Drabbles

Once he’d seen who’d matched with who — and who’d actually followed through enough to disappear into a room together — Draco bailed.

As he walked down the quiet corridors toward Granger’s room, he amused himself with the imagined stories Theo and Pansy would regale him with over breakfast, already picturing the cheeky grins and purposefully indifferent flicks of their fingers. Pansy liked to pretend she wasn’t just as dramatic as them, but that was just because her sort of drama was on another tier entirely. 

He let himself into Granger’s room, thankful not for the first time that McGonagall had seen fit to give the returning 8th Years a tiny bit of personal freedom. They were fully-fledged adults, after all.

He found his little darling sitting at her desk, something he marked with fondness and absolutely zero surprise even though it was after eleven on a Friday evening.

She spared a quick glance over her shoulder at the sound of the door, the scratch of her quill unceasing, and then went back to her work. He observed her for a moment, head tilting as he considered whether she was just being her typical busy self or if she was actively ignoring him. It was sometimes hard to tell, and he’d had his head bitten off for making the wrong assessment before, but he couldn't think what he'd done wrong.

“Hi,” he said, when she was still scribbling away.

Her quill still didn’t stop but her voice was perfectly pleasant when she replied, “Hello, Draco.”

He narrowed his eyes, still unsure. She hadn’t warded her door against him so the odds were rather favorable that she wasn’t upset with him enough to bar him entry – not that warding the door worked when he was determined to get to her and make things right. 

He toed his boots off then drifted closer, hands in his pockets. “Doing the essay for Sinistra?” he inquired.

She hummed a noncommittal sound, reaching forward and flicking through the open textbook beside her parchment. He caught sight of a sky chart highlighting the location of Cassiopeia before she turned past it. That was a yes, then.

He approached until he was standing next to her desk. She didn’t look up but he felt her attention shift to him, the energy in the room concentrating somewhere around his solar plexus; her eye level. 

He resisted the impulse to lift a hand to protect his tender insides because despite her definite ability to cast wandlessly and wordlessly, he trusted her. So he waited. 

As he’d predicted, it wasn’t more than thirty seconds before her patience wore out. 

“So, who were you matched with?” she asked. Her voice was purposefully light. 

He frowned at the non sequitur. They only did joint work in Potions and she was his partner. “Matched with?”

She rolled her eyes at her essay. “Honestly, Draco. Matched with – at the party you literally just left?” 

Her tone implied she was genuinely asking, and was genuinely exasperated with him. He was quite familiar with both but in this instance, he didn’t think he deserved the latter. 

“Oh. I wasn’t matched with anyone. I told you, I was just going to observe the spectacle.”

She snorted, incredulous. “Oh really.” 

He frowned. "Where’s this coming from? I told you what I was doing. I’m sorry if I didn’t make my intentions for the evening more clear but I promise you, I was purely on the sidelines. And I’d never have gone at all if I knew you’d be upset by it.”

“On the sidelines,” she repeated, like even that small phrase had damned him. “Lovely. Well, did you see anything interesting then?” 

At this point, he may as well shut his eyes for how much he’d narrowed them at her. And then realization struck.

“Granger,” he said, hoping his tone matched how sincerely he wanted to untangle her misunderstanding. “I didn’t mean sidelines like that – everyone who did elect to get paired off went somewhere private before doing anything together. It wasn’t that sort of a party.”

She finally turned to face him, eyes conducting a quick survey of his expression. He kept it open for her, a trick he’d had to unlearn the reverse of. He'd evidently managed to convey his honesty because she hummed a short sound and leaned back, crossing her arms over her chest. A brow flicked up and he braced himself.

“Far be it from me to interpret you saying you're going to a signet ring party didn’t mean that you were in for an evening of debauchery.” 

He tried to keep his expression serious and contrite but when her jaw tightened, eyes going sharp as knives, he felt almost giddy. He knew that expression anywhere; he wore it almost constantly when he watched her from across classrooms and hallways and Great Hall, cataloging the body language of the other boys she spoke to, assessing and reassessing the sort of friendship she had with each of them.

She was jealous.

Jealous of what he'd gotten up to because she saw him as hers and…and oh Merlin, she was jealous.

The thought filled him with a heady rush of devotion.  

He wanted to get on his knees for her; wanted to press his forehead to her lap in supplication; wanted to openly and publicly pledge himself to her. Sure, they’d only been together since the summer and, yes, she’d only just breathed the word boyfriend into his ear the night before (and oh fuck what an orgasm that had been), but he’d known the truth since before she’d even let him kiss her. She was it for him.

And he was disastrously, desperately, destructively hers. He’d tear his legacy apart to prove it. 

“If you had a signet ring, I’d wear it,” he promised. She looked unimpressed by this and he had to remind himself that she was likely unaware of the significance of that. He clarified. “I’d take your name. Make it mine.” 

She scoffed but it felt performative, like she didn’t mean the note of derision in it. Like she’d had to try to put it there, to try and conceal the truth. “Maybe I don’t want to be a Malfoy.” 

He stepped around the edge of the desk, leaning down until his nose pressed into the crook of her neck – his second favorite place to bury his face – and breathed her in. She tilted her head, letting him closer, and he took a moment to savor being accepted by her before correcting her assumption.

“No.” He pressed the word to her neck; felt her shiver. “I meant I’d take yours.”

He could feel her heartbeat against his lips, erratic and pulsing harder when he kissed her softly just below the ear. 

“You wouldn’t.” She didn’t sound sure. 

He wanted to make certain she knew he was. “I will," he murmured. "I’m yours. It’s not even a question; it’s an inevitability.” 

She raked her fingers through his hair, making a fist at his crown and tugging him up so she could see his face. He replaced his head with his hand, thumb stroking down the column of her throat, feeling the lingering condensation from his breath. He rubbed it in, a small knot of tension loosening as he felt a part of him sink inexorably into her skin. 

“You think we’re inevitable?” Her eyes searched his and for a wild moment he thought she was going to sigh and push him off her – the act of it suddenly felt so real that he lived the tiny nightmare of it within the space of a blink, his heart seizing and stomach dropping down to his feet. 

When she sighed, his heart really did stop in a cold terror, but then her mouth was fighting the upward pull of pleasure and her eyes were softening, and his heart restarted at double-time. 

“Well that’s very romantic, but I’m not going to just fall into your arms because Fate decreed it.”

He almost jumped in to explain that he hadn’t meant he was entitled to her or destined in a way that diminished the very real, very intentional way he felt for her, but then he caught her expression. 

She was giving him the coy, not-quite-flirty look that had brought him up short all those months ago when she’d sent it to him across the rubble of the castle courtyard that summer. He hadn’t been surprised to see her assisting with the repairs and when she hadn’t seemed particularly surprised to see him helping either, he’d taken that first stumbling step toward falling for her. (And after that first step, he'd been running to the metaphorical cliff.) 

The look she'd given him had been a challenge. An invitation. See if you can catch me, it had said. I want you to try.

“Ohh,” he murmured, understanding sluicing through him, warm and calming, like whisky in tea. “You’re playing hard-to-get? That’s cute.”

It was cute – and it was cruel. Delightfully, desperately cruel. He was wild over it. 

“I’m not playing at it,” she retorted but her eyes betrayed her, sparkling with the mischief he’d been delighted to discover lay just below the surface of her studious exterior.  

He nodded seriously. “No, of course not. You’re extremely hard-to-get. I’ve never had to work so hard in my life.” 

The edge of her mouth twitched and then finally curled up, breaking her straight-faced charade. “Not that the bar for that was very high.”

“Hey,” he protested, laughing. “I had to work for lots of things.”

She raised a brow, uncrossing an arm so she could rub her thumb and two first fingers together in the universal sign of money. He clicked his tongue but…well, she wasn’t entirely wrong. She accepted his capitulation with a little smirk of victory and then held out her hand.

“Let's see it then.” 

He looked at her palm, as if reading it would tell him anything about his mercurial witch. “See what?” 

She was openly amused now. “Merlin, did you leave your brain with your boots? Your signet ring.”

“Oh.” He raised his right hand, looking at the silver ring on his littlest finger for a moment before rotating his hand to show her.

She raised a bemused eyebrow and beckoned him onward with the fingers of her raised palm.

“Oh. Right.” He worked it off and dropped it in her hand, confused as to why she wanted it. She picked it up and inspected the insignia for a scant second before humming a note of satisfaction and sliding it onto her middle finger. She admired it for a moment and then held up her hand in a mimicry of what he’d done, showing him. 

“I like it,” she said. Her expression went unbearably fond. “And I don’t plan on ever taking it off.”

He tried not to freak out. 

He failed.