Chapter 2
Hermione is not a weak woman. She knows she isn’t. A woman doesn’t do the things she’s done, for herself, for others, for her country, and come out weak. She is strong and she is powerful and she has been violated.
She feels silly to talk about it that way, dislikes that she finds herself tracing the scar on her forearm more often than not. Violations are constant in her life, have always been constant, and she should be used to them. Draco hadn’t done anything she hadn’t faced before, hadn’t broken any sanctity that wasn’t tarnished already. He hadn’t done anything , and she was too well-steeped in trauma to let possibilities frighten her. .
That’s what she tells herself, over and over and over.
She knows it’s normal that she doesn’t want to leave her room at Harry’s. She knows it’s normal that her fingers are shaking and that she’s kept her hair tied back as if to prevent anyone from grabbing it. She feels overly conscious of her strength of will, that she will overcome this, move forward, heal. It’s normal to feel weak and powerless and all those things she knows she isn’t.
She hates it anyway.
She can’t get Draco’s face out of her head. His face as she told him she was leaving, his face when he lunged for her, his face when she stunned him. She can’t reconcile the face of the man she loved and the one twisting in and out of her dreams.
The wound on her leg throbs. She prefers not to think about it, and doesn’t acknowledge that it keeps time with Draco’s pounding on the wall in her mind. Her soul and his are one, their magic intertwined. She hasn’t tried to pick up her wand since she destroyed the floo, in case she takes the roof off the house by accident.
She takes Tuesday for herself, to stare at her wounds and realize what’s happened. She takes Tuesday to cry and to try and rid herself of the reminders. Her fingers stop shaking. The pounding in her head cuts off a few minutes after she hears Harry apparate out.
On Wednesday, she steps out of the room, fully dressed, and goes to have breakfast with Harry.
“I’m going to Gringotts today,” she tells him over toast and tea. She pretends like her eyes aren’t swollen and he pretends like he can’t see that they are. In exchange, he pretends the skin over his knuckles isn’t split and she pretends like she can’t see that it is.
“I’ll come with you,” he says. “I need to pick up some more reference books for the next Wizengamot session.”
He doesn’t need more references, not with the Black and Potter libraries in his possession.
“You’re welcome to come along,” Hermione says, sipping her tea. “If you’d like.”
She’ll feel safer with him along.
They go after breakfast, walking to the apparition point just outside his wards. Hermione tries not to feel guilty over the reason why they can’t use the floo. She resolves to fix it later, despite her lack of a Ministry license to do so..
She has the skill, and she doesn’t imagine Harry will much care.
They stop at the bookstore first, where Harry actually does pick up a new reference book. She peruses some of the rarities in the back, idly hoping to find one titled “Escaping a Veela Mate: A Beginner’s Guide.”
She finds a book on soul magic instead, and puts herself in a back corner of the shop to check that she hasn’t read it before. Harry doesn’t comment when he comes to retrieve her, but he stands behind her in line as they make their purchases.
Hermione would like to say that her eyes don’t dart to every corner they round on the street, but they do. She hasn’t held her wand so tightly since the war, knuckles white and stiff around the wood. She expects Draco to be looking for her here, to be just inside every doorway, although it’s not logical. She hasn’t checked their mental bond since the pounding stopped, and she doesn’t plan on it either. She doesn’t want know what she’d see.
Harry takes her arm when she jumps at an owl’s hoot in front of the familiars shop, the third time something small has startled her since they left the bookshop. She admits she feels better that she’s physically touching an ally, that he switched sides to keep her wand arm free.
They almost make it to the steps of the bank before there’s a problem.
Pansy Parkinson freezes on the steps of Gringotts when she catches sight of them. Then, bespoke robes billowing, she strides down the rest of the steps and stops directly in front of them.
Hermione lifts her chin. “Pansy, good afternoon.”
The witch doesn’t return her greeting. “How dare you, Granger?”
Hermione hadn’t grown to like Pansy in the year she’d been paraded around as Draco’s mate. The woman was bad enough herself, but the undercurrent of sex, jealousy, and secrecy that ran between her and Draco had been enough to make Hermione lose sleep, at times. It wasn’t a wonder that Pansy was the one Draco had turned confided in after… after.
“What a lovely surprise,” Hermione says. What she means is ‘fuck off.’ “Unfortunately, I have business in Gringotts--”
“And you’ve come here with Potter on your arm,” Pansy says with disgust. “You really don’t have any shame, do you? I thought you’d run from Draco eventually but I didn’t expect for you to prove me right.”
Hermione feels Harry stiffen and tightens her hand on his elbow. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” says Hermione. “Now, if you’ll excuse me--”
She tries to move past the woman, practically dragging Harry along with her, but Pansy shoves her shoulder hard enough to make her drop her new book.
Hermione stoops to grab it immediately, but not before Pansy catches the title.. Her face turns puce with anger. “You--you--! How dare you!” She turns wild eyes on Hermione, her magic sparking and making the ends of her hair rise. “Draco has given you everything! Everything! And this is how you repay him? You’ll kill him! Give me that!”
Pansy reaches for the book, almost stepping on Hermione’s foot in the lunge, and misses when Hermione pulls it away, nearly elbowing Harry in the rush. She can’t deny that it’s a possibility, that Draco might have enough Veela in him for a wasting sickness to take him if she rejects the bond. But she’d bound herself under the auspices of certain promises, promises Draco has broken.
Almost nose to nose, she looks evenly at Pansy and says, “Perhaps I will.”
Pansy’s lip curls, and she swings her arm back for a slap. Hermione sees it coming all too well, and her spine locks up, the scratches on her calf throbbing as her eyes go wide.
Harry catches Pansy’s wrist with a low thud and white knuckles, eyes hard. “Don’t,” he says into Pansy’s red face. His grip tightens, and she pales when his magic ripples over him, far more powerful than her little sparks.
“You’re guilty of this too, Potter,” she says, yanking her wrist away. Her eyes are too wide.. “Wait until I tell the Prophet what you’re helping the mudblood do. Then you’ll see.”
She storms down the steps, spine stiff and robes flapping behind her.
Hermione knows with an ice cold certainty that Pansy’s going to tell Draco what she saw. “Harry,” she says. It comes out thin, high. She can’t help it. She’s not ready to face that, not in the slightest.
Harry’s face is grim. “I know. We’ll come back another day. Let’s go home,” he says, turning on a heel to go back the way the came.
Hermione stays in place, mind working at dizzying speeds. She can go home, away from people and confrontations and too many possibilities. Back to the room she’s been in for days, keeping her hands on the pillows, the bed posts, the window frames to quell the ache that she knows is coming from Draco’s clenched fists on the barrier blocking their bond. She can hide and tie her hair back and forgo her wand, read and read and read until her eyes cross, make short trips to the kitchen and back, cloister herself up until she feels it’s safe again. She and Harry can come back another day, and she can jump at owl hoots and watch the shadows and meet one of the other hundred people who know Draco, who like him better than her.
But that won’t accomplish anything. That will not get her control back, that will keep her in the moment when she pretended to give in, when she let Draco kiss her and carry her away. Hermione Granger is not a weak woman, she is not a bowing thing. She has always controlled her life.
She’s told Draco that she’s leaving him. Regardless of her feelings, she needs to put words to action. Steel up her spine, show that she won’t be persuaded. She faced a troll at 11, a dark lord at 17. She can manage a stiff upper lip long enough to do what she came her to do.
“No,” she says. She swallows, breathes through her nose and nods decisively. “I need to do this. The goblins won’t let him pass, not when we’re in a meeting.”
Harry looks at her. “If you’re sure.”
She nods, more surely. “I am.”
They make their way into the bank, bypassing the queue for the tellers and heading to the back. There, Hermione requests a meeting with Brooksaw, her account manager.
Whether he’s free or whether the goblins decided to humor her urgency, Hermione doesn’t know. She does know that she’s grateful for the speed with which she’s ushered into a meeting room.
“I’ll wait outside,” Harry tells her, gently removing her hand from his arm. His eyes flash behind his glasses. “Just in case.”
Just in case Draco makes it past the goblins.
She nods and goes.
Hermione greets the goblin politely as he comes into the room, bowing as befitting someone of his rank. He returns the greeting in kind before sitting at the silver table, his long, spindly fingers folding neatly over her account's ledger.
“I would like to stop the deposits from the Malfoy account,” she tells Brooksaw plainly, without preamble. She removes the required keys from her person and slides them across the table to him. “I would like to return the galleons I have received from said account since the first transfer. I would also like to take myself off of the Malfoy account and take Draco Malfoy off of mine.”
Brooksaw looks from her to the keys and back again. He opens the ledger in front of him and flips through a few pages, peering through his glasses at the fine print. He clears his throat and looks back up at her. “That is...quite a substantial transfer, Ms. Granger. I feel I must inform you that you are under no obligation to return those galleons, regardless of the state of your personal affairs.”
Hermione’s spine stiffens. “I am aware,” she says. “I also know that I have those funds still. I haven’t touched that money.”
She hadn’t wanted to be Draco’s kept woman. She had wanted to show him that she was with him for him, not for his family’s money. He’d set up the transfers anyway, determined to take care of her.
She’s insisted that, if he was going to open his accounts to her, she’d open hers to him. He’d never quite appreciated that for the statement she felt it was.
Brooksaw observes her over his glasses. “Once you take yourself off his accounts, you will not be permitted to access them without his permission. That is quite the fortune you’re giving up, Ms. Granger.”
Hermione nods tightly. “It is.”
Brooksaw’s lip curls, revealing sharp, yellow teeth. His dark eyes gleam under the dim light and he seems distinctly unhappy when he says “Then it shall be done.”
He walks her through the requisite paperwork and, at the end, pockets the Malfoy key.
“An owl will be sent to Lord Malfoy, advising him of the changes to his account.”
“Of course,” Hermione says. “Thank you.”
He nods in response and walks her to the door.
Harry looks down at her, pushing himself off the wall with his shoulders.
“Home, now, I think,” Hermione says.
They go.
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Hermione feels cold. She’s wrapped in her favorite sweater, she has a heating charm, and Harry’s home is always warm. She still feels cold.
It’s the bond, she knows, just as she knew it had become untenable while she was with Draco.
It’s been four days now since she left him. She has work again after the weekend and she needs to start putting her life into order, rescue it from the storm she feels it’s become.
She has unopened mail on her desk, howlers stripped of their charms. Pansy has taken great pains in sending them to her though Hermione can’t imagine she has anything new to say about the situation.
Her head aches despite the potion she’d downed an hour ago. The pain has been growing worse, an atypical throbbing that comes from the wall. She makes herself not hear it.
It’s been four days since Draco has touched her and she knows he must be feeling the effects of the separation.
She feels awful. He needs her, he depends on her to be there when he needs her. He’s probably in pain, miserable and suffering.
She can imagine the warmth of his arms around her, the sweet whispers he used to press into her hair. What she’d give for that again, the comfort and the warmth, the feeling of being cherished in that moment.
This is the worst part, she tells herself. That she still wants him to be happy, that she still wants him to hold her while she’s also terrified of what he’ll do if she sees him again.
Relationships aren’t black and white. There’s good and bad and the good doesn’t disappear when the bad becomes unmanageable.
So, yes, Hermione still loves him. She’s the type of Gryffindor fool who can’t help but love. She’s also the type of fool who won’t be made to feel inferior. She deserves more than this, and admitting it to herself hurts and soothes, burns and makes her cold.
She settles back onto the bed, wrapped in her warming charms and knits. The space behind her eyes throbs, and so do the scratches on her leg.
Draco has been banging endlessly on the wall between their minds. Four hours today, at least, maybe longer, Hermione doesn’t know.
She does know that she doesn’t want to ignore it anymore.
There’s a particular process to what she wants to do. It’s one thing to look in on their bond, it’s another to be there.
She opens her eyes in her library, glad at least one part of her mind is still quiet, still untouched. She wanders the stacks of books, hands trailing over the spines of her memories. Her childhood teases at the edge of her sight, her years at school, her time with Ron, time with Harry. She pulls her fingers away from the books as the light dims, the air turns somber.
The restricted section. This wing has been attracting shadows for the past few months. The lock falls off when she touches it, and the gate opens with a creak.
There’s almost no light down the stacks she wants. All the books here have been sealed shut, turned to stone. Something in the dark moves, slithers away slowly.
Hermione is not afraid of her own mind.
She walks down the third stack from the left, each step slow. It takes longer than it should for the length of the shelves -- for a time, her feet move forward and the end doesn’t get any closer.. At the very end, on the wall of her mind is a door of glass. She will make it there, in time.
Whether it will be enough time to prepare herself, well. Her feet keep moving and she doesn’t think about it.
She seems to blink and she’s there.
Draco is staring across this wall, face twisted into something too sharp, too birdlike. He’s grown his wings, pointed, skeletal, dark and they arc above him. He looks like an avenging angel, snarling at the darkness in her mind. When he sees her silhouette, he begins to shout, soundless when caught on the other side of the wall.
Hermione stops in the dark, not wanting him to see the details of her. Mental projections aren’t like physical bodies. They’re reflections of burdens, strengths, emotions. Hermione hasn’t looked at herself but she imagines she doesn’t look good.
From this close, Draco looks like a nightmare.
His blond hair lies lank, tangled, interspersed with feathers. His eyes are black and ablaze, teeth sharp, mouth twisted. He looks every inch the Veela, every inch the monster behind the beauty.
He is banging against the glass and there are deep scratches from his claws, but despite his strength, the barrier stands. Hermione has strength of mind, here. She is not a bowing thing.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She knows he can’t read her lips. She’s saying this for herself, trying to ease the ache in her chest. “I can’t make it enough anymore, Draco. I don’t feel like it was ever enough.”
There’s light on his side, a fiery glow that makes him look nearly demonic. She tries to see what he’s saying, her time in the DoM making her rather good at lip reading.
If Potter lays a hand on you, Draco is saying, I will kill him. I’ll kill him!
Hermione’s fear vanishes. She can’t believe him. She can’t believe him.
Her hand gropes blindly for the nearest book. The stone crumbles away at her touch and she throws the memory in front of Draco, letting it splash against the wall.
It’s her, months ago, face pale and wretched. It’s him, in ecstasy. It’s an unknown woman writhing beneath him, moaning his name.
The memory fades and oozes back into the book which falls to the ground in front of Draco’s feet.
He’s breathing heavily, no longer screaming but still no less monstrous. His eyes flick over what he can see of her; the curve of her hip, the curls of her hair.
It was once, he mouths. How could I choose anyone over you?
He’s trying to sweet talk her and it’s not working. Not with his eyes still blazing, not with all the memories of how he’s hurt her on the shelves around her.
She grabs another book, spills another memory between them.
This one is sooner, not Friday, but maybe a month ago. She has her head in her hands, slumped over the desk in her office. He is telling the person he’s pounding into how good you are, so good, so tight for me. Words that she had thought only belonged to her, actions she thought had only belonged to her.
This time, when the memory fades, she looks for any sign that he regrets it. Any sign that he feels guilty or ashamed.
His eyes are narrowed in calculation. His mouth is pressed into a tight line.
When the memory slips away, his eyes widen, his mouth turns down. He looks heartbroken and so, so sad.
I love you, Hermione. You’re the only one I will ever touch again, I promise. Please, my love.
It’s a manipulation. He’s not taking her seriously, he’s only after what he wants. Her touch, her presence, anything to make sure he’s alright again. He’s selfish, so selfish, at the edge of their destruction.
Still, the expression wrenches something in her heart and she is furious. How dare he? How dare he not see her? How dare he not see?
She flies forward, meeting him at the barrier with a snarl on her lips.
“Don’t lie to me!” She punches the barrier, is satisfied when he leans back, eyes wide. Behind her grows impossibly dark so only the red light from his side touches her. “All you do is lie to me!”
His eyes dart over her, her face, her body. His eyebrows pinch together. When he meets her eyes again, there’s sorrow there. I--I’m sorry.
She pulls back, her eyes burning with her hatred. Hatred for how he makes her feel, how her heart is pounding overtime by being this close to him. Hatred for this clear manipulation and all the cracks in the facade she knows are there.
“No, Draco,” she says. “You’re not. And I am.” She pulls herself away from the wall, scared for what she might do. “I’m tired of being sorry all the time.”
Hermione, he says. He looks alarmed as she backs away. Hermione!
She disappears into the dark, mouth dry and heart racing. Behind her, Draco begins to pound on the barrier again.
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“I need to go home eventually,” she tells Harry on Saturday. “I have work and my robes are there.”
Harry finishes the sentence he’s writing and looks across the table at her, leaning against the back of his chair. He seems entirely open, no expectations. “Is that what you want?”
“My entire life isn’t my relationship with Draco,” she says. She pauses, smiles a little self-deprecatingly, leans back, mirroring him, and toys with the necklace at her throat. “No matter how much it feels like it.”
“It’s still new. Raw,” Harry says. “He hurt you, Hermione. You can afford to take some time off work.”
Raw, he says. She supposes that’s one word of the turmoil she has to fight off every time she says his name.
“He hurt me,” she says. She thinks about Draco, pressed against the barrier, screaming for her to come back. “If I let it, that hurt will control my life. This isn’t going away, Harry, and the sooner I learn to live with it, the more I’ll get done.”
“Everything goes away with time,” Harry says.
Hermione’s mouth thins. “You haven’t been in love.”
Harry doesn’t say anything to that, just looks at her, confused. Maybe even a little skeptical. At least he doesn’t contradict her.
“I think I’ll go back tonight,” she says. “Will you come with me?”
Back on firmer ground, Harry smiles, sets his quill down. “Of course.”
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Hermione is not a martyr. It’s something that set her apart in Gryffindor, her unwillingness to destroy herself for something else. She’ll go forward into fire for what she believes, but not if she thinks she’ll burst into flames.
She’s not a phoenix, she doesn’t regenerate.
It’s this that keeps her from going back to Draco after their...talk. She imagines that Harry would chain himself to an enemy to keep them alive, especially when all that’s needed is proximity. Hermione is not Harry.
She knows that Draco is, in all probability, dying right now.
It’s not her responsibility to breathe for him, even before he proved that he wouldn’t breathe for her.
It hurts all the same.
---------------------------------------------------
Harry leaves her alone in her apartment on Sunday morning, having stayed the night. He leaves her with wards she couldn’t have hoped to cast by herself and a strange feeling of isolation.
Harry is her brother and the one who understands her most but he doesn’t understand this. He’s trying, but she has the suspicion that he thinks she’s being too soft, that she should be going after Draco like he’s standing between her and recovery. Or freedom.
Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe she’s being sensitive. But that’s what it feels like.
She can’t imagine being any harder though.
She walks from her living room to her bedroom and realizes, eerily, that the last time she went from her living room to her bedroom, it was not under her own power. It makes her legs feel weak and she has to sit on the floor.
The bed is still mussed from their struggle. She can see a tear in the duvet from his claws.
She pulls her knees up to her chest and lays her head on her knees.
Breathe, she commands herself. Breathe.