He had never stood this still in his life. Not in a way that made his bones ache. Not in a way that made breath feel like defiance. The courtroom was too quiet. The air tasted like parchment and old stone, thick with judgment and something worse—expectation. Every eye was on him. Hundreds of them. Hungry. Waiting. Watching.
He had stood in silence before. In courtrooms. Before judges. Before enemies. He had stood while the world weighed his name like a crime in itself. He had stood with truth serum in his veins and his mother gripping his wrist like it might keep him anchored. But not like this. This wasn't silence. This wasn't stillness.
This was surrender, and it wasn't his.
He stood tall only because collapsing would be worse. His back was locked in place, too rigid to feel natural, too precise to be real. Every muscle in his legs burned. His knees throbbed. His calves trembled under the weight of ceremonial expectation. But he did not move. Movement was too dangerous. Movement would be read as disrespect. As weakness. As rebellion. And he couldn't afford to be any of those things.
Not today.
The robes they gave him felt like armor and a cage at once. Heavy silk dragged from some old Malfoy vault, lined with silver thread and stitched with generations of pride that no longer protected him. They were cold. Stiff. Wrong. They bit into his shoulders when he so much as breathed too deeply. The sleeves resisted every twitch of his wrist. He could barely lift his chin without the collar pushing back.
They weren't meant for comfort. They were meant for display.
The Ministry wanted him like this. He could see it now. The stillness wasn't just part of the ceremony. It was the point of it. This was their show. Their perfect photo. The last Malfoy heir, leashed and lacquered, wrapped in ancestral fabric like a relic pulled out of a tomb. A symbol of submission. A warning to every pureblood who still believed they were untouchable.
It had nothing to do with justice.
This was pageantry. Politics disguised as penance.
They had scrubbed this ritual clean of its ugliness and called it reparation. They had crafted every part of it with intention. The enchantment lights. The layers of silk. The shape of the stage. They had built it to look sacred. And they had cast him as the final act.
He was not a man in this room. He was a message.
And he hated them for it.
The Ministry officials sat high above him, their seats carved into the upper walls like they were judging from Olympus. Their smiles were polite. Practiced. Pleased. They watched him with the smug ease of people who had turned punishment into performance. This wasn't about healing. It wasn't about peace.
It was about power. Their power. Not his.
They didn't want him to scream. They didn't want him to resist. They wanted him still. Controlled. Quiet. Acceptable.
And he gave it to them. Because he had no other choice.
Draco stood behind the enchantment veil, still as stone. The magic shimmered in front of him, thin as mist, stretched tight with old laws and ceremonial bindings. It moved like water caught in a trance, barely rippling, humming with the kind of magic that had been carved into the bones of the Ministry long before he was born.
His hands stayed at his sides, fists clenched hard enough that the knuckles showed pale through the skin. His jaw locked until pain radiated up into his temples. His teeth throbbed with pressure. He didn't let himself blink. He didn't dare.
He just stared straight ahead and held it all in.
The anger. The shame. The memory of what he used to be.
It was the only thing he still had any power over—how still he could remain while they stripped away the last of his name.
The courtroom around him was vast and cold, dressed in stone and shadow. Every inch had been cleaned and polished for today. The arches had been enchanted to gleam. The gold trim along the benches had been retouched, shining just enough to impress, but not enough to distract. The stained-glass windows let in filtered sunlight, casting it in unnatural colors across the floor. Pale gold. Sickly green. A cruel shade of blue.
One of those slashes of light fell across his face. It burned.
He didn't flinch.
He felt like he was being prayed over by people who didn't believe in mercy.
The magic in the room was ancient and disinterested, like it had seen too many trials to care about this one. But the humans—oh, they cared. They cared enough to pack every seat. Every row of observers was full. Ministry staff. Journalists. Diplomats. People with sharp quills and sharper eyes, waiting for him to slip, to crack, to give them something they could write about over wine later.
They had come to see the last Malfoy heir humiliated. And they were not going to leave disappointed.
This wasn't a trial. Not anymore. That had come and gone years ago.
This was the sale.
The final step in turning his bloodline into a political offering.
He had already lost everything else. His father was broken. His mother exhausted. The house, cursed and empty. Their name, dragged through every headline and Ministry decree. Their vaults were mostly gone. Their allies had vanished.
There was nothing left to take from him.
So now, they would take him.
They would dress it up in sacred language. They would call it restitution. Reparation. Progress. But he knew what it really was.
A public offering.
A ritual cleansing, carried out through the oldest method of power transfer that magic had ever known.
They called it reparations. A tidy word, polished and perfumed with Ministry rhetoric, rolled out like a peace offering dressed in parchment and red wax. It sounded generous. Almost noble. The kind of word that sat comfortably in the mouths of men who had never bled for anything, who had never truly lost. But to Draco, it rang bitter. A velvet-wrapped curse pretending to be virtue. It wasn't justice. It wasn't healing. It was punishment made ceremonial, a noose disguised as heirloom jewellery.
They named it The Bride Price Ritual, as if dusting off some old, moth-eaten tradition from the vaults of magical law could somehow make it sacred again. As if a ceremony could undo the stains left by war. As if marriage, of all things, could pass for reparation. But Draco had studied history too closely to fall for that lie. Not the cleaned-up version they printed in Ministry books, but the real history, the blood-and-bone kind. He knew exactly what rituals like this had always been used for.
Not restoration. Control.
Not peace. Submission.
It had never been about repair. It had always been about reshaping power. Erasing what no longer served. Quietly binding threats to safer names. Hiding conquest in the folds of old magic and calling it tradition. That was the Ministry's greatest trick—changing the costume, not the act.
This was not reconciliation. This was a show.
A spectacle in four parts: blood, shame, display, silence.
And everyone knew it. Even the ones pretending they didn't. The ones who wore polite expressions and took tidy notes for their society columns. The ones who whispered about justice between sips of wine, trying to believe that this—this—was fairness. They were not here to witness healing. They were here for the performance. The Ministry had simply changed the curtains, lit the stage a bit better, and passed the humiliation off as heritage.
The war was over, yes. But not for him. Not for the Malfoys.
Their name still stuck in the air like smoke that wouldn't clear. It clung to conversation. Lingered in rooms after the topic had moved on. It showed up in silence, in pauses, in the subtle shift of posture when someone realized who was standing beside them.
His father had ensured they would survive the fallout. Not with strength or dignity, but with gold and strategic submission. He had given the Ministry just enough to be spared, just enough to be useful. And Draco had been left to carry what remained. Not a legacy. A liability. Not honour. Just the bitter weight of owing everything to a system that hated him.
He had paid for it in public silence. In headline after headline. In the slight but constant narrowing of eyes that told him he would never be forgiven. Not really.
He paid for it in interviews where he said too much. Or too little. In every smile that looked more like a warning. In every event where he was invited just to be observed.
He paid in stillness. In obedience. In letting them take from him piece by piece, until all that was left was blood.
And now they were coming for that too.
This ritual was the final cost.
He was the last unmarried Malfoy heir of his generation. Once, that title had meant something. It was a badge of legacy, a mark of status. Now it felt like a curse carved into his back. What had once made him untouchable now made him expendable. Too dangerous to ignore. Too valuable to leave alone.
They couldn't throw him away. His name still carried weight, and his blood—tainted as they claimed it was—held magic old enough to bend history.
It wasn't that they wanted him. They wanted to control him. Bind him. Box him in something ancient enough to pass as sacred, so the world could pretend it was justice instead of fear.
He had become a liability dressed in silk. A final piece on a board no one wanted to play anymore. And the worst part? He knew it. He knew that this was not about reconciliation, not about peace. It was about managing risk. About turning the last living Malfoy into something harmless.
But even dulled, even leashed, the blood still mattered.
Because bloodlines like his had been carved into the foundations of magical law. In old treaties. In ancient wards. In buried clauses of inheritance magic that had not been challenged in centuries. His family might have been stripped of wealth, of titles, of public dignity, but the roots still went deep. Too deep to cut clean.
And the Ministry knew it.
So they smiled.
They called it progress. They issued a press release with all the right words and an unflattering portrait. They framed it as a moment of healing. A bridge between old wounds and new futures. A sacred ritual reborn.
What they meant was: Look what we can do to him.
What they meant was: Watch us make him kneel.
The rules of the ritual were ancient, untouched, written in language so old it hummed beneath the skin when spoken aloud. Any witch with the right bloodline could claim him. She needed no wealth, no favour, no charm. Just proof of ancestry. Magic would know if she lied. Magic would decide if she was worthy.
Once chosen, the bond would be sealed in blood. The contract would be final.
No revoking it.
No escaping it.
Not even death could break it clean.
It didn't matter if he wanted it.
It didn't matter who stepped forward.
Because that had never been the point.
This ritual was not about consent. It was about containment.
It was about showing the world that even someone like Draco Malfoy could be put on display and sold like a prize.
Not asked. Not warned. Not spared.
Only taken.
Draco watched the courtroom through the shimmer of the enchantment veil. The runes were old, delicate things carved into the magic like threads of spider silk—symbols of silence and binding, laced together to make him disappear until the ceremony began. It was polite magic. The kind that hid its cruelty behind tradition. But it didn't hide anything from him.
He saw them all.
Every pair of eyes. Every set jaw. Every smirk curling beneath powdered cheeks and jeweled collars.
The room was packed. It felt like standing in the middle of a firework about to go off. Ministry officials sat in tight little clusters, all murmured confidence and barely concealed delight. Witches in designer robes whispered behind fans or gloves or crystal goblets of conjured wine, their faces flushed with anticipation. Rows of journalists lined the benches like vultures with ink-stained wings, their quills twitching as if waiting for blood to hit the floor.
No one had come for peace.
They had come for the spectacle.
And they got what they wanted. The flashbulbs kept going off—blinding bursts of enchanted light popping in uneven rhythm, burning across the back of his vision until it felt like the inside of his skull was on fire. The sharp flickers left a bitter taste on his tongue. He stood still through all of it, jaw locked, fists curled at his sides, like he could hold back everything that wanted to rise.
He wasn't being recorded. He was being consumed.
Down in the front rows, where the seats were thick with magic and memory, sat the real audience. The ones who mattered. The old families.
They didn't clap. They didn't speak. They didn't need to.
Their presence said enough.
Astoria Greengrass sat near the center, spine straight and hands folded, her gaze steady and unreadable. She looked like she was preparing for a funeral and a wedding at the same time. Her expression gave away nothing, but Draco could tell she was watching everything. Not missing a single breath.
To her left sat a Bulstrode—one of the older ones—broad-shouldered, immovable, flanked by two younger girls styled like bridesmaids and bodyguards in equal measure. Her eyes were locked on the altar, face set like she already knew how this would end.
And farther down, likely a Rosier. He couldn't be sure. The profile was too sharp, the posture too theatrical. But the smile gave her away. It wasn't friendly. It wasn't cruel either. It was the kind of smile that belonged to people who knew the rules and had always gotten away with bending them.
They weren't there to claim him.
They were there to see who would.
And maybe, just maybe, to decide if they approved.
Draco held still through it all. His back hurt. His knees were screaming. His hands had gone numb from how long he'd kept them still. But he didn't move.
Because movement would make it real.
And real meant the end of whatever version of himself he'd still been holding on to.
He knew them all. Not as strangers, but as remnants of a life that no longer belonged to him. He had danced with them once, or with their sisters, or with daughters groomed to glide through ballrooms like swans trained for war. He had bowed beneath chandeliers that dripped like frost, endured the cloying crush of perfume in drawing rooms where everything was velvet and venom. They had giggled behind embroidered fans and whispered sharp little truths about bloodlines and heartbreak, as if the two were ever separate.
They were not unknown to him. They were the architecture of the world he had once moved through with ease. Calculated, political, and practiced in the kind of violence that never left bruises. He had been raised to handle them. To flatter and deflect. To survive among them without ever giving too much away.
And even after everything, after Azkaban tribunals and forced apologies and years of scrubbing himself into something publicly tolerable, he had believed the Ministry would at least keep this humiliation controlled. He thought it would stay within the expected names. The usual families. Something grim, yes, but familiar.
He had been wrong.
Something shifted. He felt it before he understood it. A tightening at the base of his spine. A cold breath against the back of his neck. Not quite fear. Fear was too sharp, too quick. This was slower. Heavier. The kind of feeling that sank beneath the ribs and waited.
The magic was stirring.
He felt it in the floor first. Deep in the stone. Like a heartbeat trying to climb its way up through the marble. It pulsed beneath the surface in time with the chamber's old enchantments, threads of ancient spellwork woven through the bones of the building like veins. The shift in the air was subtle but exact. The temperature dropped. The wards brushed against his skin like fingertips.
Even the light changed.
The veil in front of him fluttered. Not from wind, but from the hum of something older than the Ministry itself. Something ceremonial. Something watching.
The room no longer felt like a courtroom.
It felt like a mouth, wide open, waiting to consume.
And he was the offering.
Draco stood still as the magic prepared itself. Still as the moment stretched into ritual. Still as the last heir of a condemned house about to be handed over, not to justice, not to mercy, but to whatever ancient thing had been summoned to bear witness.
He could feel it now. Deep beneath the marble floor, something had begun to shift. The polished stone seemed to exhale, not with air but with magic—slow, cold, and ancient. It wasn't a breeze. It wasn't a tremor. It was a breath drawn from spells buried too long, now waking all at once. The sensation crawled up through the soles of his shoes and wrapped around his ankles with eerie precision. Invisible vines, cold as silver, tightened without force but with purpose. The enchantments beneath the floor weren't ornamental. They moved like veins, threading ritual magic through the stone in patterns older than the Ministry itself.
The air thickened. Metallic at the back of his throat. Electric on his skin. The weight of the moment was no longer symbolic. It was magic. It was real. The enchantment veil in front of him flickered, its edges warping like light bent through water. The magic was building. Ceremony was beginning.
And then came the voice.
It cut through the tension like a knife. Clear. Polished. Measured to perfection. A voice trained for courtrooms and political events, but slick with something else beneath it. Satisfaction. The kind that didn't need to shout to be cruel.
"By decree of the Wizarding Reparations Committee," the officiant said, each word echoing through the hall like a gavel, "and under the sanction of the Magical Bloodline Restoration Act, we gather to fulfill the rite of the Bride Price Offering. Today, the House of Malfoy will make restitution."
That word again. Restitution. It landed like ash in his mouth.
There was no justice in this. No healing. It was theatre in fine robes. A punishment disguised as legacy. A wedding rebranded as sacrifice. The law had dressed itself in ceremony, but it was still just a knife in silk.
His jaw locked. The word sat behind his teeth like gravel.
He didn't flinch as the veil dropped.
The magic fell in a slow ripple of gold, casting him into full view. The gasp that followed echoed through the gallery. Sharp. Satisfied. Not horror. Not sympathy. Just spectacle. They had come for a show, and now they had it. Their faces lit up like it was entertainment. Like he was some rare creature, finally visible in the cage.
He stood in full view. Tall. Silent. Wrapped in too much fabric and too much shame. They didn't see a man. They saw a moment. Something they could write about, whisper about, drink to later in velvet-draped parlors. They saw the Malfoy name on display, pinned and preserved like something caught in glass.
He was the offering. The punishment. The ceremony.
And then the officiant called the first name.
"Lady Astoria Greengrass, of the Northern Lineage, direct descendant of High Enchanters Brisena and Corvinus."
He saw her rise from the front row. Her movement was smooth, each gesture practiced. Head bowed. Hands folded. Posture so perfect it barely seemed human.
"I decline."
Her voice was soft. Polite. Not cruel. But the silence that followed rang louder than any insult.
Gasps fluttered through the crowd. Not outrage. Not confusion. Excitement. A new layer of drama. More parchment for the society columns. Another headline for the day's edition.
He didn't move.
Another name was read.
Another woman stepped forward.
Another refusal.
Then another. And another. Each one calm. Measured. Too controlled to be emotional. Each one cut in a way that wasn't meant to humiliate him directly, but did.
They didn't need to raise their voices. They didn't need to insult him. The silence after each name did all the work. A pause just long enough to let the rejection sink in.
He stood still, but his pulse was rising. Not from shock. Not from panic. From something colder. Something older. Something that curled in the base of his spine and turned his fingers into stone.
They didn't want his name.
They didn't want his magic.
They didn't want anything left of what his family used to be.
And for the first time in a long time, he felt it without shame.
The rage.
Old, deep, quiet.
And still, he stood.
Because that was what they wanted, wasn't it?
To see if he'd break.
To see if he'd beg.
He gave them neither.
The Ministry had put him forward, had offered him like a relic to be enshrined or discarded at will, and the pureblood daughters of the old world were turning their backs. Not out of vengeance. Not even out of morality. But indifference. And there was something in that hurt more than hatred ever could.
Because this wasn't a reckoning.
It was abandonment masquerading as formality.
And Draco Malfoy, for all his inherited grandeur and magical pedigree, had just become the unclaimed prize at the altar of redemption.
He felt it building. Not loudly, not all at once, but like pressure under the skin—steady, suffocating, impossible to ignore. The air grew heavy, thick enough to press against his ribs. The tension crawled up the back of his neck, electric and cold. It was in the way the crowd began to shift. In the nervous rustle of expensive robes. In the glances darting toward the dais. Conversations had stalled mid-whisper. Even the most practiced purebloods were faltering, their composure cracking just enough to show the fear curling at the edges.
The ritual had gone wrong.
Not outwardly. Not yet. But it had begun to buckle. Too many refusals. Not enough names. The magic strained under the silence, stretched too far across tradition's brittle spine. The old spells needed a match. They needed blood. They needed binding. Without it, everything frayed. Beneath the marble, the enchantments started to pull, hungry and unmoored, desperate for resolution before the moment collapsed in on itself.
It wasn't quiet. It was swollen. Bloated with magic and dread.
Then it happened.
No fanfare. No theatrics. Just a voice.
Soft. Low. Calm.
"I claim him."
It wasn't shouted. It didn't need to be. The words didn't arrive like a statement. They arrived like a reckoning. What shattered the room wasn't what she said. It was who said it.
She stepped forward before anyone could stop her.
Unhurried. Unbothered. Untouched by the stunned silence she left behind. She walked like the moment had always been hers. As if the ritual had been carved for her, and history had simply forgotten to send the invitation.
She didn't look like a participant. She looked like a myth.
The gown wasn't ceremonial. It was divine. Sculpted silk, liquid and silver-edged, fell around her like starlight made tangible. Runes were woven into the fabric—small, secret spells embroidered so finely they flickered when she moved, like constellations stitched into her skin. The dress didn't glow with magic. It radiated something quieter. Something older. Authority. Power that didn't shout. Power that didn't need to.
Her heels struck the marble like punctuation. Sharp. Measured. The sound echoed through the chamber like a statement no one dared interrupt.
She didn't flinch. She didn't hesitate. She didn't bow. She walked straight into the circle without asking permission. As if the runes under her feet had been waiting for her weight to set them alight.
The wardlight caught in her hair, loose and shining like dusk spun into thread, and it shimmered as she passed. Not because of the light. Because of the magic. The spells didn't resist her. They knew her. The chamber felt it. Everyone did. The old power stirred like it had just remembered its name.
Gasps followed.
Not scattered. Broken.
Glass-in-a-cathedral broken. Shards of disbelief, sharp and panicked, as the gallery tried and failed to make sense of what they were seeing.
This wasn't a pureblood bride.
This wasn't an heiress bred for ritual.
This was Hermione Granger.
And by every rule that mattered, she shouldn't have been allowed past the wardline.
But the magic didn't reject her.
It welcomed her.
The runes flared to life.
Not reluctantly. Not cautiously. But with reverence.
The circle didn't seal to trap her. It sealed to protect her. The altar shimmered as her name scrawled itself across the ceremonial parchment in ink that pulsed gold and violet. The floor lit beneath her feet. The old magic twisted, sighed, shifted—like something heavy had finally fallen into place.
The rite didn't resist her. It bloomed for her.
Because she hadn't broken the ritual.
She had completed it.
Because the rite hadn't been failing.
It had been waiting.
And she wasn't just powerful.
She was inevitable.
The rage hit him so fast it stole the breath from his lungs. It rose hard and sudden, thick in his throat like bile. His chest burned. His jaw clenched. It was the kind of fury that didn't announce itself. It detonated. Sharp and white and searing with the weight of something ripped from his hands.
He hadn't expected her. Not here. Not in this room. Not in the heart of a ritual soaked in history and humiliation.
And not like this.
Not calm. Not steady. Not with that voice, soft as silk and just as cutting, curling around the moment like it had always belonged to her.
His mouth opened before he could think. He didn't know what he meant to say—maybe her name, maybe a curse, maybe just a sound sharp enough to draw blood—but the magic shut him down before the first syllable could form. His throat locked. The spell did what he couldn't. It silenced him. Ancient magic. Older than outrage. Older than the laws he had spent a lifetime learning to hate.
The rite forbade protest. The law did not care what he felt.
His voice was no longer his own.
That was the worst part. Not the spectacle. Not the audience. Not even her.
It was the silence.
Even his fury had to kneel.
He couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Couldn't even clench his fists without the magic tightening further, crawling under his skin like invisible thread. He stood frozen, shackled not by chains, but by rules he hadn't written and spells he could never break. His spine ached from holding still. His jaw burned from restraint. His vision blurred—but not from tears.
And still, he looked at her.
Because he couldn't not look.
Because somehow, seeing her hurt more than hearing her.
And she smiled.
Not to mock. Not to win. Not to gloat.
She smiled like she'd found something. Like he was something. Like this moment had never belonged to anyone else.
It wasn't the smile of someone crashing a legacy for fun. It wasn't the smug smirk of a witch showing off in front of a crowd.
It was quiet. Familiar.
Like she was remembering him. Like she had expected this. Like she had always known he would be standing there, and she had simply been waiting for time to catch up.
That was the part that broke him.
Not the magic. Not the silence. Not the ceremony.
The look in her eyes.
She didn't look at him like the world had just changed.
She looked at him like the world had finally gotten back on track.
She looked at him like fate had been wandering for years and had finally found its way home.
And he felt it. That same strange thing. That same pull. Like gravity had shifted around her. Like everything he knew about this ritual, about himself, about her—was suddenly wrong.
She didn't posture.
She didn't bow.
She didn't ask.
She simply existed. Poised and unshaken. Dressed in something so expensive and elegant it made his blood rise for no reason he could name. She looked like she belonged in a painting. Or a prophecy.
And when she spoke again, the words were barely louder than a whisper.
But they carried.
"I've always been curious about dragons."
That was all.
She said it like it was nothing. Like it was everything. Like the room wasn't on fire behind their eyes. Like the ritual hadn't twisted the foundations of law to let her stand there. Like her name hadn't just rewritten the contract. Like magic itself hadn't just bent to her without complaint.
She said it like a memory.
Like a joke that no one else would get.
Like a promise.
And he didn't know what the hell to do with it.
He didn't know if he wanted to tear the world apart around her or sink to his knees and ask what else she had always been curious about.
He didn't know if what sat behind his ribs was hatred or need.
He just knew that he couldn't breathe.
And she wasn't even trying.
***
Granger reached for the ceremonial quill with a slowness that didn't suggest hesitation. It was something else entirely. Something quieter. More unsettling. A kind of deliberate grace that made it hard to breathe, let alone look away. Her fingers moved with the weightless precision of a dream, hovering just above the feathered shaft as though the object might vanish if touched too suddenly. It didn't feel like she was reaching for parchment and ink. It felt like she was reaching for something sacred. Something old and trembling at the edge of reality.
It was the way someone might reach for the stem of a prophecy, still unspoken. Or the breath of a spell older than language. Something fragile clinging to the space between memory and future.
She didn't hold the quill like it belonged to the Ministry. She didn't grip it like a legal instrument or a formality meant to be witnessed. She held it like a relic. Something that breathed. Something with a story. She handled it with reverence that didn't perform—it simply existed. The kind of quiet tenderness someone might show a mirror that remembers who you were before everything broke.
No grand gesture. No flinch. No show of emotion.
Just stillness. Unbreakable. Unmoving. That impossible stillness she wore like silk. Her entire body seemed made to hold still until the world asked her to move. And when she finally did lift the quill, it didn't look like a choice. It looked like a ritual being fulfilled. A spell coming to its close.
That was the moment the room seemed to understand.
This wasn't a contract being sealed.
This wasn't a match being made.
This was fate being rewritten.
She wasn't just binding herself to a name soaked in ruin. She wasn't just marrying into a legacy that reeked of old power and old failure. She was doing something deeper. Older. Stranger. She was inscribing herself into a myth the rest of them had forgotten. She was carving a shape into the parchment that didn't say I accept, but rather this was always mine.
Every stroke of the quill felt less like ownership and more like a quiet claiming of time. A corner of history being marked and spoken for.
Her movements were fluid. Too smooth to be rehearsed, too precise to be accidental. They carried the stillness of a forest before a storm. The kind of quiet that hums beneath bark. The kind that smells like dusk and roots and eyes watching from deep in the trees.
And when the quill finally touched the parchment, the ink shimmered with a color that didn't belong to this world. It wasn't gold. It wasn't violet. It wasn't even iridescent. It was something between, something alive. It didn't reflect light. It breathed it. The letters rose from the page in soft curls, floating like vapor off a potion too old to be legal.
It smelled like rain and elderflower and things that only existed in dreams.
It smelled like magic that had never asked permission.
It smelled like a choice disguised as surrender, and surrender disguised as something inevitable.
And Draco—still locked in place, still silent, still slowly unraveling—could only watch.
Helpless. Furious. And unable to look away.
She signed away the last thread of his autonomy with the quiet poise of someone giving a blessing. Not a demand. Not a sentence. But something closer to grace. Like she was handing down an act of mercy she didn't realize had the power to destroy him.
And all he could do was stand there, chest tight, spine locked, heart caught on a feeling he didn't know how to name.
All he could do was watch as Hermione Granger began the exquisite, irreversible undoing of his life.
And made it look like a gift.
Then it was his turn. No announcement. No grace. No reverence. Just inevitability. The ritual did not pause for him. It did not acknowledge him. It simply moved forward, steady and unyielding, like a tide that had no interest in the drowning.
He stepped toward the altar because there was nowhere else to go. The crowd behind him blurred into a single mass of watchful silence, their faces indistinguishable beneath the weight of the moment. Every step felt slow, pulled from him rather than chosen, the kind of movement that happens when a man already understands the outcome and knows that resisting will only make the fall uglier.
He did not look at Granger. He did not look at the officiant. His eyes stayed fixed on the parchment waiting for him at the center of the circle, his name already etched in soft, unfinished strokes beside hers, as if the spell had been holding its breath for him.
He reached for the quill.
It was still warm.
Her warmth. Her hand had been here only moments before. The heat clung to the silver filigree like memory. His fingers closed around it before he meant to, the sensation catching in his chest without warning. It felt heavier than it should. Not in weight, but in what it carried. A decision. A sentence. A future already set in motion.
He lifted it.
A man writing the final line of his own story.
When the nib touched parchment, the ink did not glide. It pulled. Slow. Thick. Iron-dark. It formed the letters of his name in strokes that felt too permanent to be ink. More like engraving. More like carving something from bone.
This was not contract.
This was consequence.
The magic recognized him long before the room did. He felt it strike through him like a sudden plunge into cold water. His spine stiffened. His breath caught. Something inside him recoiled, curled back, drew in tight like an animal baring teeth in the dark.
His magic knew.
Before his mind could make sense of anything, before he could pretend this was symbolic or ceremonial or political, his magic recognized the binding. It felt the shift. The closing of a door that would never open again.
There would be no reversing it.
No severing.
No undoing.
Something ancient had settled. Not just around him, but inside him. A new shape fitting into the hollow places where certainty used to live.
He finished signing.
The ink dried in less than a heartbeat.
And in that exact moment, the truth settled in his bones with quiet, merciless clarity.
He did not belong to himself anymore.
There was no one else to blame.
Not the Ministry.
Not his family.
Not even her.
He had walked into the circle.
He had taken the quill.
He had written his name.
And the magic had accepted it.
So he turned to her.
Not because he wanted to, but because he had to. Because if he didn't, he would've put his fist through the nearest pillar, or hexed the officiant, or burned the whole bloody chamber to ash just to feel like something still belonged to him.
And when he faced her, it hit him like a slap.
She was already looking at him. Calm. Steady. Still.
Like this wasn't a public execution. Like he wasn't unraveling in front of her. Like she had all the time in the world to let him come undone.
He took a step closer.
"You think this is funny?"
His voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It scraped along the edges of the silence like broken glass, sharp and quiet and laced with something darker than anger. Not just fury. Not just humiliation. There was disbelief there. Betrayal. A kind of ache he didn't have the words for, bleeding through the cracks in his composure.
He needed her to say something. Anything.
She didn't flinch.
Of course she didn't.
Hermione Granger never flinched.
"Not funny," she said.
And gods, the way she said it hit him harder than a hex. It wasn't defensive. It wasn't smug. It wasn't even apologetic. It was maddening. It was calm. As if she weren't standing in the middle of the most sacred magical rite in modern history, having just rewritten the terms of both their lives with one sentence and a signature. As if she hadn't just hijacked his future and handed it back to him with a bow.
"Interesting."
That word. That unbearable word.
It made his jaw tighten. Made his throat close. Made something sharp and sick rise in his chest like acid.
Interesting.
Like he was a subject under a microscope. Like he was a detail in the margin of a textbook. Like he wasn't a man with blood on his hands and panic in his lungs. Like she hadn't just torn the bones out of his spine and offered him back to himself with a smile.
His sneer came fast, hot, uncontained.
"What exactly do you think this is, Granger?" he snapped, voice low but full of something that cracked at the edges. "What kind of fucking game are you playing?"
She didn't blink.
"Do you even understand what you've done?"
His fists clenched, nails biting into his palms until the sting grounded him. He wanted to shake her. He wanted her to rise to the bait, to lose that mask of composure and show him the mess underneath. He needed to know there was a mess underneath. Something human. Something he could grab hold of. Fight with. Blame.
But she tilted her head instead.
That goddamn thoughtful little tilt. Like she was listening. Like she was considering him. Like he mattered.
Her hair fell forward, catching the light as it slid across her shoulder, and for a second, the whole chamber blurred. The crowd, the circle, the laws carved into the marble. None of it existed.
Only her.
And the way she looked at him.
Not like an enemy.
Not like a hero.
Not even like a rival.
She looked at him the way people look at broken things they're not afraid to touch. With interest, yes. But with care. With that unbearable softness he'd only ever seen in hospital rooms and graveyards. The kind of gaze that didn't challenge or mock. The kind that forgave, even when you hadn't asked.
"You looked so lonely," she said.
Just that.
Nothing more.
No lecture. No explanation. No apology.
The words slid into him like a knife. Not because they were cruel. Because they weren't. Because they were real.
And that made it worse.
His breath caught. His jaw twitched. He couldn't breathe around it.
She hadn't said it to win.
She'd said it because she meant it.
He looked at her, eyes burning, throat full of gravel, and for one suspended, staggering second, he didn't know whether to scream at her or fall to his knees.
But it didn't matter. The ritual didn't wait.
The magic rose. Gold and violent. Alive with purpose.
It surged through the circle like a wave cracking open a dam, roaring up between them with the sound of thunder held in a breath, sealing the bond with finality so complete it made the ground tremble.
And in that exact moment, he understood something he would never be able to undo.
She hadn't stolen him.
She had chosen him.
And that, somehow, was the more terrifying thing.
The heat rose from the parchment in a rush that stole his breath, a sudden bloom of magic so fierce it felt as if something inside him had been set alight. Not a spell cast around him. A spell cast through him. The warmth surged beneath his ribs and spread upward in waves, wrapping around his arms like cuffs that could not be seen, sliding up his spine with the heavy, consuming weight of molten metal. It moved beneath his collarbones and threaded itself into the narrow paths of his veins, golden fire edged with something sharp and cold, something older than pain.
It did not simply bind him. It entered him. It took hold.
The magic rooted itself in the hollows of his body the way memory does, settling into places that were never meant to be touched. It spread with slow, merciless certainty, each breath falling under its command. It sank past muscle and marrow and every buried piece of ancestral spellcraft that had ever lived inside him. It recognized him. It claimed him. It treated his blood as if it had always belonged to it.
And it kept going.
It moved through him like a truth returning home after being forgotten. Like a door that had always been there, waiting for this moment to open. It wound through old corridors of lineage, through inherited power and inherited sin, turning locks he had not known existed.
His chest tightened. His vision flickered. He felt something inside him fold inward for a moment, as if to shield itself, as if instinct understood something his mind had not yet reached.
Then it sealed.
A flash of gold burned between them, bright enough to sting even through closed eyes. The parchment glowed in a clean, merciless light and then cooled, the magic locking into place with a finality that did not need sound to be heard. He felt it in his bones instead, a deep and undeniable click. A door shut. A chain fastened. A promise written into the architecture of his blood.
And then the chamber fell quiet.
Not the ordinary quiet of a room without voices. A quiet that pressed into the air and stayed there. A quiet that felt like the world holding its breath, as if acknowledging that something irreversible had just occurred.
It was done.
Hermione Granger was now his wife. Not through courtship. Not through choice. Bound to him by a ritual older than most recorded magic, sealed in a language no court could undo.
And far worse than that simple truth was the one that followed.
He was hers.
Not in name alone. Not in the polite, political way the Ministry would later print in their statements. Bound in body. Bound in blood. Bound in legacy. Every door inside him that could be locked had just been opened for her.
Forever.
***
The carriage moved with a grace that felt almost mocking. It hovered above the ground as if the very laws of motion had stepped aside for it, gliding through the countryside with the smoothness of something that had never known friction or effort. The wheels did not turn. The body did not jostle. It floated, elegant and quiet, built by people who thought luxury was the same thing as mercy.
The road beneath it was charmed to remain perfect. No stones. No mud. No frost. No reminders of the real world. Only a polished path wrapped in old protections, the kind that remembered wars no one spoke about anymore. The interior matched the exterior in its careful, cultivated comfort. Soft cushions that shifted to cradle the spine, air held at the exact point between warm and cool, windows charmed to let in only moonlight so the world outside could not intrude. The walls themselves seemed to hush the air.
It was beautiful in the way expensive things often are. Beautiful in a way that tried too hard to be gentle. Beautiful in a way that was, in its core, a lie.
Because nothing about this moment was gentle.
Inside the carriage, the quiet was not peace. It was pressure. It was the thick, concentrated silence that settles over a battlefield before the first movement breaks it. Every inch of the air felt stretched thin, pulled tight, waiting.
She sat across from him, legs drawn up comfortably beneath her, her posture unguarded, her expression calm in a way that felt almost surreal. She held a small, luminous sprig of something green in her lap and stroked its leaves with slow, thoughtful fingers. She was humming under her breath. A small tune. Almost absentminded. As if she were sitting in her own garden, beside her own window, on an ordinary evening.
As if she had not just dismantled the shape of his life.
The sound of that humming scraped against him in ways he could not articulate. It wrapped itself around his nerves and pulled. Not loud. Not cruel. Just present. Soft, persistent, intolerable.
He sat rigid on the opposite bench, his back straight, his hands locked into white-knuckled fists against his knees. His jaw ached from how tightly he held it. Every muscle in his body felt wound tight enough to snap.
There was anger in him. Of course there was. But anger was only the top layer. Beneath it lay something hotter, something heavy and raw, something he could not shape into words. Confusion. Shock. The disorienting burn of having no control. And beneath that, deeper, something worse. A pull. A recognition he did not want to examine.
She was calm. She was untouched. She looked as though nothing about this was extraordinary.
That was what made him want to tear the quiet apart.
The space between them felt alive. Thick. Charged. The silence was not stillness. It was a presence. It breathed against his ribs, stirred the back of his throat, waited behind every breath. It pressed in, closer and closer, until it felt like the air itself was listening.
She did not look at him. She had not looked at him since the carriage door shut. And somehow that was worse than if she had stared. There was no triumph in her posture. No satisfaction. No guilt. No fear. Just that same quiet self-possession she had worn from the moment she stepped into the ritual.
She had not stolen him. She had claimed him. And she had done it as though she had every right to.
That was the part that broke him open.
Not the ritual. Not the binding. Not the loss of choice.
Her certainty.
The carriage glided on, silent and steady, through moonlit fields and sleeping forest.
On the surface, nothing moved.
Inside, something was moments from shattering.
Granger sat across from him with a calm that made no sense. A few minutes ago she had changed the course of two families, a legal system, and the rest of his life. Yet she sat as though she had only stepped out of a garden to rest for a moment. Her legs were folded beneath her, bare ankle peeking from the hem of her gown, her shoulders relaxed. She looked as if the world had asked nothing difficult of her at all.
The gown she wore gathered around her like a slow breath, soft layers that caught the moonlight and released it again in faint glimmers. The runes stitched into the fabric pulsed now and then, gentle and steady, as if responding to her heartbeat. Nothing about her posture was theatrical. She did not try to look composed. She simply was.
She hummed to herself. A quiet sound, steady, tuneless, almost like someone remembering the shape of a song heard long ago. It wrapped around the space between them, light and unbothered. And it made his skin feel too tight.
A small plant rested in her lap. He had never seen anything like it. Its leaves curled and unfurled with a slow pulse, as if it breathed. Tiny motes of gold drifted from it in soft, warm flickers that did not disperse. They hovered in the air near her hands like they belonged to her. She touched the plant with a tenderness that was not deliberate or performed. It came from somewhere older than habit. She murmured to it in low, soft tones that dissolved the moment they were spoken. Not spellwork. Not command. Something closer to comfort.
She did not look at him.
Not to gloat. Not in avoidance. Not in fear.
She simply did not feel the need to.
That was the worst part.
Granger had always lived slightly aside from the intensity of things. Even in school. Where others burned or broke, she stayed steady. Where others scrambled for control or influence, she reached for what mattered and left the rest behind. He had not understood it then. He understood it even less now.
Draco sat opposite her, rigid and cold. His hands lay on his knees, fingers curled in tight fists. His jaw ached from holding itself shut. His back refused to soften against the cushions. Every part of him felt overdrawn and overheated and starved of air. His breath came too shallow. His heartbeat thudded like something trying to get free.
He could not move. If he moved, something would give way. He did not know if it would be his composure or his voice or the thin thread of control he still had left. So he stayed still.
The silence between them did not feel empty. It had mass. It pressed against his ribs. It seemed to gather and reshape itself with each breath they took. The carriage was charmed to maintain perfect air and perfect warmth, yet all of it felt wrong, too close, too witness-like.
Her name was tied to his now. Her signature still glowed behind his eyes. The contract had sunk itself under his skin.
There was no undoing it.
He looked at her and felt something inside him shift. Not hatred. Not entirely. Not even anger anymore. Something unfamiliar and sharp. Something that frightened him more than the ritual ever had.
Because she had not destroyed him.
She had begun something.
And she did not even seem to know it.
She finally looked at him.
Not startled. Not apologetic. She looked at him the way someone looks at a flame they intend to touch, just to see if it will burn. Her fingers moved with quiet certainty as she plucked a single mint leaf from the glowing plant in her lap. She held it between her fingertips in the space between them, light as breath.
The offering was so simple that it felt cruel.
He stared at it. The leaf, her hand, the calm curve of her wrist. None of it made sense. The gesture was too gentle for this moment. Too soft. Too knowing.
He felt his pulse hammer against his ribs.
Her hand did not waver. She did not coax him. The leaf waited between them like a truth placed carefully on a table, waiting to see who would acknowledge it first.
He did not move.
His hands stayed where they were, curled into fists so tight his knuckles had gone pale and bloodless. His jaw ached. His shoulders locked. His chest felt pulled tight by invisible thread. He did not know if his body refused the gesture or if something inside him feared accepting it.
The silence grew heavy. Close. Intimate in a way that felt dangerous.
His voice came out rough. "This is not how this works."
The words fell like he had thrown them, hard and sharp, meant to cut. He needed something to break the softness. To shatter the stillness she carried like a shield. Something to make her react, to prove she was not untouchable.
Her hand lowered only slightly. She did not flinch. Not even in the eyes.
"How does it work then?" she asked.
Her tone was quiet. Not defiant. Not mocking. Curious, as though they were discussing the proper way to shelve books in a library rather than the shape of their lives.
"It works," he said, teeth pulling tight around the words, "with consequences. With cost. With what this means. You cannot just walk into a ritual like this and decide it belongs to you."
"I did not decide," she said. "I answered."
He let out a breath that felt too hot in his throat. "You do not understand what you have tied yourself to."
She studied him for a moment. Not his posture. Not his restraints. Him.
"Draco," she said. His name landed softly. Too softly. "I am not afraid of you."
He almost laughed. Not because it was funny, but because something inside him snapped at the ease of it.
"You should be."
"No," she replied. "Not you."
Her voice was steady enough to make the walls feel like they were listening.
He leaned forward just slightly, unable to stop himself. "Then you are either lying or foolish."
She shook her head. "I did not do this to win. I did not do it to claim power or to make a point. I saw you standing there. Alone. And I knew."
"Knew what?" His voice had lowered without his permission.
"That you had been left to burn for long enough."
The carriage felt suddenly too small. The air too thick.
He did not know where to put his hands. He did not know where to look.
Her eyes did not move from his.
"I am not here to fix you," she said. "I am not here to save you. I am not here to make you grateful. You can hate me if you need to. You can ignore me. You can try to pretend I am not here. None of that changes the fact that I am not going anywhere."
He felt something shift under his ribs. Something old. Something sharp.
"So what," he said, voice quiet and frayed at the edges. "You intend to pity me?"
"No," she said. "I intend to see you."
The words hit harder than any curse.
He closed his eyes. Just for a second. Just long enough to breathe without shattering.
When he opened them again, she was still holding the leaf.
Still offering.
Not asking for anything.
Not trying to take.
He did not reach for it.
But he did not look away.
And for the first time since the ritual began, the silence between them did not feel like something waiting to break.
It felt like something waiting to begin.
He hated that he did not understand her. The thought dug in like a splinter and kept digging. The word she had used would not leave him. It turned in his mind like a shard of glass, catching light, cutting wherever it touched. Anything. She had said it so easily. As if he had nothing to give. As if there was nothing of him that could be asked for.
He found himself watching her again, his glare full of heat he could not aim. It was anger, yes, but not clean anger. Not the kind that rises and burns and spits itself out. This was something heavier. Something that sat in the chest and refused to move. Something that tasted like humiliation and longing mixed into one.
She did not return the look. She simply rested her gaze on the passing fields beyond the glass, her fingers moving over the petals of that odd plant in her lap. Gentle movements. Thoughtless. Like breathing. As if his fury were rain hitting stone, there but unable to change anything.
That was what undid him.
Not the ritual. Not the binding. Not the loss of choice.
Her quiet.
Her distance.
Her softness that refused to be a weakness.
He felt something inside him strain, pulled tight past what he could hold. He did not know if he wanted to seize her by the shoulders just to make her look at him, to make this real, to prove she was not untouchable. Or if he wanted to sink to the floor at her feet, forehead pressed against her knee, just to anchor himself in something solid before the silence swallowed him whole.
And the worst part was that both desires felt the same. Both came from the same place. Both hurt.
He could imagine throwing the door open and letting the wind tear the breath out of his lungs as he vanished into the night. He could imagine crawling toward her, palms flat on velvet, unable to keep himself upright. He could imagine pressing his hand to her wrist and asking her why. Why him. Why today. Why she had looked at him like that. Like he was not something broken.
He wanted to know what she saw when she looked at him. What part of him she had recognized. What part she had decided to claim. He wanted to know if she had seen something worth saving, or something she simply refused to step away from.
He did not know if he hated her for it.
Or if he envied her so sharply that the feeling carved itself into bone.
All he knew was this: Hermione Granger had undone him in a way nothing else ever had. Not the trials. Not the headlines. Not the grief. Not the guilt. Not the war.
She had used no wand. No words. No force.
She had undone him by existing.
And he knew, with a clarity that made his pulse stumble, that she did not even realize she had done it.
She had not tried.
That was what made it unbearable.
***
He lay awake in the room she had chosen for him. Not offered. Chosen. Assigned, the way someone might place a piece on a board and wait to see what it would do next. The bed was too large, the kind that assumed permanence. The kind that softened beneath you and tried to convince you not to leave. Nothing about it matched how he felt. Not the velvet throws. Not the silver-lined pillows. Not the way the sheets smelled faintly of something floral, some polite blend of lavender and clean spring air that made his skin crawl.
The walls breathed around him, old magic sighing through the stone like a memory. Runes pulsed low and steady. Too steady. He could feel them even with his eyes closed, humming beneath the silence like a second heartbeat. The quiet wasn't peaceful. It was the kind that listened. The kind that asked questions without ever saying a word.
He didn't sleep. Couldn't.
He had slept in worse places. On battlefield soil. In cellars lined with cold stone. In cursed tents where spells stitched the seams and every sound felt like a threat. He had never needed comfort to sleep. He had just needed the chance.
But here, in this room scented like rest and carved out of soft enchantment, he couldn't unclench a single muscle. Not one. His jaw hurt. His neck ached. He couldn't even turn his head without feeling the pressure stretch tight behind his ribs.
She had put him one room away.
Not in a separate wing. Not across the hall. Just one room. A single breath between them. Close enough to hear the running water when she turned on the tap. Close enough to feel her through the wall, even when she was silent.
And gods, he was still thinking about her.
He couldn't stop. Every time he closed his eyes, she was there again. In the ritual hall, standing in that circle of old magic with her voice calm and steady, saying I claim him like it meant nothing and everything all at once. As if she hadn't just attached herself to the most ruined name in wizarding history. As if it hadn't cost her anything at all.
She had smiled at him.
And that smile had ruined him more than anything the Ministry ever could.
It had not been mocking. It hadn't even been triumphant. It had been… soft. Steady. Real. She had looked at him like she wasn't afraid. Like she wasn't disgusted. Like she wasn't doing him a favor. That look had sunk deeper than he wanted to admit. Deeper than the contract. Deeper than the vow.
He turned over. Then again. Still nothing. Just her face behind his eyelids, and the sound of her voice playing in some loop his brain refused to shut off.
He hated her. Of course he did.
He hated her calm. Hated the way she never raised her voice, never snapped, never flinched. Hated the way she looked at him like she didn't see the monster he had been forced to become, like she was seeing something under it. Something left behind. Something she was choosing anyway.
He hated that she had not gloated. Had not tried to control him. Had not even rubbed the ritual in his face.
She had just... stayed.
Not like a captor. Not like a bride. Like someone who had found a puzzle piece she had been missing and decided to keep it, even if it was jagged at the edges.
She had kept him.
That was the part he could not name. The part that would not let him rest. Because it didn't feel like power. It didn't feel like strategy. It didn't even feel like pity.
It felt like care.
And he did not know how to survive that.
Not care. Not kindness. Not from her.
Not when he had nothing to give back. Not when he had been trained for war, not warmth. Not when his whole life had taught him to run from softness like it might split him open.
He could feel her through the wall. Her magic had a rhythm to it, low and strange and steady, like the tide. The scent of her lingered in the air. Rosewood, parchment, and something he hadn't named yet. Something sharp and bright, like a match being struck. Something alive.
Sleep finally came, but it came like a thief. It stole into his body when he was too tired to keep holding himself together. It didn't ease him into dreams. It dragged him under.
And when it did, her name was still in his mouth.
Not spoken. Not shouted.
Just there. Soft and silent. A shape he had never meant to learn.
And it followed him down.