The room feels cold when she apparates.
Colder, at least. After one week in a low-rent, non air-conditioned, objectively awful apartment by the coast in Markree, County Sligo, she is suspicious that her general sense of acceptable temperature has gone down at least three degrees.
Still.
Hermione’s fist involuntarily tightens around the handle of her wand as she shivers, the hairs of her arm rising, bristling with newfound electricity between her skin and the starchy, uncomfortable fibre of her cotton shirt. She can feel the stem of her wand trembling, glowering with her magic. She presses her lips in a thin line and lets the insidious trepidation—that has found a home in her, this trapped, grovelling monster, part of her life since the last three years—take control of the next few steps. Hermione is almost at home with it, the tension, the gut clenching sense of dissociation when she lands in a place not entirely safe, not entirely her scene, where a wrong foot means losing that foot.
This isn’t supposed to be one of those places, though.
With the tip of her wand gleaming a threatening red, she takes a careful step. There’s the familiar Rochester Lamp burning at the corner of the room, beside the dressing table. The golden flame flickers with the sporadic onslaught wind from the open window, making shadow and light dance inside the small, mediocre motel room. The bed is made, there’s a torn parchment on the writing table beside the window. Hermione dwindles between relief and distrust at the smells of cedarwood and vanilla—candles she remembers buying. Underneath it, like an afterthought, the sweet, sharp smell of parchment scribbled with fresh ink. He has a habit of making notes almost with religious desperation. In the early days of their… cooperation, she thought it was his incorrigible neatness.
Now, though.
There’s a sound of water running in the bathroom, muffled by the closed oak door. Hermione is afraid to call out his name. This is an unusual time for him to come here, more unusual, almost criminally uncharacteristic, is the cryptic note he sent her. Doubt simmers under her blood. Should she cast a stupefying charm? Strong enough to stun someone unsuspecting, but harmless... well, relatively harmless to recover from? An invasive image flashes through her head. A clipped off toenail. Hermione shakes her head determinedly. Better safe than sorry.
She raises her wand. The tip glowers with a bright scarlet light.
The door opens. A tall, rather angular figure comes out of the shower.
“You came,” Draco Malfoy says pointedly.
The relief leaves Hermione in a strangled breath. Her ears ring, blood rushing to her head as she takes a step back, then another, almost choking on the silent gasp. She hadn’t realised how tightly she had been holding onto her wand, hadn’t realised that her heart was pumping so ferociously, ready to combust, or fight.
Both, a nagging voice chimes in her head.
Draco, on the other hand, looks obscenely calm. He has wrapped a towel at his waist. The only piece of clothing on his slick, shiny body. The water dripping from his head makes the silvery blond hair a shade darker. Cool metal.
He cocks his eyes at her raised arm.
“I was going to hex you, you moron,” she hisses, dropping the wand instantly. A soft, harmless whistle splits out from the abandoned weapon as it hits the ground.
“You could’ve been hit.” The words would probably sound more menacing if she weren’t so busy trying to steady her breathing. Still, she glowers at him in anger.
He scoffs. “So I see.”
The unresponsive parts of her senses finally flood into her as she regains her composure. Her stomach is caught up in a bout of empty fists. She hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. The one glass of glucose water she downed sourly now sloshes uncomfortably in her stomach as she watches Draco shrug, reaching out to the side of the dresser for another towel, calmly drying his hair.
Hermione blinks hard against the distraction, his calm demeanor, the light from the bathroom beaming lazily over his hair like a halo, and wrenches out the hair band to let the curls fall free. Her hairline prickles with sweat, it drips on her fingers as she feels the taut muscles of her shoulder. It’s been a terrible day, she tells herself. That’s why I’m so suspicious. She walks over to Draco. The light from the bathroom shadows him to her. She can’t read his expression without standing in her tiptoes.
“Is the water still warm?” She pulls out her dragonskin gloves—a gift from Draco for her twenty first birthday last year. When she takes off her shirt, a warm waft of damp sweat makes her cringe.
He hums.
The hairs on her arm pricks against the stale air. She shivers. The room is still cold, even after the adrenaline has done its course. An unnatural, insidious chill slithering on the slope of her curves. Like trepidation. Disturbingly invasive. The dried scratch of wound on her left wrist prickles uncomfortably.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Why did you call me at this—”
He tilts his head. The light glints on his cool grey eyes, and she finds him studying her with a blunt expression. “I found another one today.”
Her breath hitches. Her entire body turns rigid at the instant. It feels as if a cool sleet of ice has passed over her, crystallising her blood. Of course. It makes sense now, the time gap, the tightness, the marrow deep, senseless chill.
“Where is—?”
“It’s safe.” He raises his hand, twirls a strand of her hair away from her face. Instinctively, she leans up. “Perfectly safe.”
The last sleepy trail of her heartbeat picks up its pace again at his words. The slick velvety softness masking the bleak… disconcertion. Anger. His eyes flick over hers before he bends down. His lips are cool, and the kiss feels dry.
“What’s wrong?” she asks again, hating the ever constant timbre in her voice; something he is able to scratch out every time. Every useless emotion she feels through the day, every sparse, renegade bit of fear, anger, dread, anxiety, relief bulks up in a nauseating clot and hover at the back of her throat. Like a patchwork map of her psyche, a secret aching to bleed out. Most of the times she lets it out by fucking him, most of the time she cries until she can’t feel her eyes.
Most of the time, he lets it out by fucking her, other times it’s by breaking walls—the muggles here have exceptional rule of discretion for the depleting witches and wizards. Mostly due to obliviate.
Feeling gravity betray her when he drops his hand suddenly, Hermione gulps down the dread to make room for logic. Rationality. She tries to stand still as he walks away to the bed. He flicks his hand and the piece on the flies to her.
Hermione catches it with her heart in her throat. It’s her own handwriting, graciously juxtaposed by the slant, looped scribbles of his own. Numbers and code names and incantations pulsing off, linked together in a mess of briar-patched words around her own, interconnecting under the ubiquitous eye that could be found in every piece of paper he sends to inform The Order, to her.
The ink bleeds off when she touches the side of the eye. A lash smudges out.
She smells the sharp, kerosene-likesmell. She coughs before saying, “This is the coordinates to the place I—”
“I’ve been thinking,” he starts calmly, just like he always does, no matter the subject. It’s the result of a ruthless self remodeling routine, his demeanour. Hermione has only seen it slip in this room. “About what you said the other day.”
“About what?”
His voice drops lower, becomes silky, intent, “Horcuxes.”
She had been obsessing over the pieces of dark magic when he came along to the other side. She remembers the night. The ungodly storm bellowed hardest as ever when the knock came at the shell cottage. Six wands flew at once, aimed menacingly, meticulously at his chest. Hermione’s was not among them only because she was too weak to do so. A poisonous hiss, a call for blood and bruising before… Bill made them stop.
She forgot the topic of discussions and repercussions and what it was that made them finally come to a grudging compromise, but she could never forget his eyes when he stared at her for the first time in the homely cottage. It was almost dawn. The putty grey-blue light of the unborn sun shimmered into the kitchen. His lips trembled before he looked up and straight into her eyes. It was the first time she realised how grey his eyes were, how colourless. Ethereal. Something unspeakable passed through them. More than apology, more than shame. It was guttural, his regret. It had moved something in her. She agreed to give him the chance.
Sometimes she wonders if that was a mistake, for him and her. If the connection was a noose for either of them.
Both of them.
Horcruxes.
“What about them?” She tells him so much now, it’s hard to keep track. It’s an insidious mistake, she knows. Even though he’s risked his life for her—for them—more times than she could count, she knows they’re only on borrowed time, imbalanced resistance. One wrong word to the wrong person, and everything falls apart. She reminds herself of this truth fruitless when he tells her about his day, whatever dark spells he cast, how many pieces of his souls are forever tainted to its velveteen touch. How much he still hates his father.
His favourite sweet is sherbet lemon. So is hers.
“About their origin. How they’re made.”
“And?”
The initial theory of Dumbledore has long proved to have been wrong. Voldemort didn’t create just seven horcruxes, as they realised when Draco came to them carrying an archaic family ring dripping with dark, disturbingly familiar magic. Hermione has since been studying numbers to figure out exactly how many horcruxes might be out there. The number, as she is suspecting, has a disturbing chance of being among three figures.
“And how Nagini is one of them.”
She flicks her fingers to close the window. “Yes, I think—”
“So.” He drags his nail on the line of his jaw. “I was thinking about another live thing that could have been—”
Her breath stutters. She has to sit down by the side of the bed before she can process anything else. Oh she can tell where he’s going with this. The temperature in the room drops down a few more notches.
“He’s one of them, isn’t he?”
Hermione closes her eyes determinedly. The rapid, thumping beat of her heart picks its pace with a vengeance. It feels as if it actually wants to tear itself out of her. She doesn’t even have the energy to try and act coy, as who he is talking about. She clamps her hand on the soft, warm duvet. Silk fluttering on her skin.
Her wrist pricks.
“Yes,” she whispers, conjuring the image of the bright green eyes and a smile that leaves nothing a secret.
“Ingenious,” he says sourly. “What’s a more resilient weapon than a live—”
“Don’t talk like that,” she snaps. The image disappears into darkness.
“How else do you want me to talk? How else could I possibly talk about it?”
She blinks. His face is hidden inside his hand. She thinks it’s probably better that she can’t see the venom in his eyes. “Draco—”
“I have been risking everything to assist you in your quest for Horcruxes. Everything.”
A broken bone, its white, dome shaped head jutting out of his knee. The healer said he won’t be able to play quidditch anymore. A blasted toe, deep, dark blood spraying over his ankles.
“I know—”
“And now I realise that no matter how much I suffer… how much you suffer, it’s worthless.”
“This is not worthless. What we do is—”
“I come back home.” It pierces her heart that home means the rented, squalid hotel room. “And my girlfriend is not even honest with me.”
Her lips curl involuntarily.
A terse silence.
“Oh.” He sneers. “So you’re not even my girlfriend. Fuck buddy, then. A vessel to leak out your frustrations. That’s what I am to you people anyway, right?”
“No. You are more,” she bleats. “You know you are—”
More than just a vessel, more than a body. He is the bright bold freshness after a weary day. A splash of colour in the bleak reality. He is the boy waiting for her in this make-believe home.
Most of the time, he is all that she looks forward to.
“I get it, OK? I get why your people think I am… but I thought we had honesty between us, I thought you weren’t going to send me to my fucking death—”
Always the worst raids, always the more brutal tortures. Make that death eater blind. Take the hand. His nights are endless nightmares alternating between things he’s already done to things he would do, would have to do. The scar on her wrist lights up like a candle. Hermione notices all this with her one eye open. One hand clasped tight around her heart. She tells herself that this means more than them, more than any of them.
“It’s not like that, Draco,” she finds herself saying, almost begging. “I wasn’t sure how you’d take it. I wasn’t sure how to even think about it.”
“Does he know?”
“He suspects.” She takes a shaky breath. “I suspect, too, you know. There’s nothing indefinite to say that he is a… a—”
“Yes there is.” He snaps his head up, stares right at her. “It all fits.”
That was their code word, wasn’t it? The both of them used to put the wretched world together like puzzle pieces, accepting bleak truths no one else was willing to accept. That was what drew them together, wasn’t it? It was not about lust or anger or resentment, at first. It was about understanding. The morbid, intelligible realisation passed over them across bread and butter. Recognising the tired animal in each, staring at it without blinking. Touch came later. Much later.
“Do you think,” he says now, across the bed, across an ocean, “when the time comes, you’ll be able to kill him? Will anyone?”
“How can… how can you ask me that?”
“I’ve been bombarded with tough questions ever since I’ve joined the lighter side, Granger. Now I get to ask questions about dubious allegiances.”
Will you be able to kill your aunt, Malfoy, if it comes down to it? Or will you change sides again, craven? How about your father? What if we have to use your Manor for shelter of muggleborns, of mudbloods? Could your pureblood walls take that?
That was, of course, before both of his parents turned up dead at a suspicious fire that burned down half of the Malfoy estate.
“Will you be able to do that for the greater good?”
She is near hysteric as she fishes for a coherent answer. Heart beating in a mad, mad frenzy. The words are too fast and slippery for her to grasp. “It won’t be like that! I swear I… I’m trying to find an alternate way. There will be, there has to be—”
“You saw what happened to the diary. The locket and my ring. There is no way to destroy the horcrux without completely destroying the vessel. Beyond repair.”
“Harry is not a vessel,” she hisses, the words sound menacingly wrong even as she says them.
“Then what is he?”
“My friend.”
His entire face twists at this. As if it suddenly dawned on him what he had been asking. His lips press into a thin line, quivering. Hermione holds her breath as they reach on the precipice of the ever enfolding hill, the bridge burning in hungry, orange flames, the fault lines dwindling between him and her, always rippling, always pulling them apart. His cheeks flood with colour. Suddenly, he looks much younger.
Almost as young as his age.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” He did.
“I know.” She does.
The moment swirls, shivers into something like a dream, not entirely real. They shouldn’t be talking of these stuffs, of lambs and slaughters, of sacrifice disguised as goodwill, of the greater good. This is a safe haven, this is a place where they are different people, not what the war spits out, broken and tired. Jagged. Suspicious. Wrong. Seeing enemies in strangers, blood in water. In this room, they are whatever they want to be. And what a glorious dream that is. What an enchanting person he becomes. Someone who belts out Latin when he’s righteously outraged, someone who has the Epic of Gilgamesh memorised like the back of his palm, someone funny, mischievous, with a mind as deep as it is wide. Hermione likes to speak in codes with him, she likes to melt in the warm, warm sheets and wonder about stardusts and evolution, not worry about him catching up to her thoughts. He is always there.
Draco offers his hand. In the flickering light, she can see his fingers trembling.
The room is still cold. But, Hermione imagines, his arms would be warm. “Come here.”
Late at night, as she tries to regain her breathing, he plays with her now fresh hair. The lamp has long been extinguished. What little light remains in the room stands as only the testament to the resistance of the moon. Hermione watches sheets of dust wrinkle in the silvery light breaking through the window, a soft, fresh smell of mint now invades her senses. An iridescent glow hovers above. She wraps her hand around the one he has draped over her stomach, taps lightly on the bend of his elbow. She can feel his eyes on her face, on the shallow dip of her collarbone. Careful. Contemplative. She can tell he’s still searching for forgiveness.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Hermione closes her eyes. Breathes in deep. “It’s alright. You… weren’t wrong about me holding back. I’m sorry about that.”
“I just… I want to be good. I want—” His voice breaks. He wants to be so many things, she’s afraid she won’t get a glimpse of most of them. She’s afraid, when the war is over—if, a terrible, gnawing voice in her mind says, if the war is over—they wouldn’t know where to pick up from the mess they’re making at this place. Every touch is an attempt at coping. Every promise seems like a rope to hold onto.
“I want to be good. But most days, I don’t see the point. Of hunting horcruxes, putting my life, your life out there… How does Potter do it, anyway? I feel I’d pitch myself off the astronomy tower if I had to…” He chuckles sourly. “But that’s a lie, isn’t it? I’m still here. Still living.”
“Not just living. You’re doing something good. Something that matters..”
“Yeah, sure.”
She tilts her head to stare. Her eyes linger on his nose, the hollow under his eyes, the sharp angle of his face, always standing out in challenge. The pale skin gleams in the shallow light. His eyes are calm, liquid silver. His sort of beauty always puts people off guard. Not entirely homely. Not easy to look away anyway.
“We all need to come to terms with difficult boundaries,” she says softly.
“Yes, but... you shouldn’t have to. Not you.”
Hermione tries to be innocent to his intentions. But she knows. He is protective of her. He tries to make her choices easy, every time they go on excursions. She remembers finding the sixty-fifth horcrux with him. The woman they had to kill to get away. She knows he tries to tackle her morality, how fragile it is in times like this. He treats it like the centre of his gravity; if someday she slips, she knows with a piercing certainty that he will fall right into her.
A briar patch pain slather in her chest. They should’ve been here sooner. They should’ve had this sooner. All the things that separated them, blood, name, houses sound so frivolous she wants to cry.
A plague on both your houses, she thinks grimly. Look what you made of us.
“We all have boundaries.”
Faulty lines crackling under the weight of reality. Somehow she has landed herself in a world where nothing is constant. The lines keep shifting, shrivelling, changing with foreign, nefarious interferences. Once Draco Malfoy stood at the far end of the other line. She wonders how many of the lines will shift, new boundaries emerging, taking her—taking them—further and further away, before they turn into someone they don’t even recognise.
If she never met him—again, if she hadn’t met him again—the world would have looked easier to navigate. Every action and every resolution could be placed neatly into boxes of good and evil. But now…
“We do.” He brushes away her hair to kiss her neck.
“I can’t forsake... everything to this war.”
Not Harry. Not Ron or Ginny or... him.
“I know. I have boundaries too. I just… they’re so different from yours that I… forget. I slip.”
But are they? Different? Hermione remembers that stormy night in Cheshire. A flock of rouge dementors hounding over them. She fell flat on the ground, feeling the cloying stickiness of blood dribbling down her neck. Draco could’ve left. He could take the amulet on his hand that wasn’t injured and apparate. No one could blame him, not really. Hermione was hoping for the bleeding to quicken, deplete the oxygen level of her body so when the dementors finally came she would be far away in her mind.
When the bright silver warmth of his patronus broke in, it felt like the sun. It felt like being born. She swore that day, feeling his angry tears on her cheek as he was chiding her about her lack of protection and general sense of self-preservation, that she would return the favour. The warmth of the sun. Rebirth.
She knows he isn’t ready to hear of these promises; the world is too chaotic, too uncertain. Right now they can only find solace in an obscure room in a muggle motel.
“I can’t lose the people I love,” she whispers, praying that he knows it includes him, fearing that he doesn’t. “It’s selfish, I know. But I can’t be made to make these decisions.”
She’s too young. She’s given so much already. Not this not this not this too.
“I understand.” He does. Always did. That’s what drew them together. Something about the tar black parts of her soul, the one not strong enough, the one cursing at the universe with undignified tears, the one using sex to deflect from the ever encroaching void in her chest—the ones too ugly to look at, he places his fingers on them, brushes away the soot and dust and denial and looks right at the eye. He likes her eyes, she knows. He draws them on every piece of parchment like it’s a charm on its own.
Hermione takes a shaky breath. “Where do you draw the line?”
His eyes flick over her face. In the moonlight, the colour transforms. From something cold and unattainable to something soft. Almost melting.
“You,” he whispers, as if it’s a secret, as if she doesn’t already know. “Only you.”