled.

A hiccup of breath. A tightness in her throat.

And then tears.

Not the quiet, noble sort. The wild, ridiculous kind that take you by surprise—betray you utterly. Tears with sound in them. The kind that ruin the collar of your jumper and fog your glasses and make you miss the man and hate him all at once.

She sobbed like she hadn’t in years. Loud, ugly, guttural. The kind that yanked memories from the past and hurled them like stones. Every whispered joke. Every fight. Every apology that had come too late or not at all. Her fingers trembled as she picked up one photograph after another—Draco on her sofa, holding Crookshanks like it was a hostage negotiation; Draco on the balcony at that awful hotel in Prague, hair tousled by wind and smirking like he owned the sky; Draco pressed beside her in bed, asleep with a book open across his chest.

She wept over each image like it had betrayed her personally. Every one of them was a dagger dressed as a memory. Every smile, a ghost. Every touch, a wound reopened.

She pressed a crumpled ticket stub to her lips—a show they never made it to because they’d argued in the alleyway behind the theatre about whether or not she was too stubborn. He’d made her laugh halfway through yelling. She had loved him for that.

Her tears soaked through the edge of an old note written in the margins of a spellbook: "Don’t overthink it for once, Granger. Just let me in." She’d kept it. Like an idiot.

The scarf—green and silver, stupidly soft—still smelled faintly like him. She buried her face in it, keening, all composure lost.

She wasn’t crying like someone broken. She was crying like someone who’d held it all in too long. Who’d written essays and saved lives and answered every owl, but never healed the part of herself that Draco Malfoy had ruined by simply existing in the exact way she’d always wanted.

It was grief. But worse—it was longing dressed as grief, and hope still foolishly clinging to the hem of despair.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered, furious with herself, with him, with the universe for continuing to rotate in spite of it all.

She curled onto her bed, knees to chest, the scarf still in her lap. She clutched it like a lifeline she’d sworn never to grab again. Her chest hitched with every breath, each inhale a battle between reason and ache.

Crookshanks, sensing catastrophe with the precision only Kneazle-cats possess, leapt up beside her and butted his head against her shoulder. When she didn’t respond, he meowed once—sternly—and then climbed into her lap with a groan that suggested long-suffering tolerance of dramatic humans.

Then, with all the casual cruelty of fate itself, Crookshanks yanked the scarf from her hands and curled himself into it with a purr of ownership. He batted at one of the photographs that had fallen across the duvet, then gave it a slow, deliberate lick—right across Draco’s smiling face.

Hermione burst into fresh sobs.

She cried for all of it.

For the missed chances.
For the years lost.
For the letters never sent.

For the photographs she never framed.
For the man who kissed her like a promise and left like a coward.

For the version of him she couldn’t hate—no matter how hard she tried.

For the girl who once believed she could fix him.

For the woman who still wanted to try.