"Don't make this harder than it has to be, Malfoy. You'll survive without a hug."
The words clung to him like a curse. They echoed through every silence, carved themselves into the stillness of every hour, a refrain he could not shake. You'll survive without a hug.
No. He would not survive.
He would rather die than endure this absence. The thought of survival without her touch was meaningless, a hollow parody of living. How could he breathe, how could he move through a world that felt so empty, when the only anchor that made his miserable existence bearable was her?
If I held in my hands anything gold could buy, I'd still not have a thing worth giving you.
He pressed his palms into his face before dragging them through his hair, pacing the length of his room with the restless energy of a man undone. Every step felt like he was walking deeper into a labyrinth with no way out. He was hopelessly, pathetically in love, drowning in emotions so fierce and suffocating that he no longer recognized the man in his own skin.
But why?
What made her different? What gave her this unbearable hold over him, this power that stripped him down to raw nerve and bone? She was infuriating, always infuriating. A stupid, stubborn bitch. The Golden Girl with her polished reputation, her maddening intelligence, her insufferable habit of always being right, that sharp tongue that could slice him apart without lifting a blade.
And yet.
And yet he wanted her. He wanted her with a desperation that bordered on madness, a hunger that hollowed him out from the inside.
He stopped pacing and leaned heavily against the wall, his breath coming uneven, his head falling back until it struck the plaster. His eyes closed, shutting out the world as though darkness might bring clarity. But it only made the truth ring louder in his chest.
It wasn't her wit, though it burned through him every time she turned it on him. It wasn't her intelligence, though he had come to admire it, first begrudgingly, then with awe, watching her move through every trial with strength that seemed inhuman.
It was her. Entirely her. The way she occupied every room like it belonged to her, the way she met every challenge head-on, the way she saw through him as if all his carefully built walls were nothing more than glass. She stripped him bare without even trying. She made him want to claw his way out of the pit he had fallen into and become something better, something worthy, something more than the bitter wreckage he had been left as.
His fists clenched until his nails dug crescent moons into his palms, sharp little reminders that he was still here, still living in a world that had her in it, but never enough of her to satisfy the gnawing need inside him.
And then there was the physical aspect, the part that made his frustration boil over until he could hardly breathe. He groaned, his thoughts sliding into dangerous places before he could stop them. The curve of her hips tormented him, the way her hair fell across her face in soft strands, the spark in her eyes whenever she was angry.
And her lips. Merlin, her lips. He wanted to press his mouth to them until the world vanished, to taste what it felt like to be consumed by her, to be undone in the kind of kiss that left nothing behind.
And her legs. That damned dress she had worn the other day had left him restless for hours, unable to think of anything else. If he was honest with himself, it had been days.
And then came the rest of her. Every line of her body, every inch that wasn't his to imagine but filled his mind anyway, unrelenting.
He slammed his fist against the wall, his chest rising and falling in jagged bursts.
"Fuck," he hissed, dragging a hand down his face as if he could erase the hunger that clawed at him.
Why was he like this? Why did she unravel him so easily? She wasn't his. She might never be.
The thought left him hollow.
He dropped heavily onto the edge of his bed, his gaze fixed on the floor without really seeing it. The truth had already bled through every wall he had tried to put up. He was in love with her, madly and stupidly in love with Hermione Granger, and she didn't even notice him. Not in the way he needed her to.
To her, he was nothing more than a shadow of what he used to be, some broken remnant of a life she would rather bury than recall.
But to him, she was everything. She was the single spark in a life he had thought burned to ash, the only light that made the darkness even remotely bearable.
The idea of losing her was unbearable. The thought of never holding her at all was worse. It ripped at him from the inside, left him restless and aching, left him clawing for something that wasn't his to claim.
He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his head falling into his hands. His breathing was uneven, his chest tight with the weight of it.
He didn't know how to stop loving her. And deep down, he wasn't even sure he wanted to.
•••
She stepped into the dimly lit room, her heels clicking against the wooden floor in a rhythm that seemed to mock his heavy silence. One glance at him, sprawled out on the couch like a discarded rag doll, and she let out a derisive snort.
"Malfoy, you look like absolute shit."
He tilted his head just enough to glare at her, his platinum hair sticking up in every direction, his eyes shadowed from too many sleepless nights and too much self-loathing.
"Thank you for your kind words, angel. Truly uplifting. Really helps my case."
She folded her arms across her chest, one brow arched with theatrical disdain.
"Oh, so I've walked straight into a pity party. How delightful. Should I fetch the world's smallest violin so you can perform your tragic little concert of despair?"
He groaned, dragging his hand down his face as though he could wipe away either her words or his own miserable existence.
"What do you even know about feeling like the worst human being alive? About wishing you could vanish completely, that the ground would swallow you whole just to put you out of your misery?"
Her expression didn't soften. If anything, her features grew sharper, her lips curling into a humorless smile that barely hid the storm behind her eyes.
"Oh, allow me to enlighten you, Malfoy. I have a rather vivid memory that might serve as a proper educational moment for your little existential tantrum."
He pushed himself up slightly, narrowing his eyes, suspicion flickering across his face.
"And what might that be? The time you punched me? Because honestly, I'm starting to think you got a sick thrill out of that."
She didn't even flinch. If anything, a faint glimmer of amusement crossed her face before vanishing again.
"Don't flatter yourself. Although, let's be honest, you probably did enjoy it. It's almost poetic how much of a masochist you've turned out to be."
He scowled, mouth opening to fire back, but she wasn't finished. She moved closer, her steps deliberate, her body angled as she leaned against the arm of the couch with a kind of predatory grace that made him feel cornered.
"No, Malfoy. I'm talking about a memory we both share, though we saw it from very different perspectives. A little scene in a dark manor with screaming, with blood, with you standing there like a fucking statue."
The color drained from his face.
"Hermione…"
"Oh, don't you 'Hermione' me. You want to talk about feeling like the worst human being alive? Let me remind you of that charming evening when Bellatrix carved me up like a holiday roast, and you just stood there. Watching. Silent."
His throat worked, but nothing came out. He looked as though her words had struck him across the chest, his pale skin leeching even paler.
"Imagine that, Malfoy. Imagine what I felt. The pain. The humiliation. The sheer terror of knowing I might not live through the night, all while you stood there and did absolutely nothing."
His gaze dropped, unable to meet her piercing eyes.
"You think I don't hate myself for that? You think it doesn't tear me apart every single day?"
She pushed herself away from the couch, standing taller, her arms falling to her sides. Her face softened only a fraction, but the sharpness in her voice remained.
"Good. It should haunt you. Because you're right. You should feel like the worst human being on Earth. But here's the truth, Malfoy. Wallowing in guilt and misery doesn't change what happened. It doesn't rewrite the past, and it certainly doesn't earn you sympathy from me."
His eyes lifted slowly, silver glistening with unshed tears that threatened to break him apart.
"I didn't know what to do," he whispered, voice cracking with the weight of it. "I was terrified. If I had tried to stop her, she would have killed me. Or worse."
She laughed bitterly, shaking her head in disbelief.
"Oh, poor baby. Always the victim in his own story. You're right, she probably would have killed you. But at least you would have died with a shred of decency, instead of living with the knowledge that you stood by and did nothing."
Her words cut through him like a blade, sharp and merciless, driving deeper into wounds that had never truly healed.
"I'm sorry." His voice was nothing more than a breath, yet it lingered in the air like a confession that could not be taken back.
She sighed, and for a fleeting moment the sharp edges of her expression softened, though only by the smallest degree. "Sorry doesn't change the past. But if you really mean it, if you truly want to make amends, then stop drowning yourself in self-pity and start proving that you can be better."
Her words cut clean, leaving no room for excuses. He nodded quickly, jaw tight as he forced down the lump rising in his throat. His voice was low, almost pleading. "I'll try."
She studied him for a long, measured moment, her gaze steady and unwavering, before she turned toward the door. Her hand hovered near the handle, her posture screaming of finality. "Good. Because honestly, you cannot get much worse."
That broke him. He surged to his feet, the sudden movement charged with desperation, and his voice cracked through the thick silence that pressed between them. "I am so fucking sorry. I'll do anything. Anything you ask of me, I swear it."
She froze where she stood. Slowly, she turned back toward him, her features hardening once more, and if possible, her expression became colder than before. Her eyes glimmered with a bitterness so heavy it seemed to sink into the very air.
"Anything?" she repeated, her tone biting, every syllable laced with venom. "You think the word sorry carries any weight at all? You think an apology somehow erases what happened?"
He shook his head violently, the words tumbling out with frantic urgency. "No, no, I don't. I know it doesn't. I just— I don't know how to fix this. I don't know what you want me to do."
Her laugh was sharp, hollow, and cruel, echoing in the room like something fractured and mocking. It was not humor but a cold knife dragged across a wound.
"Fix this?" she echoed with bitter incredulity. "Fix this? Oh, you poor, deluded boy. There is no fixing this. No spell, no words, no promises will ever put it right." She stepped closer to him now, her voice dropping into something darker, something that seemed to crawl beneath his skin. "Do you want to know what I truly wish for you, Malfoy? What I wake up wishing?"
His throat constricted, his hands trembling at his sides, fingers curling in tight fists as if bracing himself against the storm of her words. "What?" he rasped.
Her eyes glittered with a fury that was colder than fire. "I wish you all the worst things in life," she hissed. "I wish that every night when you close your eyes, the last sound you hear is my scream. I wish that you were the one forced to kneel on that stone floor and scrub my blood from the cracks, to feel it soak into your hands until you could never get it out. I wish they had carved into you instead. I wish the pain had been yours."
Her words struck him like physical blows, each one a whip across his skin. He flinched, his entire body trembling as though she had reached into his chest and wrenched his heart from its place.
"They did," he whispered hoarsely, his voice raw and frayed with pain, the confession torn from him like flesh from bone.
Her smile was cruel, an icy twist of her lips that carried no warmth and no mercy.
"Good," she spat, her voice soft yet brutal. "That is exactly what you deserve. We were children, Malfoy. Children. And I would never have stood there and watched while it happened to you. Never. Not for a second. I never hated you. Not when you called me every filthy name you could think of. Not even when you were your ugliest, most spiteful self. I saw what was beneath it all. I saw a frightened boy, lost in the duties pressed on him, lost in the hollow weight of who he thought he had to be."
Her voice wavered, not with pity but with the razor edge of a truth she had kept buried for far too long. His breath hitched at the sound, raw and panicked, but she did not falter. She pressed forward, merciless, refusing to give him even the smallest reprieve.
"I would have taken the curse myself before I stood there and let my classmates suffer that kind of pain. I would have stepped in for anyone, even someone I despised. But you? You are a coward. You have always been a coward. You stood there and you watched, and you did nothing. You let me bleed while you pretended you were helpless." Her voice rose, each word striking like a lash. "And do you know what makes it worse?"
He shook his head, his tears spilling freely now, his throat too tight, his voice trapped beneath the crushing weight of her fury.
"You cannot even admit it. Not what you felt then, not what you feel now. You bury it under excuses and misery, and you pretend it is penance. But I see through you. I know what you are. I know you are in love with me, you sick fuck." Her voice cracked on the last word, breaking with something that was half fury and half despair, and her hands trembled at her sides. "Do you think I never noticed? Do you think I never saw the way you look at me when you think I am not watching? The way you hover like some desperate, pathetic shadow? It disgusts me."
His lips parted, his chest shaking as if the words might finally break through, but his voice betrayed him. He choked on the flood of emotions, and nothing came.
Her eyes flashed, and she stepped closer, so close he could feel her breath. "You want me? You want me to forgive you, to save you from the filth of what you are? I would rather rot in the ground than give you that kind of absolution. If there is a hell, Malfoy, I hope they chain you to me for eternity so I can remind you every day what you are. A coward. A monster. A boy who watched me scream and did nothing. And you will pay for it, forever."
The words landed with such force that his knees almost buckled, but she was not finished. Her voice dropped to a chilling whisper that cut deeper than her shouting ever could. "Do you know the truth I have never said aloud? I would rather have died in that drawing room than open my eyes and see your face standing there. I would have preferred death to waking up and knowing that you lived while I screamed."
He broke then, tears hot and relentless spilling down his cheeks, and he did not bother to wipe them away. His chest heaved, his body convulsing with sobs that he could not control. He looked like a man stripped bare, a boy lost in his own ruin.
He opened his mouth, the beginnings of a plea trembling on his tongue, but she silenced him with a single sharp movement of her hand. Her eyes burned with contempt as they locked on his.
"Save your breath," she said, her voice low and cold as iron. "There is nothing you can say that will erase what you did. There is nothing you can do that will make me forget the sound of your silence while I begged for my life. Nothing."
With that, she turned on her heel, the sharp click of her shoes striking the floor like nails in a coffin. The door slammed behind her, the echo reverberating through the room until it felt as if the walls themselves were mocking him.
He sank to his knees, his palms pressed to the floor as though the weight of her words had dragged him down. His sobs tore through the quiet, jagged and unrestrained, and every venomous sentence replayed in his head until he thought he might shatter under the weight of them.
And still, even in the ruins of his misery, even knowing that he was irredeemable in her eyes, he could not stop loving her.
•••
This was Stockholm syndrome. It had to be. There could be no other explanation for the way his mind clung to her with such ferocity, the way his heart seemed to break in her presence only to mend itself again the moment she looked at him. She was his tormentor and his savior all at once, and the truth, the brutal and unrelenting truth, was that she consumed him. Every waking thought belonged to her. Every nightmare wore her face.
He did not dream of her the way other men might dream of the women they loved. His nights were not filled with softness or stolen kisses. His dreams suffocated him. They were steeped in shadows, each one dragging him back to that room. The Hermione of the past was always there, writhing in pain on the cold stone floor. He saw her blood staining the flagstones, her screams cutting through him like knives, her eyes begging for mercy she never received. And he saw himself too, a pale and trembling reflection in the corner of her torment, standing motionless, a useless boy too paralyzed by fear, too cowardly to lift a hand.
He woke drenched in sweat, gasping for breath as though he had been drowning. The echo of her cries lingered in his ears long after he opened his eyes. And yet, when the nightmare dissolved and reality pressed in, he wanted her all the same. Not the Hermione who haunted his memories, but the one who had stood in his flat just hours before, spitting venom with every word, calling him a coward, slicing him open with her voice as though she wielded it like a blade. He wanted her even then. Especially then. Because she was right. He deserved every ounce of her contempt.
After she walked out that night, the fight left his body. His knees buckled beneath him, and he collapsed onto the floor, too broken to reach the couch, too undone to even think. His body folded in on itself, and he cried. Not the quiet, hidden tears he had learned to swallow in silence, but loud, unrestrained sobs that shook him apart and echoed off the walls around him. The sound filled the empty flat until it became unbearable, until even he wanted to crawl away from it, but he could not stop. He could not hold himself together anymore.
It was not humiliation alone that undid him. It was not guilt alone either. It was something far more dangerous, something corrosive. It was an unraveling. The kind that stripped him down to nothing and left him raw, exposed, and broken on the floor.
He cried until his throat burned, until his eyes stung and swelled, until the sleeves of his shirt clung damp to his skin from the tears that would not stop. He pressed his face into his arms, as if burying himself in the fabric could blot out the sound of her voice, but it only made it worse. The words replayed again and again, sharp and merciless, each one cutting deeper than the last.
He deserved it. Every syllable. Every lash of her fury. He deserved it for standing frozen while she suffered in that house. He deserved it for every cruel word he had thrown at her in school, every slur he had spat from his mouth like poison, every time he had let cowardice define him instead of courage. He had spent years building walls of arrogance and indifference to hide what he was. She had torn those walls down in a single night. And now there was nothing left of him but the truth.
And yet, no matter how much he knew he deserved her hatred, the weight of it did not grow easier to carry. It was crushing him from the inside, pressing against his ribs until he thought he might break apart under the strain.
"What is wrong with me?" His whisper cracked in the silence, torn from a throat that had been scraped raw from hours of sobbing. His words clung to the dark corners of the room, fragile and hollow. "Why can't I stop? Why can't I stop loving her?"
It would be easier if he hated her. Easier if he could summon some clean, sharp anger toward her, if he could build his defenses out of resentment instead of shame. He wanted to blame her for being too perfect, too infuriating, too much of everything he could never have. Too Granger. But no matter how he tried to turn his feelings into poison, they twisted back inside him, soft and aching. Hatred never came. Only love, feral and consuming.
And so he sat there on the floor, clinging to the memory of her face as she turned to leave. Not the venom in her words, though they had sliced him open, but the flicker of something else. Pain, just for an instant. Pain behind her eyes, buried beneath the armor of her fury. He wanted to believe that pain meant something. That it was not only hatred she felt when she looked at him. That maybe, against all sense, there was something else under the surface. Something he might one day reach.
But how could there be? How could she feel anything other than loathing for him? She had every reason in the world to despise him, to despise the boy he had been, the choices he had made, the silence that had nearly destroyed her.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw sparks behind his eyelids. His chest ached with the weight of her words. His head throbbed from crying until his body had nearly emptied itself of tears. Yet none of that hurt compared to the pain lodged inside him, the knowledge that she had been right all along.
He was a coward. He had stood there. He had let her suffer. He had done nothing.
And now he was paying the price, not only with his memories but with the endless loop of her voice replaying through every corner of his mind. He deserved every second of it, and yet it did not lessen the agony. It never would.
Still, as he let his head fall back against the wall, as the quiet of the flat pressed in around him like a tomb, another thought slipped into his mind. It was faint at first, a fragile whisper, but it refused to vanish. It spread and grew with each breath, until it lit something inside him he had thought was gone.
Maybe he could not change the past. Maybe he could never undo what had already been written in blood and screams. But the future was still unwritten. The future could still be fought for.
He could fight for her.
Even if she hated him. Even if she spat in his face every time he drew near. Even if she never forgave him and carried her fury into every year of her life. He could still fight to be someone she might one day trust. He could still try to claw his way toward redemption, even if it was futile.
Because one thing was certain now, clearer than it had ever been. He could not survive without her. Not really. Not in any way that gave meaning to his existence. To lose her completely would be to lose the last fragile tether he had to hope.
And so, as the last of his tears dried on his cheeks, Draco Malfoy made a vow in the silence of that flat. A vow not spoken to her, not promised aloud, but carved deep into himself where it could never be broken.
He would become the man she deserved. Even if she never saw him. Even if she never cared. Even if it changed nothing between them. He would do it because he owed her that much. Because his guilt demanded it. Because his love demanded it.
And because the truth, the truth that chained him and sustained him all at once, was that he would always love Hermione Granger. He would love her until it destroyed him. And perhaps that was exactly how it was meant to be.
•••
He had three months to go. Ninety days until the shackles of his parole fell away, until the Ministry declared him rehabilitated and sent him stumbling back into the wizarding world as if he were some kind of success story. On paper, it was freedom. In practice, it felt like a death sentence. Because the closer he crept toward that finish line, the more he understood that freedom wasn't what he wanted.
Freedom meant losing her.
Hermione Granger had been a constant in his life for nearly a year, the one steady figure in the storm of obligations and punishments that had followed the war. The Ministry had assigned her as his case worker, and at the time, he had thought it was an insult wrapped in bureaucratic efficiency. Granger, the insufferable know-it-all, the war heroine who had risen from the battlefield bloodied but unbroken, now handed the task of babysitting him. It felt like a sick joke. One final humiliation piled onto the countless others.
At first, he had convinced himself that he hated her. He had told himself she was smug, sanctimonious, insufferably perfect. The Golden Girl forced to stoop down into the gutter where he had been left to rot. But when she arrived at his flat for the first time, clipboard in hand and eyes sharpened like blades, something in him had shifted. She had not pitied him, which he might have expected, and she had not spat in his face, which he almost would have preferred. She had treated him like a job, nothing more, and it was that merciless practicality that had undone him. She looked at him like he was a problem to be solved, a complex equation she could not wait to finish, and for reasons he still could not untangle, he craved it.
And then, somewhere along the line, hate became something else.
He noticed the way she pushed her hair back behind her ear when she was irritated. He noticed the tiny grooves her teeth left in the end of her quill when she chewed it without realizing. He noticed how her voice softened, only slightly, when she asked him if he was sleeping enough, if he was eating at all. He noticed how, on rare days when her laughter broke through that wall of steel she carried around her, it sounded like something he had been starving for without even knowing.
He had fallen for her. Not in pieces, not gradually. He had fallen all at once, hard and unforgiving, as if there had never been any other outcome for him. It was not only her brilliance, though he had always known she had that in spades. It was not only her sharp tongue, though there were days when he thought he would bleed for the chance to be cut by her words. It was the entirety of her, the contradictions that made her human in ways he could barely stand to witness.
And when he realized he loved her, it brought no relief, only terror. Because the truth followed quickly on its heels. In three months' time, the Ministry would close his file. His sentence would be complete. Hermione would walk away from him, and she would never look back.
The thought gnawed at him until it became unbearable. He would lie awake at night staring at the ceiling, counting the days in reverse, dreading each one that slipped through his fingers. Each visit, each conversation, each sharp glance from her eyes that lingered longer than necessary became something he hoarded, clutching at it like treasure he would one day be forced to bury. And beneath it all grew the poisonous certainty that he was not strong enough to survive her absence.
Because the world could strip away everything else, and he had endured it. His home, his dignity, his name, his freedom. He had survived the loss of them all. But to lose her, to wake up one morning and know that she belonged to another life, a life he would never be allowed to touch, felt like a punishment greater than anything the Ministry could devise.
And so he began to wonder, late at night when the flat was quiet and the air hung heavy with his shame, whether he should fear the end of his parole at all. Whether freedom was truly freedom if it meant a world without her.
And so, Malfoy did what he had always done best. He made a plan.
He wasn't fool enough to believe this would be simple. Winning Granger's heart would be the greatest challenge of his life, and he knew it. Hermione Granger wasn't the kind of woman who would melt at flowers left on her doorstep or purr at hollow compliments whispered in her ear. She was sharp, discerning, and merciless when it came to falsehoods. Any trace of manipulation would shatter what little ground he had managed to gain. If he wanted to hold her, to keep her, to steal her heart and claim it for himself, he would have to earn it. And that was the part that terrified him.
But fear had never stopped him before. Not truly.
So he watched. He listened. He memorized her. He discovered that she adored Earl Grey but could not stand chamomile, that thunderstorms calmed her and lavender made her wrinkle her nose in distaste. He learned that on her rare free days she disappeared to a magical creature sanctuary, and that, though she would never admit it out loud, she had an embarrassing fondness for dreadful wizarding romance novels. These tiny fragments of her became jewels he stored away, proof that she was more than the untouchable war heroine everyone else saw.
And in the quiet of his nights, he thought about everything she had already given. After the war, when the rest of them were still trying to patch themselves back together, she had carried the burden of others, shouldering the cases of men like him because no one else would. She had chosen duty over ease, compassion over comfort.
"She's saving the world again," he muttered one night, flat on his back and staring up at the cracked ceiling of his flat. His voice was bitter, but the ache in his chest was not. "And here I am, trying to save myself through her."
It was selfish. He knew it, admitted it, and loathed himself for it, but the knowledge didn't matter. Loving her felt like the most selfish thing he had ever done, yet it also felt like the only thing in his life that was not hollow. The only thing that still burned.
Weeks slipped past, and he began to notice changes. They were small, subtle things that would have gone unseen by anyone else, but he saw them because he was desperate to. Her sharp edges blunted in his presence. Her eyes lingered on his face a second longer than necessary. Her voice softened, her scolding becoming less pointed, as if something in her tone had cracked open without her meaning it to.
He told himself it meant nothing. He told himself she had no time for romance, not with her endless work, not with someone like him. He told himself she would never choose him. And still, when her gaze held his for that fraction of a second longer, hope bloomed inside him like poison.
As the final month of his parole loomed, the weight of time pressed down on him. Ninety days had shrunk to thirty, and he could feel them slipping like sand through his fingers. He had three months behind him, four weeks left, and only one chance to act.
He no longer wanted to simply steal her heart. Theft was too easy, too cheap, and she would never forgive him for it. No, he wanted her to choose to give it. Freely. Willingly. To hand it to him with those steady hands of hers, knowing exactly what he was, and deciding anyway.
That, he knew, would require something he had never possessed in abundance. Patience. Humility. Courage.
The kind of courage he had run from his entire life.
But for her, he would find it. For Hermione, he would force himself to stand tall. For Hermione, he would tear down the cowardice that had defined him and build something new in its place. For Hermione, he would become the man she deserved.
And if it killed him, so be it.
Because he already knew the truth. He would do anything for her. Anything.
•••
She stumbled into his flat, the smell of firewhiskey clinging to her like smoke that had soaked into her very skin. Her cheeks were flushed, her curls tangled and wild, and an uncharacteristic giggle slipped past her lips as she braced herself against the doorframe. She looked utterly unlike herself, more like a stranger wearing her face. Draco froze where he stood, convinced for a moment that he had conjured her out of his own guilty longing, that his mind had finally fractured and created a drunken apparition to torment him. When she swayed slightly, though, when her shoulder collided with the frame, he realized this was no dream. He bolted toward her at once, panic clawing its way into his throat.
"Darling, are you alright?" His voice cracked, the rising panic making it thin and brittle.
She lifted her hand with a grand, unsteady wave, her eyes glassy and her tongue heavy with drink. "Kindly fuck off," she slurred, the words sharp despite the wobble in her stance.
He winced but forced calm into his voice, even as dread coiled tight in his chest. "You cannot Apparate like this. You will splinch yourself or worse. What in Merlin's name were you thinking?"
Her eyes narrowed, the hazy warmth of drink sharpened into something furious. She jabbed a finger into his chest hard enough to make him flinch. "Like you give two fucks," she snapped. "I'm here because I want to be here. Because I need to be here. Not because of you."
He reached out, trying to steer her toward the couch before she collapsed in the doorway, but she slapped at his hands with surprising force for someone so far gone. "Please, just come lie down," he urged, his voice soft, coaxing, desperate to settle her.
"Don't you dare touch me, Malfoy," she hissed, her eyes blazing as if the command itself might set him alight.
"My love, please," he whispered, the words torn from him before he could stop them, a confession wrapped in a plea.
Her reaction was immediate. She shoved him with both hands, catching him off guard so that he stumbled back a step. Before he could recover, she advanced on him, her movements clumsy but her fury sharp enough to cut bone.
"You do not get to 'my love' me," she spat. "Do you hear me? When we were younger, I even thought you were fit. Handsome, arrogant, irritating, but still someone a girl could look at and imagine wanting. And then you let them burn you, you let yourself be branded like livestock. Do you know how quickly any shred of that fantasy died the moment I saw that mark on your arm?"
Her words struck harder than any curse, sharper than any blade. He didn't argue, didn't even flinch beyond the tightening of his jaw. He stood still, absorbing her venom like it was his penance.
She swayed again, and his hand twitched instinctively, desperate to steady her, but she batted it away. Her face twisted as her voice dropped, low and dangerous, the firewhiskey making her honesty brutal.
"You stood there," she growled. "While I screamed. While she carved into me. You did nothing. Tell me, Malfoy, did you like it? Did it make you feel strong? Was it easier to let me bleed so that you wouldn't have to?"
His throat closed around the words. "No," he whispered, barely audible, his voice trembling.
She stepped closer, so close he could feel the heat of her skin, the sting of her breath hot with drink against his lips. Her eyes locked onto his, burning with rage and a grief he recognized all too well.
"What happened to you?" she whispered, the cruelty in her tone cutting deeper than if she had screamed it. "Did they break you in the throne room? Did they carve into you for their sport? Did they make you beg like a dog for scraps of mercy?"
His hands curled into fists at his sides, nails biting into his palms until he felt skin give way. Still he stayed silent. He would not defend himself. He had no defense.
Her lips curled into something venomous, almost a sneer. "Thank Merlin you are still handsome. If you weren't, I would beat the living shit out of you right here and now, just to watch you bleed."
That was the breaking point.
Something inside him snapped, raw and unrestrained, and he closed the distance between them in one desperate movement. He grabbed her face with both hands, his grip rough, his chest heaving like he had been holding his breath for years. Her eyes widened, startled by the sudden force, but she didn't pull back.
"Don't," she breathed, trembling but defiant. "I fucking dare you, you sick—"
And he kissed her.
It was not soft, not gentle, and certainly not the kind of kiss that belonged to tenderness. This was a collision, brutal and unforgiving, a kiss born of years of silence, of wounds left to rot, of desire tangled with hatred until neither could be pulled free from the other. His mouth crashed against hers like a breaking storm, punishing in its force, as though he could press every unspoken word, every regret, every sleepless night into the shape of that single moment.
To his shock, she responded at once, her lips meeting his with the same wild ferocity. There was no hesitation, no pause to weigh what it meant. Her fingers clawed into his hair, tangling and tugging so hard he hissed against her mouth, though the pain only drove him further into the madness of it. She pulled him closer and shoved him back in the same breath, caught between fury and need, her nails scraping along his scalp with the kind of sharp cruelty that made his chest ache with wanting more.
Their breath came ragged, harsh, filling the narrow space between them until it felt like the air itself had turned combustible. The taste of firewhiskey burned on her lips, bitter and intoxicating, her tongue a blade against his as she kissed him like she wanted to ruin him. Her body collided with his, trembling and rigid all at once, a contradiction of resistance and surrender, and he thought he might unravel from the force of it.
Every kiss was a war. Every movement a blow struck and a wound received. It was not romance, it was not affection. It was fire meeting fire, grief tangled with rage, years of silence and cruelty finally exploding into a kiss that was closer to a fight than to love.
His hands locked onto her waist, fingers digging into her like he could anchor her there, as if letting go would reduce him to ash. He pulled her tighter, closer, desperate to feel her against him, to prove she was real and not some fevered dream he had conjured out of loneliness and guilt. She responded with equal violence, her teeth grazing his lip until he tasted copper, sharp and electric.
Somewhere inside the chaos was fear, sharp and quiet, whispering that this would end as quickly as it had begun. That when it broke, it would leave them ruined, more fractured than they had ever been. He felt it in the trembling of her body, in the way her hands shook even as they gripped him like a lifeline. This was not a beginning, it was a detonation, and when the fire burned itself out, there would be nothing but wreckage.
But he could not stop. He would not stop.
In that violent kiss, with Hermione pressed against him, every ounce of fury and loathing bound tight with a desire too dangerous to name, he felt alive for the first time in years. The world fell away, leaving nothing but her, and though he knew he would pay for it, though he knew she might never forgive him, he kissed her as if his survival depended on it.
Because in that moment, it did.
When they finally tore themselves apart for air, it was not with relief but with the same ragged hunger that had sparked the first kiss. Their breaths came harsh and uneven, filling the quiet flat like the aftermath of a storm that had ripped the world open. Her forehead rested against his for a moment, her eyes closing as if she were trying to ground herself, but the tremor in her hands gave her away. She was shaking, not from fear, but from the sheer force of everything she was feeling, everything she refused to put into words.
Draco's grip had not loosened. His hands stayed locked on her hips, clutching her as though the ground beneath them might split and drag her away from him if he let go. He wanted to speak, to say something that might matter, but his throat burned, clogged with every unsaid confession he had buried for years. Apologies were too weak. Explanations would sound like excuses. And the only truth that mattered was right here in front of him, close enough to touch, close enough to destroy him.
Her hands slid down from his face to his throat, fingers pressing hard against the skin there, testing, daring. She could have shoved him back, ended it all in one brutal push, but she didn't. Her grip lingered, fierce and punishing, her thumbs brushing against the rapid thrum of his pulse. His heart pounded so violently he was sure she could feel every frantic beat. It was a surrender and a plea all at once. He leaned into her touch with a shuddering breath, his eyes half-lidded, desperate for anything she was willing to give.
"You drive me insane," she hissed, her words shaking as though each one cost her something. "I should hate you. I should hex you into oblivion and leave you bleeding on the floor. But instead, here I am. Here I am, and I cannot stop." Her nails dug into his skin, just shy of breaking it, and he swore under his breath, the sound more like reverence than pain.
"Then don't stop," he murmured, his voice raw, scraping like gravel. "Never stop. I'll take it all, Granger. I'll take your hate, your anger, your hands around my throat. I'll take it because it's yours. And I would rather bleed from you than breathe without you."
Her jaw tightened, her eyes narrowing in that way that always made him feel exposed. "You're pathetic," she spat, though her voice cracked. "A pathetic, selfish boy who thinks wanting me makes up for everything."
He nodded, the bitter laugh he released almost choking him. "I know. And I don't care. Call me pathetic. Call me worthless. Just don't walk away."
Her lips trembled, caught between fury and something far more dangerous. She pulled him down into another kiss, harsher than before, her teeth grazing his lip until the sharp taste of blood filled his mouth. He groaned into her, the sound vibrating against her tongue, his body pressing into hers with a desperation that bordered on frantic. His hands slid from her hips to the curve of her back, pulling her so close he thought their bones might fuse together.
She kissed him like she was trying to break him, like every ounce of rage had nowhere else to go but into his mouth, his skin, his body. And he let her. He welcomed it, begged for it, his every thought reduced to the taste of her, the force of her, the way her fire burned through the hollow parts of him and left nothing but ash.
There was no tenderness in it, no softness. It was destruction. It was two people tearing each other open because there was no other way to survive the weight of everything between them.
And when she finally pulled back again, her lips swollen, her breath ragged, her eyes blazing, he knew he was ruined. Irrevocably, completely ruined.
It wasn't enough. It could never be enough. She needed more, needed to feel this, needed to feel alive, needed to drown out the storm that had been devouring her from the inside for too long. She kissed him like she wanted to consume him whole, like he was both poison and cure. Her nails scraped along his scalp, a sharp, almost punishing drag that left him dizzy, his breath caught between pain and ecstasy. Their mouths moved together in a brutal rhythm, a clash that was closer to violence than affection, a meeting of two people who had been broken by the same war but in different ways.
His hands moved restlessly across her back, tracing the curve of her spine through the thin fabric of her dress, desperate to learn her shape, to memorize every line, every hidden shiver. He clung to her like a drowning man clutching driftwood, terrified that if he let go she would vanish into smoke. It didn't matter that she was still furious, that her words had always been barbed and merciless. None of it mattered. What mattered was that she was here, that her body was pressed against his, that her lips tasted like both ruin and redemption.
When they tore apart again for air, the silence was heavier than any words could be. Her lips were parted, slick and red, her chest rising and falling in unsteady bursts that mirrored his own. For the briefest second, he thought he saw something soften in her gaze, something that hinted at tenderness, but then it was gone, replaced by a glare sharp enough to cut him in two. She looked at him like he was a specimen beneath glass, something to be dissected, something she already regretted touching.
"Thanks," she said flatly, her voice low and clipped, every syllable laced with venom. "I needed to know what it tastes like kissing you."
The words cracked against him like a whip. His chest tightened, but he forced himself to meet her eyes, forcing out a small, bitter smile. "And?" His voice was soft, almost tentative, though beneath it simmered a raw thread of hope he could not conceal. "What's the verdict?"
Her laugh was hollow, mocking, and it scraped at him like broken glass. "Get off your high horse, Malfoy," she shot back. "I always wondered what it would feel like to kiss a Death Eater. You know. For science. Curiosity satisfied. That's all this was."
The insult sank into him like a blade. He felt it twist in his chest, slow and merciless. He had been prepared for her anger, her disgust, even her cruelty, but hearing her reduce him to a curiosity, a passing experiment, nearly undid him. His mouth opened, but before he could form a reply, she kept going, each word sharpened to pierce him deeper.
"And I assume," she continued, her lip curling as she looked him up and down with open disdain, "you've spent years imagining what it would be like to fuck a Mudblood."
He flinched. Not outwardly, not in a way she could gloat over, but inside he crumbled. His heart dropped like a stone, and he swallowed hard against the truth she had flung at him. Because yes, he had thought of her. Not with filth, not with contempt, but with longing so deep it bordered on obsession. Not just any witch, not just any girl. Only her. Always her. Hermione.
"Hermione," he managed, her name leaving his mouth like a plea, rough and unsteady.
But she cut him off with a sharp flick of her hand, her voice like iron. "Don't. Don't you dare try to twist this into something it isn't. It changes nothing. Do you understand me? Nothing."
He nodded without realizing it, his throat thick, his tongue heavy with the words he could not say. She had stripped him bare, ripped open the wounds he had tried to bury, and there was nothing he could do but stand there and take it. Because she wasn't wrong. She was never wrong.
Her expression shifted, the fury still there but tempered now by something colder, something final. "Do yourself a favor, Malfoy," she said, her voice quieter, almost steady, though it struck him harder than any scream could have. "Don't mistake this for forgiveness. Don't mistake me for someone who could ever forget what you did. This isn't mercy. It isn't love. And it never will be."
Her words lingered in the air like smoke, choking him, clinging to him even as she turned on her heel. The sound of her footsteps across the wooden floor echoed through the flat, each step dragging her further away from him, each one tearing at the frayed edges of his resolve. He didn't move. He couldn't.
The door opened, then slammed shut with a violence that rattled the frame, and just like that she was gone. The silence that followed was deafening. Draco stood there for a long time, frozen in place, until finally his body betrayed him. His hand lifted slowly to his lips, still swollen, still tingling from the force of her kiss.
She had called it curiosity, a mistake, a meaningless indulgence. Something she could dismiss, discard, and forget.
But for him, it had been everything. The culmination of years of silent torment, of longing so sharp it had become a part of his very being. And that was the cruelest truth of all. She could walk away, leaving this behind her as nothing more than a reckless moment, while he would carry it forever. He would be haunted by the taste of her mouth, the scrape of her nails, the fire of her anger.
It would never leave him. Not in a month. Not in a year. Not ever.
And that, he realized with a hollow ache in his chest, was the difference between them.