“Malfoy.”
“Granger.”
Partners. Hermione almost couldn’t believe it, almost wanted to rage and shout and shove her still-red scar into Professor McGonagall’s face, except - except she didn’t really care. Except she was far too heartbroken and tired, like a wrung out dishcloth, from weeks of brutal testimonials at trial after trial, to feel anything at all.
And in the middle of all of that, Malfoy’s trial had almost seemed laughable. She wasn’t forgiving him, but - it was hard to think of a boy your age as your worst nemesis when you had just listened to Death Eater after Death Eater list out their crimes. Torture, rape, killing of muggle after muggle - most counted at least a dozen each.
Compare that to Malfoy, and Hermione just didn’t know if she had it in her anymore. To hate.
She was so tired of hating things. It felt like the fire that had sustained her all throughout the past couple of years had gone out, and she didn’t know what was left.
Malfoy looked much the same as her. Tired. Wrung out. His long fingers tapped restlessly at one knee, his legs hardly fitting under his desk.
It was funny, Hermione mused absentmindedly, how much a year could change things. When they had left Hogwarts at the end of Sixth Year, it had felt like home, like they belonged. Now - everything felt too small, like they were adults playing at being schoolchildren again. It still felt like home, but like a home that you had left long ago, and had now returned only to find you didn’t quite know where you fit in.
Eighth Years, is what they were being called. Hermione had been far too glad to grasp at a hope of ever having the future she wanted - achieving a proper education being the first step of that - to even really think about what being back would be like.
When it was just her.
Ron and Harry hadn’t considered for a second coming back, both of them taking their own chances in the Auror Training Program. Hermione couldn’t blame them, especially Harry. She was sure he had his own memories here that he’d rather forget.
“A research project,” McGonagall was saying, and Hermione forced herself to pull her attention back to the present. She’d never had trouble concentrating in class before, but she’d never lived through a war before either.
“I want you to know that I am only proposing this because I know how driven, how talented you are,” she said, speaking to the small group of Seventh- and Eighth - years who had passed her stringent requirements to be in Advanced Transfiguration. “This will be highly theoretical. I will expect higher standards from you than I ever have before. This course is not for the faint of heart. But,” she said, and here her eyes landed on Hermione and Draco, sitting somewhat awkwardly beside each other, “I have faith in you. You are brilliant young witches and wizards. I know that you will do your best to broaden your own horizons and,” she said, pausing slightly to smile, “impress me.”
Hermione wasn’t sure they deserved her faith. But she wasn’t one to give up, and the opportunity to study ancient, rare texts as part of their research projects - “just research, for now,” McGonagall had warned, “I won’t be losing any more students” - was one she couldn’t pass up.
Apparently, Malfoy had felt the same.
Hermione couldn’t say she was surprised; Transfiguration was the one subject she had never quite managed to beat him at.
********
“Have you considered Volk’s Principle of Accountability?” Malfoy asked, running a hand through his white-blond hair. They were one week into the school-term, and he was beginning to look less like he could keel over at any minute and more like he just hadn’t slept in a couple of days.
“In the passing tense?” Hermione responded, a frisson of excitement running through her. “Wouldn’t that interfere with - “
“The permanence of the object? Not if we used - “
“Lades’ Theorem,” Hermione finished, already scribbling on a piece of parchment. “Of course! Lades’ Theorem would allow us to calculate the exact theoretical energy loss and transfer between points, which would mean we’d at least know how unstable it was.”
“Exactly,” Malfoy said, and there was, for a moment, a hint of his old smugness about him, the idea of a smile in the corner of his mouth. Instead of hating it, Hermione found that she sort of - well, didn’t hate it. He was her partner, after all. And she hadn’t realized how nice it was to have someone who actually understood her intellectual ramblings, instead of Harry and Ron, who just tried to pretend like they were listening.
“Then it would be easy to stabilize,” Hermione said. “As long as we could account for it, as long as the calculations were right - “
“They will be,” Malfoy said. Hermione raised an eyebrow. “You’re the Brightest Witch of our Age,” he said. “They’ll be correct.”
He gathered up his papers; glancing out of the Library window, Hermione was surprised to see that it was late afternoon, the low sun glinting in the sky. She knew, from the past week, that Malfoy had some prior obligation to attend to. And besides, her vision was beginning to blur - it was Saturday, and they had been at it all day.
“See you in class,” he offered, a passing goodbye, before striding out of sight.
Hermione pondered the unlikeliness of their situation for a moment, while gathering up her own things. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but surely the - the ease in which they worked together wasn’t it, the way they finished each other's sentences and could follow each other’s train of thoughts as easily as if it was their own.
She supposed she had expected them to be alright partners, maybe even good, given the combination of their past histories (a blow against them) and their aligned academic pursuits.
She hadn’t expected them to be great.
Her scar itched under her robes, sending a frisson of awareness spiraling through her. Malfoy may not be someone to actively hate and resent with all of her soul, but he wasn’t someone to be trusted.
At least, not yet.
********
The dew from the early morning grass soaked her ankles, the cool air sending shivers up her spine. But Hermione was too glad to see the morning sun to be anything close to complaining.
Behind her, Draco wasn’t feeling the same. “Granger, if I didn’t know you wanted this grade so bad, I’d think you were trying to kill me,” he huffed, still limping slightly.
Hermione smirked slightly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said primly. “How could anything in our completely theoretical research project be dangerous?”
“Bloody completely theoretical,” Draco muttered. “ I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”
“Mostly theoretical,” Hermione corrected herself. Draco just shot her a black look and set about trying to tidy himself up as much as possible, which involved a lot of Scourgifying, which didn’t seem to be doing much for the black, thick mud covering him.
(It wasn’t Hermione’s fault that he’d fallen into the bog. He should’ve been paying more attention. It was the Forbidden Forest, after all.)
She wasn’t sure when Malfoy had become Draco. Maybe near the end of October, when they’d both spent three sleepless nights studying a text that had been lent to them - via McGonagall - by some mysterious benefactor. Or halfway through November, when Hermione had finally managed to translate some runes needed for the Arithmancy that was sneakily working its way into every inch of their project.
(“Bloody runes,” Draco had muttered, after they’d spent nearly a week on one page. “Thought this was supposed to be Transfiguration.”
“You know,” Hermione had said, “Historically, Wizards used runes for far more than we do today. It’s ridiculous that they’ve been reduced to mostly higher-level study, not practical - “
“Yes, Granger, I have read Wiggleshed’s Runic Rumination on the History of Wizardkind, thanks very much.” )
Of course, her use of Draco’s first name was kept solely to her subconscious. Out loud, he was Malfoy, and she was Granger, and they were perfectly cordial - if a bit obsessed - partners.
The trip to the Forbidden Forest had been a - well, a (slightly forbidden) theory of Hermione’s. Something to do with place, and magic, and the phases of the moon. (Full, if anyone was wondering.)
As much as muggle horoscopes were complete nonsense, Hermione had to admit the the general phases of the earth had a lot more effect on its magic then she might have originally believed.
And the magic in Hogwarts was different. Changed, by centuries of human use, of house elves and students and spells and constant contact with the world.
They needed the wild magic. The magic of the forest. (Theoretically, of course.)
And it was still theoretical. They hadn’t tried anything, just done a couple of diagnostic spells, run a couple of tests.
It hadn’t been dangerous.
(Once again, Hermione wasn’t counting the bog. That was, entirely, Draco’s fault.)
But it had been - promising.
And they were both alive and unharmed, despite Draco’s whinging about the whole thing.
********
“Hermione.”
“Mm?”
She didn’t want to wake up. She was wonderfully warm and tired, lost deep in the recesses of sleep.
“You fell asleep,” the voice continued. “Not that I don’t appreciate a little rest - because I do - but if we are going to do this, we need to do it soon.”
Things were coming back to her. Malfoy. Forest. Time-sensitive definitely theoretical spell. Right.
She sat up, wiping at her eyes. “Time?” she asked, winding her hair up into a bun.
Malfoy handed her a flask of tea. “Five am,” he said, fiddling with one of the runestones laid out on the ground.
“You could have woken me,” she said. Five was perilously close to what they’d determined was the peak point in the Forest’s natural cycle of magic.
“You never sleep, Granger,” Malfoy said, giving her a look. “And this is important. If you had keeled over from exhaustion, this whole thing would be ruined. And I’d probably be expelled, for endangering one of the Golden Trio.”
Hermione just stuck her tongue out at him.
(She wasn’t sure if she’d imagined him calling her Hermione or not, but she had far too many other important things to think about right now. That was something best pondered later.)
********
“You can dance?”
“I am a Malfoy,” Draco said, in that faux-haughty way Hermione had come to know so well. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
She lifted the corner of her mouth. A half smile, but she had to admit that his hands, curved around her waist, were taking a rather large part of her attention.
Her black dress, the overlaid silver stars shimmering as the skirts swirled around her ankles, nearly tripped her. She probably would’ve ended up face-first on the marble ballroom floor, but Draco effortlessly caught and redirected her, making it look like part of the dance.
“You,” he said, mouth perilously close to her ear, “cannot.”
“I haven’t really had the occasion to learn,” she said, glancing around the ballroom. A charity function, for Post-War fundraising events, seemed like a perfect idea. Hermione just had no idea why it had to be a black-tie ball, out of all of the options. Or why she had to be there.
Well, she did know - the presence of at least one member of the Golden Trio was practically required at these sorts of events, and Harry and Ron were currently in the midst of some - apparently vital - training mission. The traitors.
She hadn’t been planning on dancing - or doing anything, really, other than make a brief appearance - but then Draco had revealed that he was attending.
One thing led to another, and now, they were dancing.
Hermione was sure every eye in the room was upon them, and not because of the striking image they cut, Draco’s white-blond hair contrasting beautifully with his all-black suit, which matched her dress, her hair half-up for the evening, spilling artistically across her bare shoulders.
Nor because of their Project (capitalized due to its importance, of course) which was serving its purpose of impressing McGonagall. Or at least, the slightly-vague progress reports were.
No, they were staring because Hermione was a War Hero and Draco was a Death Eater, and people weren’t very good at minding their own bloody business.
(Did Hermione mention how tired she was? Anyhow.)
“People are staring,” she muttered, doing her best not to step on Draco’s feet. Maybe they were staring because of her abysmal dancing, and not anything else. One could hope, right?
“Let them,” Draco said, simply, and for a moment Hermione’s breath caught in her chest.
They seemed to be caught in what Hermione had privately titled A Moment - something that seemed to be happening more and more lately.
She wasn’t sure what to think about it. She only knew that somehow, somewhere along the way, Draco had turned into - well, someone of some importance to her.
The thing was, she thought, that she knew him now. Knew what his voice sounded like when he’d just woken up. (Or when he hadn’t slept at all). Knew that he wasn’t at all a morning person, but liked to pretend he was. Knew how he took his tea and his toast, and how fussy he really was about his appearance being what he termed “proper”.
(Extremely.)
Hermione was finding out that knowing someone like that was a dangerous thing.
********
“That’s it,” Draco said, staring down at the piece of parchment like it had just proposed.
Hermione was feeling much the same way - like she could kiss it. Or someone. Draco looked up, and caught her eye, and blushed slightly. He was grinning like a maniac, hair mussed and tie askew, the Slytherin green and silver now as familiar to Hermione as her own Gryffindor red and gold.
She grinned back, stupidly. “That’s it,” she agreed.
It was it. Or as certain as they could be, at least - the final tests, the final spells, couldn’t be snuck under the radar. In the end, their project was research. Theoretical to the point of hindrance, unlike anything that would be done in a real research project, in order to - as McGonagall had reminded them, every week - to stop them from doing something stupid like Transfiguring themselves into something that they could not be easily Transfigured out of.
But still. Even with proof, even without real tests - this was it. Months of work. Months of trying to rebuild some semblance of normalcy - Hermione looked back at her September self and thought with some amount of glee that she would never believe how far she’d come.
How far both of them had come.
“That’s it!” Draco said. “Granger, I feel like you might not be properly feeling the magnitude of this moment! If this - if this works, I mean, it’ll need more testing, more adjustments, doubtless, but this - “
“ - it’ll change everything,” Hermione said, breathlessly, meeting his eyes.
It already has, she thought to herself.
“Yes,” he said. “It will.”
********
Later, Hermione will - rather absentmindedly - posit the question: what if McGonagall hadn’t paired them together? What if one of them hadn’t come back for Eighth Year?
And Draco will smile at her from whatever the latest improbable project is, hair falling into his eyes, and tell her this:
That it wouldn’t matter, because he firmly believes that anywhere, anyhow, they would have found each other - that just like the cycles of the earth’s magic, their coming together would be slow but purposeful, drawn to each other by something that didn’t have a name.
That the two of them were bound. He’d known it that first week, he claims, and Hermione always laughs at him then and calls him a flirt, because how could he have known?
But then she thinks of him in the Library, grinning at her over an impossible theory, and she thinks oh. Maybe.
Maybe she knew already, and just wasn’t ready to see it.
And Draco will grin at her with that same grin, and say that it’s not a crime to flirt, and Hermione will say that it is when he does it, and shouldn’t he have gotten better at it by now? - and it will dissolve into the type of fight that always seems to end with Hermione chucking some priceless scroll at his head, and then they have to stop before they get into the real property damage.
And Hermione will say that he’s a bad influence on her, and he’ll wrap his arms around her waist and press his face against her hair and say no, she’s the bad influence -
And Hermione will think this. This is why I fought so hard and so long. This is why I made it out the other side.
So she could have this.