Draco Malfoy is an arsehole. It works for him. Or it has for most of his life. When he was a kid it got him whatever he wanted from his parents and house elves and shopkeepers. Anyone he could order around and make ridiculous demands of. Peacocks and racing brooms and tickets to the World Cup.
Now, at 18 years old it isn’t nearly as useful to him. Being an arsehole doesn’t get him anything other than ignored by everyone around him. Written off as the Death Eater who begged for a chance to do better. Begged to come back to Hogwarts.
Fuck if he didn’t regret it after a week.
Draco came back to a place he didn’t recognize. A place he didn’t fit anymore. A place where he just couldn’t do any better .
So he found something that he could control.
He brewed potions and handed them out to the Slytherins who could stand to look at him, eyes just as haunted as his own. Families just as twisted.
After word gets out, he starts selling the potions, other things too. Muggle drugs and alcohol that help his classmates escape the castle none of them recognize.
Draco Malfoy finds a rarely visited corner of the grounds- a tall stone wall behind the greenhouses- and waits for his classmates to find him. Slipping him a galleon or two for a bit of freedom.
Draco Malfoy deals in artificial happiness. The addictive sort that people can’t help but want more of.
He sells patchwork solutions to problems none of his classmates want to face.
Firewhiskey to Seamus Finnegan who calls him Death Eater scum and tosses the galleon at his feet instead of handing it to him.
Draught of peace to Hannah Abbott who has tremors from a blasting curse she’d suffered at the final battle of the war.
Blunts to Cormac McClaggen who seems intent on wasting his eighth year getting high and sleeping with any girl who says yes.
Whatever they want, Draco gets it.
Because he is an enabler. And an arsehole.
Theo makes some comment about a dealer not taking from his own supply. Draco ignores him. He needs all of it more than anyone else.
Two months into the school year, people know where to find him.
They trickle by in the morning or afternoon, never spending more than two minutes with him. Getting what they came for and leaving.
It is a terribly kept secret. Draco Malfoy- drug dealer.
When Hermione Granger appears, staring at him as he smokes a cigarette, he expects she is there to put an end to his illicit dealings.
Only she doesn’t pull her wand out and hex him, taking points and telling him she had better not find him here again.
No, she stops a few feet away and worries her lip between her teeth.
“Granger,” Draco greets, unsure what is about to happen.
She narrows her eyes and walks closer, holding her hand out.
“Give me one of those,” she orders, her usual snappish voice gone, exhaustion clear in her posture, her voice, and her eyes.
“Lost all manners, have you, Granger?” Malfoy asks, not making any move to get her another cigarette from the carton in his pocket.
Instead of doing what he assumed she would- stamp her foot with indignation and storm off- she closes the five feet of space between them and sits on the ground next to him, leaning against the stone wall.
“Come on, Malfoy. Don’t you want to contribute to the delinquency of the Golden Girl?”
She leans her head back and closes her eyes.
Draco stares at her for a long moment, wondering why she isn’t sleeping. Because it is obvious she isn’t. Obvious in every purple shadow and deep line carved into what should be a youthful face.
He takes a drag from his cigarette and smirks.
“Here,” he says, holding his half gone cigarette out to her between two fingers.
She opens her eyes and blinks.
He can tell it surprises her, but she doesn’t take even a moment’s pause before reaching for it and bringing it to her lips.
They look dry, cracked. Like she hasn’t had any water in days.
If he weren’t an arsehole Draco might have asked her if she was alright.
She looks awful. The fingers holding the cigarette shake subtly and her nails are bitten to the quick.
“Give it back,” Draco snips, as she takes another long drag.
She exhales slowly, the smoke heavy in the damp highland air.
“Willing to put your mouth on something a mudblood touched, Malfoy?”
It is nasty. The way the word clings to her mouth, dripping with spite. The way she says it as if it doesn’t mean anything to anyone but the pair of them. Like it is a private insult he came up with all on his own. Like it is a word only she has ever been a victim of.
If Draco Malfoy is an arsehole, Hermione Granger is a bitch.
Draco laughs. A dry bitter thing that makes Hermione look at him again.
“Give it here,” he says, ignoring her attempt to bait him.
She hands it back, their fingers brushing.
He brings the cigarette to his mouth and thinks about what she said.
After he exhales, he brings his knees up and rests his arm holding the cigarette on it.
“Is that all you wanted? One cigarette?”
Hermione sighs, loudly.
“Elixir to Induce Euphoria.”
Draco presses the butt of his cigarette into the ground at his side and drops it.
“Why not brew it yourself?” He asks.
“Draught of Peace too.” She ignores his question.
Draco frowns. He has both already brewed, sitting in his room in a box disillusioned beneath his bed.
“Why?” He asks.
She laughs. Sharply.
“You don’t really care, Malfoy. So just name your price.”
Draco’s jaw clenches. He thinks about how hard things have been since being forced back for this stupid attempt at normalcy.
No one in the castle wants him there. Even the people who come to him for draughts and fags and liquor wish he was anybody else.
At least once a day he ends up on the floor from some hex he doesn’t bother trying to shield himself from.
Students whisper about the Death Eater allowed back into the castle, given a short lead to hang himself with.
The professors pretend to care, but none of them step in to stop any of the jinxes or comments that leave Draco hurting in more than just a physical way.
Draco Malfoy is public enemy number one.
But he isn’t the only person suffering. He knows that.
Everyone didn’t just wake up after the war and move on. People were hurting. That was why he was so successful with his little operation here. More than hurting, his classmates were aching, burning, screaming.
Even though Draco and Granger are sitting next to each other, silent, Draco knows they are both screaming.
You’d have to be a sociopath not to be.
“Fine. Come back tomorrow. Two galleons a piece,” he says when he can speak without choking on the words.
Granger doesn’t immediately stand up.
He reaches into his robes and pulls out the carton of cigarettes, slipping one out and casting a wandless Incendio to light it.
“Here,” he says, offering it to her.
She takes it and then sits there, not sharing, until the cigarette is burned down to the end.
No words shared.
She puts it out on the stone at her back and then gets up, leaving in silence.
After that, Granger finds him behind the castle at least once a week. She comes early. Before anyone else is awake. One time Draco even finds her waiting for him, well before dawn, thumbnail in between her teeth.
They don’t really talk, but she stays longer than any of his other customers.
They exchange pleasantries. Or the opposite of pleasantries. Scathing remarks that have lost all their sharp edges since the end of the war.
She insults his family, his pointed face, his inability to beat her at anything involving magic.
He insults her hair, her blood, and her inability to ignore a cause.
Except Draco doesn’t have any more family. His face has filled in. And he really doesn’t give a rat’s arse if he graduates, let alone gets more NEWTs than her.
And Hermione’s hair is soft, controlled, and pretty. Her blood status doesn’t matter now that she has saved wizardkind. And she hasn’t picked up any new causes since school started back up.
Draco isn’t who he was.
Granger isn’t who she was.
Draco is a stoner chasing after oblivion and a life he doesn’t loathe.
Hermione is a burnout know it all who is way too smart for her own good.
They make a perfectly pitiful pair.
The Death Eater arsehole and the Golden Girl bitch.
Hermione Granger is done with saving the world. Done with living for other people. Fighting for everyone else while her body, her mind, her soul is battered beyond recognition.
When she returned to Hogwarts it was with an easy plan. Heal her friends, ace her exams, and help put the wizarding world back together.
She lasts all of six weeks.
Hermione makes it six weeks into her seventh year when she cracks. Following the war, her torture, her parents, Harry dying and coming back from beyond the veil, Hermione keeps herself together. Acts as the beacon that the rest of the world wants her to be. Helps put the castle and the wizarding world back together again.
Pours from a cup so empty it cracks into dust.
Six weeks into a school year that feels like a faraway vision, a little girl, all of 11 years old, comes to her crying because a ghost materializes in the Great Hall. A kid.
Hermione manages to hold it together long enough to comfort the girl and wipe the tears from her cheeks and then Hermione breaks into a thousand pieces.
She doesn’t leave her bed for three days, sleeping in fits and refusing to talk to anyone.
And nobody knows what to do because nobody else is Hermione Granger.
Once her body is starved of food, tears, and emotions, Hermione manages to stumble back into the world.
She isn’t the same, but no one can really tell.
They don't see her sneaking potions and smoking cigarettes. Downing bottles of alcohol just to avoid seeing blood covered children and vacant eyes in her sleep.
Hogwarts isn’t exactly an easy place to gain access to illicit substances. Drugs, alcohol, potions.
So eventually Hermione has to look for someone who can get her what she wants.
What she comes to need.
A Hufflepuff tells her that the stone wall hidden near the back of the greenhouses is a good place to get what she is looking for.
It might be a little twisted of her, but Hermione likes seeing Draco Malfoy.
He’s a fucking mess.
She might not be able to sleep through the night or finish a full meal or laugh at her friends jokes if she is sober, but he’s way worse.
He can’t sleep at all, can’t keep down food, can’t talk to anyone else in the castle without trembling and reaching for the carton of cigarettes in his robes.
She likes to sit beside him behind the greenhouses and breathe in the depression. The anxiety. The fear.
It is nearly half term when she realizees that they pair of them are a match made in hell. Two sad things waiting for an end they can swallow.
It is a freezing cold day that finds her winding her way outside, casting a useless warming charm, and finding Malfoy alone.
“Morning,” she says, purposefully leaving out the word that would indicate it is a good morning.
“Granger.” Malfoy is already slumped against the stone wall, his knees bent towards his chest and a joint in between his fingers, the smoke disappearing in the dim shadows of early morning.
He has blood on his chin.
She ignores it while she gets settled. Sits beside him and takes the joint when he offers, taking a slow inhale.
They smoke together in silence, Hermione waiting to join Draco in what is clearly a dazed state.
“What happened to your face?” She asks, grabbing the wrapped sandwich that she knows is for her from the ground between them. He’d been doing that every day since she’d mentioned the weed makes her hungry. Bringing her breakfast.
“That sounds like something I’d ask you,” he chuckles wryly.
Hermione ignores that and reaches into her bag, pulling out the paste she’d made for wounds like his.
“Here.”
“Granger, you may be comfortable accepting unknown substances from a former enemy but I’m not.”
She rolls her eyes.
“I developed it when my piercing got infected last year. Works great for small infections and cuts,” Hermione explains.
“You have a piercing?” Malfoy asks, sounding more than skeptical.
Hermione nods, wiping the sauce from her chin with her thumb.
She sucks the sauce off and then puts down the paper wrapped sandwich.
“Last year. Bit of a ‘ prove I’m an adult’ moment.”
“Your bellybutton?” He asks, looking over her face and ears and drawing the most sensical conclusion.
“Nope.” She laughs, thinking of what Ginny had said to her in the muggle tattoo parlor where she had gotten her piercing.
No one in the whole world would guess the Golden Girl has her tits pierced.
“No fucking way,” Malfoy says when he narrows down the options.
He is staring at her chest. Maybe if she wasn’t high and bored, she’d be upset by it. Instead, she just shrugs and picks her sandwich back up.
It tastes divine. Like the Welcome Feast at the start of a new year, or the best birthday dinner she’s ever had. It tastes like the greasy chippy that her Da took her to after dance class when she was little.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not going to show you my tits, Malfoy.”
“It’s not like I want to see them. There is just no way the goody two shoes, prim and proper princess of Gryffindor, Golden Girl has got her nipples pierced. No fucking way.”
Hermione takes another bite and ignores him. Malfoy doesn’t know her any more than her friends do.
Even if they waste hours in this godforsaken pit together.
Hermione finishes her sandwich, balls up the wrapper and lights it on fire in a quick wandless wordless whisper.
“Fuck you.” Malfoy says when he spots her wandless, wordless magic.
“Fuck you,” she answers because it is the most satisfying answer she can come up with.
Malfoy is the bane of her existence.
He is so pitiful but he’d kill her if she ever made him feel like she sees him that way.
And he is a good source of contraband substances so she isn’t about to duel him to the death.
“Okay, I was lying. Of course I fucking want to see them.”
She laughs again, feeling detached.
Now that she’s eaten, the buzz has cut evened out, making it a bit more enjoyable.
“Not happening.”
She leans her head back against the wall and closes her eyes.
They just sit there for a while, Hermione’s breathing evening out.
She has a lot to do today. Classes for one. Homework for another. Dinner, presumably.
Harry and Ron’s quidditch practice.
“You’ve got to stop thinking so bloody loudly, Granger. Or I might just confund you and take a peek myself.”
She opens her eyes.
“Fuck you,” she snaps, grabbing her bag and standing up, her legs a bit numb from being locked in the same position for so long.
“Fuck you.” Malfoy answers.
She leaves him sitting there in the pit they have carved out for themselves.
Draco stuffs the extra sandwich into his robes, ignoring the house elves running around the kitchens like it is on fire.
He’s been feeding Granger.
Just a sandwich now and then. And only when she is high or drunk or under some influence that makes her accept food from him.
Her sallow cheeks fill out a bit.
She isn’t there when he reaches the greenhouses, but he knows she’ll be along shortly. It has been a week since her last fix and he brought something new this week. A synthetic muggle drug that is supposed to make you feel like you are flying.
When she shows, she skips straight to the pleasantries.
“Fuck you,” she greets, sitting next to him- so close their knees touch- and taking the sandwich from his hands.
“Fuck you,” he answers, pulling the small vial of pills out of his pocket.
He waits for her to have a few bites, not wanting her to forget it is there, before holding it up and smirking.
“How much?” Granger asks.
He shakes his head.
“It’s new. I’m not sure what you’ll think of it,” he says.
Malfoy hasn’t collected money from her in weeks.
She sticks a hand out and waits for him to open the vial, pouring two pills into his own hand before handing her one.
She pops it into her mouth without waiting, swallowing it dry and going back to eating her sandwich.
“Right,” Draco says, incredulous.
“It isn’t poison is it?” She asks when he continues staring.
“Bit late to ask that, don’t you think, Granger? Maybe you aren’t as smart as everyone says.”
She laughs, brighter than she ever has in his presence before.
“Maybe I want it to be, Malfoy. Ever think of that?”
Draco hates her for that.
“Here’s hoping,” he says instead of what he wants to. He puts the pill in his mouth and swallows it just as she did.
“Fuck you,” she says, not an ounce of malice in her tone.
“Fuck you,” he answers, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.
The muggle pills are sort of a bust. They don’t really make Hermione feel any better and they don’t last as long as potions do. Nor do they feel so forbidden.
Awful.
Immoral.
People are prescribed pills all the time in the muggle world. Her own parents had prescription pads.
That was how people dealt with things.
Potions were different. They weren’t made just to fix things. Some were made to poison, to kill, to muddle and confuse.
Hermione asks Malfoy to play around with the Draught of Peace. See if he can’t introduce a bit of hallucinatory effect.
Draco is forced to relocate when it starts to snow. Even warming charms and shields aren’t enough to keep people coming to find him by the greenhouses.
So he takes up residence in the dungeons, in the old dueling club classroom.
Granger tells him it is depressing. A real pit. And then she spends hours, lying on a pile of furs he’d stolen from the Slytherin Common Room.
Looking up at the ceiling which is enchanted much like the Great Hall only it shows the galaxy rather than the sky.
“I want to try something new,” Granger says one afternoon, when the pair of them are supposed to be in Transfiguration.
“I’m not sure there is anything left in the world you haven’t tried,” he snorts.
Hermione was adventurous. She tried plants, synthetic pills, alcohol, potions, weed, nicotine, even charms to chase away the feelings she didn’t want to feel.
Draco liked to be with her when she was under the influence.
He doesn’t think they’ve been sober at the same time since that first day she came to find him.
“Sex,” she says.
Draco blinks, his fingers freezing, the cigarette in his hand remaining unlit.
“Fuck you, Granger,” he snaps after a second, moved out of his freeze by the realization that she is taking the piss.
“That’s exactly what I want, Malfoy. I want you to fuck me.” She sits up.
He ignores her.
She moves onto her hands and knees and crawls across the fur covered floor towards him.
He swallows, bringing the cigarette up to his lips.
Before he can mutter the spell to light it, she is two inches from his face, her magic lighting the cigarette in a silent flash.
“It works. To escape. I know it does. Sex. Pleasure. Stimulation. Shut me up, Malfoy. Fuck me so hard I can’t remember the fucking death and destruction and loss,” she begs him, voice wet and needy.
“No.” Draco smokes his cigarette, thinks about hexing her. Sending her flying ascross the room and away from his lap where she has made herself comfortable.
“Please,” she whimpers, sitting back on her ankles and looking at him like he is the drug she wants more than any other.
Addicted. Draco has turned her into an addict and he didn’t even mean to.
“Hermione,” he exhales, needing her to realize what she is asking. Needing her to sober up just enough that her dignity comes back to life.
“You want to, Draco ,” she says, his first name dripping from her lips like hot honey.
He shouldn’t have used her first name.
“Sober the fuck up, Granger. Fuck off and sober up,” Draco snarls, pulling his legs from either side of her and scrambling to his feet. He stamps out the cigarette and tosses it in the corner.
He looks down at her and nearly fucking cries.
She is kneeling there, face flushed, hair wild, tears in her eyes.
Her shoulders are caved and he knows it is because the weight of the world is pressing in on her.
All she’d had that morning was a cigarette and a shot of firewhiskey.
They’d been rotting in the pit together for hours.
She is sober. At least as sober as he is.
“I’m sorry,” he mutters.
His head hurts. His chest too.
She just stares up at him, eyes glassy, lip between her teeth, holding back.
Draco kneels down in front of her and takes her face in his hands.
“I’m sorry, Granger. What do you want from me?”
His voice is gone, scratchy and weak.
She blinks and the tears spill over, but before he can wipe them away with his thumb, her lips are crashing against his, stealing his breath.
Sex. She wants sex from him.
When she pulls her face back, his hands stay cupping her jaw.
“I’m only going to ask one more time,” she warns him. “Will you please just fuck me?”
She’d heard him say no. She isn’t touching him, her own hands wrapped around her stomach.
“Yes, bloody fucking witch,” Draco swears, crashing into her and pushing her onto her back, her head falling amongst the furs.
Her legs move from beneath her and her hands reach for the hem of his shirt, pushing it up until they have to split apart so it can go over his head.
He tears at her blouse, relishing the buttons flying off the pale white cotton in a violent motion.
She arches against him, her stomach flat and smooth and he bites at her lip.
Draco wastes no time in pulling her skirt down her legs, her tidy fucking knee high socks left in place because he hasn’t the desire nor the time to waste on removing them.
Hermione is all writhing pleasure and soft moans, keening for more of his touch.
His fingers tear at her panties until her hot center is right there and her knees are falling apart for him.
He pushes up only long enough to unbuckle his belt and shove his pants down.
She pushes herself up onto her elbows only long enough to unhook her bra. And fucking Merlin and Morgana, she really does have her fucking tits pierced. Two small silver bars decorate her nipples, the skin around them pebbled from the exposure to the cool air and the heat between them
And then he is sucking at her left breast, nipping at the soft skin and the cool silver and teasing her as his fingers slip through her folds.
“More,” she pleads, a hand slipping into his hair and the other coming up to her other breast, pulling at the piercing and eliciting her own sounds of pleasure.
Draco wants to fuck her.
She was right. There is nothing else in the whole fucking world right now.
Just her and her moans and the feel of her heartbeat under his lips.
He shifts again, positioning himself so he can press his cock into her warm wet cunt, pressing one of her knees back until she hisses and paws at his chest.
“Now,” she demands.
Draco growls and nods and lines himself up, pushing into her and leveraging himself against her body, one hand holding himself up as the other grips the skin of her thigh.
Allowing him to push in and out of her at a rapid pace, a punishing pace.
Fucking her with as much anger and spite and desire as he can while his whole world pigeon holes into her.
Into just her.
She screams as he fucks her, her hands groping and teasing her tits, begging him to move faster, go harder.
He can feel when she tightens around him, when her breathing gets so short and static that he isn’t sure her lungs are getting their fill. He presses his body down against hers, his cock moving deeper inside. He slips his arms around her and pulls her up against his chest, her legs moving around his thighs as he pistons up inside of her.
She clings to his back, her head tossed back and her eyes rolling back.
“Fuck me, Draco. Fuck-” she gasps, she keens. She does exactly what Draco wants her to do. She is everything Draco wants.
“Fuck,” he groans as she clenches tighter, as her nails dig into his back.
She comes seconds before he does, trembling and clinging to him, pressing her face into his neck, breath hot and labored against him.
He kneels there, her arse resting in his hands, his cock going soft.
When her breathing becomes a bit more steady he pulls out of her and lays her back, more gently this time.
The tears in her eyes have spilled down her cheeks and her eyes are rimmed in red.
She pushes her hair back from her face and he stares openly at her naked body, her tits splayed in front of him, piercings glinting in the low light of the empty classroom and the galaxy illuminating her body.
Her cunt glistening from a mixture of his cum and hers.
“I knew it would work,” she whispers.
His pants are around his ankles, him not even able to shed them before he’d been inside of her.
“You were the only thing that existed. For a few minutes,” she says, her left knee coming up to rest against his hip.
He can’t stop himself from pressing a hand into the soft skin of her thigh, holding her skin to his.
She is right.
“Bottle it up, it would be better than the elixir of euphoria,” he agrees.
“But it is all still out there,” she says, eyes flashing sad, gaze moving to the door across the room.
Draco doesn’t look at the door. He doesn’t want to.
All he wants is to ignore the rest of the world.
And because Draco Malfoy is an arsehole, that is what he does.
He sheds the rest of his clothes, pushes a cushion under her hips, and helps her escape from the world once more.
He escapes too, in the taste of her cunt, the feel of her walls around his fingers, and the tight grip of her fingers in his hair as she pushes his face further between her legs.