Bound by Silence
Hermione’s quill carved ink into parchment, the letters sharp, deliberate, unwavering—at least, that’s how they should have been. But tonight, the ink bled, smudging slightly under her fingertips, and her focus wavered more than she cared to admit. The Hogwarts library, usually a sanctuary, felt different.
It was late, but then again, it was always late when she found herself here. Another lonely night spent in the company of books while Harry and Ron were up to god-knows-what, their plans rarely ever including her past the initial invite. She had grown used to it—being the afterthought, the one called upon when a problem needed solving, but left to her own devices when the night stretched long and there was nothing immediate to fix.
Loneliness had become a quiet companion, a familiar shadow that slipped into the empty seat beside her, just as predictable as the candlelight flickering against the old wooden tables. But knowledge had never abandoned her. The books whispered their secrets into her skin, reassured her that she mattered—that her mind, her hunger for understanding, had a place in the world, even if it wasn’t always beside the people she called her friends.
And yet, she wasn’t alone. Not really. Not tonight.
Draco Malfoy had begun appearing in the library more often. It had started subtly, at first. A glimpse of pale blond hair among the rows of bookshelves, the occasional sight of him at a table not far from hers, hunched over some obscure text. And then, it became more than that.
Sometimes he read. Sometimes he worked. But sometimes, he did nothing at all, just sat there, his presence humming at the edges of her awareness like an unsung spell. He never sat too far. Always within sight. And whether that was by accident or design, Hermione had long stopped trying to convince herself that she didn’t notice.
Because she did.
She noticed how he never positioned himself outside her periphery, how, on the rare nights he wasn’t there, the room felt colder, emptier. And that thought alone was dangerous. It settled in the pit of her stomach like something she shouldn’t have swallowed, something sharp-edged and unresolved.
And then there was the way he looked at her.
It wasn’t like the sneers and glares he used to throw her way in the earlier years, sharp as daggers meant to wound. No, this was different. Calculated, searching. As if she was something to be figured out, a puzzle he had nearly solved but couldn’t quite finish. It made her uneasy, made her want to disappear into her books and pretend she didn’t feel the weight of his stare whenever he thought she wasn’t looking.
They were playing a game. A quiet, unspoken thing.
The rules existed, but neither of them fully understood them. Words between them twisted, layered themselves with meanings that never quite revealed themselves. Every conversation was a code, a cipher waiting to be cracked. Hermione had spent too many nights trying to decrypt the look in his eyes, trying to piece together the puzzle he never quite let her solve. Sometimes, she thought she had it figured out. And then, with another interaction, it unravelled again.
Maddening. But neither of them stopped.
She kept her eyes on her parchment, willing herself to focus, to push away the distraction sitting directly across from her. But she could feel him watching. Studying. As if she were the piece of parchment in front of him, and he was the one trying to decipher something he wasn’t meant to understand.
“What do you want, Malfoy?” she asked, the sigh in her voice carefully measured, betraying nothing.
Draco leaned back in his chair, the picture of casual arrogance, but there was something too calculated in his movements, too measured in the way his fingers tapped idly against the table. His wand spun lazily between his fingers, catching the candlelight with each rotation.
“And here I thought you’d appreciate the company,” he said smoothly. “Always so lonely in here, Granger.”
Her jaw tensed.
“I enjoy the solitude,” she corrected.
Draco smirked. It was slow, deliberate. “Is that what you tell yourself?”
Hermione set her quill down, finally meeting his gaze. His eyes were sharp, searching, like he was peeling back the layers of her words, digging for something buried beneath them.
“If you have nothing better to do than bother me, then leave,” she said, voice steady, unshaken.
Draco leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, and the air between them thinned. His scent—clean, expensive cologne mixed with something darker, something distinctly him—curled into her senses.
“But you like it when I’m here,” he murmured.
Her breath caught.
Her fingers twitched slightly against the parchment, a barely-there movement, but Draco saw it. Of course he did.
“You’re delusional,” she said, but the words didn’t have the bite they should have.
Draco hummed, tilting his head slightly. “Maybe.”
She inhaled slowly, grounding herself. And then, with a bite she didn’t quite feel, she said, “Won’t your friends get angry if they see you talking to the Mudblood?”
She had expected him to flinch, expected the ugly slur to cut through the air like it always did, to remind him of what he was supposed to believe, of who he was supposed to be.
But Draco didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink.
“I don’t care what they think,” he said, voice certain.
That surprised her.
She had spent years assuming that his whole world—his choices, his words, his sneers—had been dictated by the expectations of his bloodline, by the weight of his family name. That was the foundation of their entire relationship, wasn’t it? Superiority. He was better. She was lesser. It was a law written into the fabric of their world, something that had existed long before either of them had been born.
And yet, here he was, tearing at that fabric with a quiet defiance she didn’t know how to process.
When had this shift happened? When had the lines blurred? When had he stopped caring?
She tried to pull back the curtain of time, to pinpoint the exact moment—but there were too many memories, too many instances where he had been like this, and it made her head spin to realise that perhaps he had always been this way. Perhaps it was only now that she was finally beginning to notice.
The silence stretched. The library around them seemed to fade, the distance between them shrinking even though neither of them moved.
And yet, for all the space still left between them, she could feel something pulling, stretching. A thread taut between their hands, frayed at the ends, ready to snap. She could feel it, and she knew he could, too. And sometimes, she was overcome with dread at the thought of that thread finally breaking, at the thought of what would unfold if it did.
Would they fall into something unstoppable? Or would they ruin each other beyond repair?
“You should go,” she said quietly, but she didn’t sound convincing. Not even to herself.
Draco didn’t move right away. His gaze lingered, something unreadable shifting behind his eyes, something she knew she would spend the rest of the night trying to make sense of.
And then, just as quickly as he had arrived, he was gone.
The library was silent once more, save for the uneven rhythm of Hermione’s breathing. The scent of him still lingered in the air, ghosting over her skin, settling into the pages of her book as if it had always been there.
She picked up her quill, but the words blurred uselessly before her, lost in the place where silence met the echoes of things unsaid. The ink pooled at the tip, untouched, as her fingers trembled ever so slightly, though she would never admit why.
She stayed in the library until her eyes burned, until the candlelight blurred and her vision swam. The words on the parchment became unreadable, but not because of exhaustion—because they could never convey what truly occupied her thoughts. Eventually, she forced herself up, stretching her stiff limbs as she walked slowly back to the dorms, where silence was her only welcome. The castle halls were empty, shadows stretching long in the flickering torchlight, but none of them unsettled her as much as the absence she felt in her chest.
Sliding into bed, her body ached with exhaustion, every muscle weighted with the slow drag of fatigue, yet her mind pulsed with an electric restlessness—so full of him she thought she might shatter under the pressure. The feeling was a living thing, clawing at her ribs, curling its fingers around her throat. When would it end? When would she be free of it? It was irrational, and in Hermione’s lexicon, no such word existed. Irrationality was for others, for people who acted on whims and followed impulses. She was ruled by logic, by structure, by the comfort of knowing that every force had a counterforce, every equation a solution. But with Draco Malfoy, it always seemed quite the opposite.
She turned onto her side, the sheets cool against her burning skin, pulling the blankets up to her chin as though they might contain her unravelling thoughts. But they clung to her like cobwebs—silken, insidious, inescapable. Each thread was him. The murmur of his voice, the tilt of his head when he spoke, the calculated glint of his eyes dissecting her with something too sharp to be mere observation. The spectre of him had long since taken root, lingering in the corners of her mind like an ink stain she could never quite scrub clean.
It was maddening, this slow descent into something she could neither name nor deny. He was there, even in absence. A shadow cast across her consciousness, a breath at the nape of her neck, the ghost of fingertips grazing the edges of her restraint. She tried to silence him, tried to shut the door on whatever dark and twisting thing had wrapped itself around her, but it was futile. The more she pushed, the more he remained, whispering through the cracks.
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing the darkness to take her under, but even behind her closed lids, she saw him. The way he looked at her—not with loathing, not anymore. Something else. Something that pried at her ribcage, peeling her open, exposing something raw and unguarded beneath. And she hated it. Hated him. Hated herself, most of all, for letting him get this close without ever truly touching her.
There was no rationality in what she felt. She knew that. She acknowledged it. But unlike any other useless and impractical thing, she could not rid herself of him.
He had already burrowed himself too deeply into her, a presence carved into the marrow of her bones, an imprint upon her psyche. A sickness or a spell, she did not know which. Only that it had no cure. And she wasn’t sure she wanted one.