Construo Cosmos
"Construo Cosmos… Nebuleffio… Construo Cosmos… Dissipio Stellae… Dissipio Stellae… Construo Cosmos…"
Hermione set her wand down slowly on the table beside Draco's bed and stared upward. She smiled a little at what she'd done, and she reached for Draco's hand beneath the blankets. He made a soft little noise, and she reached to stroke at his bare arm. He'd come to bed shirtless, in only black flannel pyjama trousers, after washing up in the shower. Hermione had put on one of his long-sleeved shirts for layering and her knickers.
For some reason, sleeping in his shirt made her happy. The sleeves were too long, but, even clean, it smelled like him. Cedarwood and a hint of peppermint. Clean and dignified.
She should hate him, Hermione knew, but she absolutely did not hate him. She stroked his arm again and whispered,
"Draco, I've made something for you?"
"Hmph…" Draco rolled toward Hermione a little and blinked his eyes open a bit. He yawned a little and squeezed at her hand. "What's wrong?"
"Look up," Hermione told him. Draco frowned but rolled onto his back, and then his full lips parted.
Hermione lay beside him, still holding his hand, and she said,
"I think this is how they do it at Hogwarts. Haven't worked out the real-time weather changes or anything, but…"
"It's brilliant." Draco sounded awed as he stared up at the bedroom ceiling that Hermione had enchanted. Gone was the visual limit of the ceiling, replaced by the endless abyss of space. Shimmering stars, distant galaxies, colourful nebulae… they were gazing up at the heavens, created by Hermione when she'd woken with an idea.
"How… how do you do things like this?" Draco gazed up at the beautiful sight above them. Before Hermione could ask what he meant, he specified, "Those coins you made for Dumbledore's Army. Hexing Potter, having the presence of mind to do that, so the Snatchers wouldn't recognise him. The way you duelled in battle, the way you can expertly Obliviate and repair memories. This… this work of art you've made. How? How do you do this?"
He tipped his head toward her, and Hermione felt overcome by him all of a sudden. She shook her head a little and said self-deprecatingly,
"I just use my want and cast spells. That's all."
"I am sorry," Draco said, and before Hermione could insist that they were through with apologies, he continued, "I am sorry for buying into the ludicrous notion that the magic of a Pureblood was somehow better than the magic of a Muggle-born. Because you, Hermione Granger, are the most talented witch in the entire world, I think, and your parents use metal tools to fix teeth."
Hermione laughed a little, but her smile faded when she felt his thumb drag over the slightly raised scar on her wrist. Mudblood. His eyes welled in the twinkling light from above them, and he said sincerely,
"I wish it had been you to kill her and not Molly Weasley."
Bellatrix, he meant. Hermione shook her head and insisted, "Mrs Weasley had earned it. And, anyway, I don't want to kill anybody. I've never wanted to kill anybody."
"You did give me a very good punch to the nose," Draco reminded her, and Hermione reached to brush her knuckles over his cheekbone.
"Good thing I didn't do any damage. It'd be a hell of a face to muck up."
"Hermione." Draco pushed himself up onto one elbow then, and he stared up at the slowly moving stars and galaxies and nebulae that Hermione had created. He kept his eyes up at the ceiling as he asked, "Did you mean it? What you said last night, about us being… you know, together?"
"Yes." Hermione left it at that. Draco kept staring up, until finally he lowered his eyes to her and said in a careful, quiet voice,
"I'm a little afraid of what you make me feel. You might accuse me of being easily frightened, and I suppose I've been a coward many times over the years. But you, Granger… you terrify me more than anything else in my entire life."
Hermione frowned and sat up. "Why?"
He took her face in his hands and then dragged his fingers through the French twist that she'd released into messy waves. He studied her eyes and then her lips, and he touched his mouth gently to hers before he whispered,
"Because as much as I've spent years whinging about telling my father or bragging about who I knew, I always felt like others were accessories or means to an end. Not necessities. Nobody else was really necessary. Nobody else actually meant anything, at least not anything significant. Not until you, and you feel very necessary. Very significant."
Hermione couldn't control the way one tear boiled up in her left eye then. She let Draco brush it away as she eyed the pale pink Dark Mark on the inside of his left wrist. She glanced up at the cosmos she'd made, and then she lowered her eyes to him and said,
"I've needed people my whole life, for a lot of reasons. But I have never felt my heart race and my breath catch over anybody else. I've never… I've never wanted someone like this, Draco. Not just what you did to me last night - which was amazing, I should point out - but things like dinner. Things like lunch at the Ministry. Pizza. Wine. Terrible films and amazing operas. I want to be together with you. I want people to know that I'm together with you, not because of politics, but because you make me happy and I'm utterly unashamed of that. Now, please, will you kiss me?"
He answered by pressing his lips to hers, and she opened her mouth at once to let him in. They both tasted of sleep, but no one seemed to care. They slowly lay back down and Draco pulled the blankets over them. Hermione moved her lips to Draco's neck, and he huffed a breath as she reached between them. He was going hard, she could feel. She gave him a questioning look, but he insisted,
"I just want to hold you. That sounds childish, doesn't it?"
"No." Hermione rolled away from him and then backed up until he could wrap his arms around her. After a long moment, the firmness in his pyjama trousers faded, and he laced his scarred left arm over her scarred left arm. He laced their fingers together and whispered,
"This is the most beautiful night sky I've ever seen. I reckon you'd have to be an astronaut like the one in that awful film in order to see something like this. I doubt you could see it from Earth. All the damned electric lights."
"Before Muggles filled the world with electricity," Hermione noted, "there was no light pollution, and even in the largest cities, you could see the Milky Way cast across the sky."
She stared up at the stars and galaxies she'd crafted, and she admitted,
"The Muggle world does not deserve to be destroyed, but it is far from perfect."
"Nothing's perfect," Draco mumbled, "though my bedroom ceiling right now comes damned close."
Hermione smiled a little and watched as his fingers dragged over her knuckles. He used his right hand to push her hair aside, and he kissed the skin below her ear as he whispered,
"I bought you a birthday gift."
"You did?" Hermione turned her face a little. "My birthday isn't for weeks."
Draco smirked. "Oh, I've got plans for you, Granger. All sorts of plans. Gourmet meal, beautiful gift… the sort of thing I did to you last night and then some…"
"Draco." Hermione laughed and turned her face away again, soaking in the warm feel of his breath against her hair and neck. She stared up at the heavens she'd made with her wand and absorbed the sensation of Draco snared around her.
He was hers now, and she was his.
If she'd told her third-year self that someday she'd be in bed with Draco Malfoy, fingers tangled, talking of birthday gifts, she'd have punched her own damned self in the face. If she'd told herself even two years earlier that she'd be wearing Draco Malfoy's shirt in his bed after he'd brought her to paradise with his mouth, she would have thought it was some sort of trick, some sort of terrible joke.
But this wasn't a joke. And as much as Ron and Harry couldn't bring themselves to forgive Draco, Hermione had reached the point where she could make all sorts of excuses for what he'd done as a brainwashed child. The wizard tucked behind her was a different man than the boy she'd loathed.
She liked this wizard.
She…
No. Not yet.
Hermione sighed and asked him,
"Do you have nightmares?"
"From the whispers, you mean," Draco murmured. There was a long pause, and he admitted, "Only very occasionally. I don't know those people. I have loads of nightmares, but they're about other things. Used to be seeing people fall, seeing people die. Now I dream about my mother asking me if it was you, if it was the Granger girl, and I said yes."
"You hesitated," Hermione pointed out, turning her hand over and staring at both of their scars. "You said yeah, maybe. You didn't want to turn us over, did you?"
"I didn't want to, but I did, in a way. And then I was out in the courtyard, and I heard… I heard you screaming. It was the most wretched sound in all the world."
Hermione squeezed her eyes shut. She could still feel the digging, searing, awful pain of Bellatrix's torture, the way she'd been deliberate messy and haphazard in carving the word Mudblood into Hermione's arm.
"I have nightmares about it, too," she admitted. "But then I remember that the war is over, and that we won. And you're on the right side now, Draco."
"I need to tell you something." There was a sudden urgency in his voice, a sense of desperation that made Hermione turn slowly to face him. She glanced up once more at the ceiling as she did, seeing that her creation was fading a little, that the ceiling was coming back into view. She faced Draco and asked him,
"What's the matter?"
"Hermione." His pale eyes seemed afraid all of a sudden, and he cupped her jaw in his hand. The twinkling light from above was evaporating; her Conjured work was diminishing. Draco's face was barely visible in the darkness, and once the last bit of light from Hermione's enchantments gave way to inky black, Draco murmured,
"I'm not sure I could ever actually understand what it is, much less feel it. I'm not sure I'm a… a good enough person for it."
Love, he meant. Hermione's heart started to thrum insistently in her chest, and her breath hitched inside her throat.
"And, anyway," Draco was continuing, "it hasn't been very long. Definitely not long enough for… anyway, I need you to know that I wasn't having a nightmare before you woke me up. I was dreaming of you, but it wasn't a nightmare."
"Was I reading a book again?" Hermione asked, trying frantically to break the tension. Draco was silent. He brushed his lips against Hermione's and whispered against her mouth,
"I didn't realise, Hermione, what it could be to feel alive like this. And the dreams I have of you… I want them to be real. I want you to be real for me. I want to be real for you."
"This is real," Hermione said gently, kissing him again and curling up against his chest as he rolled onto his back. "We are real, Draco. You. Me. Our past and our present. Some sort of future, whatever it may be. It's all real. I'm not going anywhere. Are you?"
"No." He stroked carefully at her hair, and a very long silence followed. Hermione could hear his breath, steady at first and then shaking and shallow. "Hermione."
"What's the matter?" Hermione pressed her palm to his chest and brushed her lips against his shoulder. "What's wrong, Draco?"
"I may be wrong," he said. "I may not understand. I may have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, but something inside of me is screaming it, a drum pounding out the idea of it being true, and I…"
More silence then, and Hermione just kept stroking his chest as she waited for him to speak again. Finally Draco stammered,
"I don't… I can't… it hasn't been long enough, and we hated one another long enough, but I… I think that I…"
"Draco." Hermione pushed herself up onto her elbow and let her hair fall down around her face and onto Draco's chest. She brushed her fingers along his collarbone and whispered, "Just tell me."
Draco huffed a loud breath, and Hermione "You're brilliant, and you've got the best interests of even your enemies in mind, and I enjoy my time with you, and I think you're very beautiful, and so I can't help thinking that I -"
"Draco, no." Hermione bent to kiss his cheekbone, and she whispered near his ear, "You don't have to say this. What we are is enough, and -"
"I'm falling in love with you, Granger," Draco said harshly, his voice a rough bark. Hermione reached quickly for her wand and whispered,
"Lumos."
In the blue-white light of her wand, Draco's face was like a marble statue with piercing sapphire eyes. He stared up at her in the gently pulsing light, nodded, and said,
"I can't help it. Not one bit. And as stupid as it sounds, as entirely-too-soon as it seems, the reality is that I had a crush on you for years and just didn't feel like I was allowed to have it. And now I have you with me, at lunch and dinner, at the cinema and the opera. In my bed. And so now I know, and I don't care if I sound like a blithering bloody fool. I'm falling in love with you, Granger."
"Hermione," she whispered, staring down at Draco in the light of her wand. He licked his lips slowly and replied,
"Hermione."
"Nox." Hermione snuffed out her wand and set it back down, and she arranged herself with her back to him, encouraging him to thread his arm around her again. She remembered the sound of his voice… you filthy little Mudblood. You're next, Mudbloods. She could see the snarl on his face at her misfortune, the way he'd taunted and mocked and endangered her and her friends for years. And then she felt the wizard behind her, the man he'd grown to become - someone who was desperately trying to atone for past wrongs and to build a more noble future, a future where he was part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Could she ever love him? This Draco, the one who had called her into a private room in the Leaky Cauldron to apologise with no expectation of forgiveness… could she ever love him? The wizard who had laughed with her over roast duck and chatted with her about mundanities, the one who had cooked them spaghetti bolognese. The wizard who always cared if she finished, if she was satisfied, if things felt good for her. The wizard with his fingers shaking against hers, his breath panting softly against her neck… could she ever love him?
"Goodnight, Draco," Hermione whispered, and he just replied,
"Night, Granger."
Author's Note: Is Draco right about what he's feeling? Is it just that years of wanting Hermione and feeling like she was forbidden fruit, combined with some good quality time together, have made him fall in love? Or is he misinterpreting his emotions? Coming up in the next few chapters, we'll see Hermione's new House-Elf welfare act signed into law by Kingsley, we'll see Harry/Ron/Ginny react to Draco and Hermione being a public couple, and we'll find out if Hermione can just let Draco do his job without trying to find the whispering boy's mother.
I did manage to find an hour to write on Christmas Eve, but I'll be spending the next few days after Christmas at my lake house, and likely won't be writing until around the 30th. I do greatly appreciate your patience. If I can pepper in a chapter here and there, I will. In the meantime, I am immensely grateful for any and all feedback, and to those who are celebrating, a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!