Draco had never been the kind of man to wander without purpose.
Even as a child, his movements had been deliberate. At Malfoy Manor, where everything was built to mirror power—symmetrical, pristine, and sharp-edged—he had walked with precision. No pauses. No detours. He moved through the halls with the certainty of someone who had been taught the stonework would bend for him if he asked. His feet pointed forward. His hands stayed still. The corridors had been memorised like scripture. Every arch, every door, every turn existed to remind him who he was meant to be.
But this house wasn't his.
And it made no effort to pretend otherwise.
The Granger cottage looked innocent from the outside. A storybook structure softened by ivy, with weatherworn brick and a slanted roof that seemed to sag with the weight of too many seasons. The windows glowed gold in the late light, warm in a way that felt deliberate, as if the house had learned how to hold memory and keep it gentle. He had expected something simple. He had expected quiet. He had not expected this.
Because inside, the house didn't just exist. It lived.
Not like the homes he had known—homes tamed by magic and bent to command, responding to needs before they were spoken. This house moved on its own terms. It breathed in a way he could feel beneath his skin, low and constant, like the murmur of trees in a forest untouched by wandlight. It wasn't enchanted. It was present.
The floorboards betrayed him at random, creaking where they should have been silent, softening where he expected sound. The walls leaned into strange angles, rounding where they should have stopped, twisting subtly enough to unsettle. He couldn't find a rhythm. Couldn't make a map. Every turn felt like a refusal. One corridor led to a room full of windows and too many plants. Another opened into what might have once been a music room, now overtaken by vines and moonstones and the sharp smell of herbs. A pantry narrowed into a stairwell so slim he had to shift his shoulders sideways to fit through.
There was no logic to it. No hierarchy of space. Just softness and curve and disobedience.
It was disarming in the way vulnerability always was.
The colours made his chest ache. Moss green, sun-worn pink, the violet-grey of a storm just beginning to form. There were no family portraits, no silver-framed paintings of forgotten ancestors. Instead, there were frayed tapestries stitched with constellations. Mismatched chairs. Shelves crowded with books, some open to pages in the middle of being read, some pressed between candle stubs and jars of what looked like dried fruit or crushed flower petals. There were feathers tucked into spines. Blankets folded and refolded until their corners softened with use. The walls smelled faintly of lavender and dust.
It was not curated.
It was lived in.
And he hated how much that rattled him.
Every object felt like it belonged to someone real. Someone who stayed. Someone who didn't build palaces to keep the world out but shaped rooms to welcome it in. It was the kind of space that knew how to hold people. The kind that forgave the mess.
He ran a hand over the edge of a wooden banister and felt it warm beneath his fingers.
And the plants. Gods, the plants.
They were everywhere.
They spilled from shelves and hung from beams. Vines curled around light fixtures and dragged their leaves across the floorboards like silk ribbons. There were succulents with thick, waxy skins that glowed faintly with stored moonlight, herbs in cracked ceramic pots reaching for unseen windows, and leafy green things without names that brushed against his arms as he passed. Nothing about them had been placed for decoration. Nothing clipped or curated or arranged for display. They grew as they pleased. Wild. Brazen. Alive in the way untouched forests are alive. As if the house itself had encouraged them to take root wherever they liked, and they had obeyed, not out of submission, but out of trust.
Every breath he took was full of her.
Not perfume. Not anything bottled or deliberate. Just her. Just the quiet, devastating truth of her, soaked into the air like rain after drought.
It was the same impossible scent that had clung to the courtroom the day she claimed him. Fresh mint crushed beneath warm steps. Sun on wet stone. The dry lift of sage. The low green hum of moss pressed against skin. It filled the curtains. It lived in the pillows. It rose from the grain of the floorboards like a memory that refused to stay buried.
This wasn't a house she lived in. This was a house that loved her.
And Draco—already walking a wire between fury and something he couldn't name—felt the realisation sink in with terrible, inevitable clarity.
It did not love him.
It tolerated him.
Not with disdain, not with rage, but with the silent, measured patience of something very old that had already seen the likes of him. Something that had decided long before he arrived that he did not belong. Something that was simply waiting him out.
Still, he kept walking.
Even if the house didn't want him here, he wanted to see more.
He wanted to understand her. He wanted to see how she existed when she wasn't performing, when she wasn't in battle, when no one was watching. He wanted to see what kind of world she built with her bare hands, when she had no war to fight and no one to impress. He wanted to see what she loved. What she protected. How she moved through a space that bent to her joy.
Somewhere inside this house—this wild, strange, stubborn house—was the truth of her.
And he was going to find it.
Every hallway felt like it remembered her. Like her shadow still lived there, too deeply soaked into the walls to be shaken out. He could feel it in the doors she used often, in the parts of the floor worn soft by her step. She had moved through this space in such a way that the house had reshaped itself around her. It would not let her go.
And it would not let him forget her, either.
He found himself opening doors just to feel them resist. Just to hear the hesitation in the hinges. It wasn't loud. It wasn't cruel. Just deliberate. A small reminder that he was an intruder. A quiet refusal.
You are not hers. Not yet.
In one room, the floor glowed beneath his feet. A faint, silvery shimmer, like moonlight trapped beneath wood. It flared softly when he stepped forward. Died back when he moved away. The house was watching. Measuring. Keeping score.
Another room had a ceiling enchanted to mirror the night sky. Not a charmed mural, but a live reflection of the sky outside, stars blinking into place with the slow rhythm of twilight. He stepped inside and looked up, and the clouds stilled. The sky froze. The stars dimmed slightly, like they had been startled by him and didn't know what to do next.
He held his breath.
So did the room.
Then there was the library.
Although calling it that felt dishonest, like trying to fit something alive into a word meant for walls and shelves. The space was circular, tall enough that the ceiling vanished into shadow, and tangled with magic that didn't believe in rules. The shelves weren't furniture. They were part of the house, carved straight from the stone like ribs or roots. They curved up the walls in spirals, uneven and half-wild, rising into the dark without any concern for order.
The books were worse.
They didn't behave. They didn't match. They looked collected, not curated—some bound in old leather, others wrapped in string or velvet or parchment too fragile to touch. A few hovered gently off the shelves, pages fluttering as though caught in a dream. One or two hummed low to themselves in languages he didn't speak. The air vibrated with secrets, thick with a kind of quiet that didn't want to be broken.
He reached for one at random. No title. No markings. Just age.
The moment his fingers touched the spine, it shivered.
Not dramatically. Just enough to pull back. Like it had recognized him.
Like it had made a choice.
He didn't try again.
Even the magic in this house—especially the magic—was watching him closely. Waiting. Deciding.
And then, just when he thought he'd mapped enough of the strangeness to feel something close to understanding, he saw it.
Near the landing, right at the heart of the house where the light softened and the scent of dried lavender hung in the air, carved directly into the floorboards, was her name.
Hermione Jean Granger.
Silver script, curved and radiant, not inked but etched. It pulsed faintly with something old. Something reverent.
Beneath it, smaller lines shimmered into view, just barely legible in the moonlight.
Beloved by the stars. Welcome always.
He stared at it.
His jaw locked. The back of his throat burned. Something unfamiliar twisted deep in his chest, a cold thread pulled tight around something softer than he liked to admit.
He didn't touch it.
He turned before the walls could see the expression on his face.
Because the only space in this house that didn't hum with her name—the only place untouched by her quiet joy—was his.
The room she'd given him.
Technically, it was perfect. Spacious. Warm. Designed with a sort of restrained elegance. A wide bed, well-made. A desk with fresh parchment and three different kinds of ink. Charms on the windows to let in morning light without heat. A shelf of neutral books. A wardrobe with enough hangers to suggest permanence.
It was comfortable.
And completely empty.
No wild plants. No open books. No scent of mint or sage or whatever impossible thing always seemed to follow her through the air.
There was nothing of her in the room at all.
It felt like a message, one delivered without cruelty or kindness. A formal offering. A gesture of hospitality that didn't pretend to be more. Something like, This space is yours, but only if you stay on the edge of everything.
He stepped to the wall and pressed his palm to the surface, just to see.
The reaction was immediate. Subtle, but undeniable. The magic within the house shivered beneath his touch. Not rejection. Not pain.
Just... distance.
Like the way a wolf retreats before you reach it. Like something ancient drawing the line without speaking it aloud.
You can stay, it seemed to say.
But you are not known here.
And just as he stepped back into the corridor, silence pressed in. Thick. Close. Wrapping around his shoulders like fabric still damp from stormwater, clinging too tight to breathe.
Then he heard her.
A laugh.
Distant. Bright. Light as birdsong.
It drifted down from somewhere above—barely there, more breath than sound. The kind of laugh that slipped between the beams of a house and landed gently on the floor like sunlight through a cracked shutter. Unforced. Unburdened. It rang through the stillness like it had always been meant to be there.
And somehow, impossibly, that sound stung more than anything else.
Not the cold weight of the house's magic. Not the books that flinched. Not the strange, quiet warning that threaded through every hallway.
Her laugh.
Because it made one truth rise sharp in his throat, harder to ignore than anything else he'd tried to bury.
She belonged here.
And he didn't.
She stepped through the threshold as if no time had passed, as if the stone remembered her weight, her breath, her rhythm. Barefoot, steady, she moved forward like this place had always been hers and had simply been waiting for her to remember. There was no drama to it—no gust of wind, no spell shimmer, no ceremonial pause. Only the calm, graceful return of someone arriving exactly where they were meant to be.
The dust along the floor shifted. Not away from her. With her. As if the house itself had kept her place.
When her skin met the cool stone, the wards responded—not with suspicion, not with force, but with a quiet, unmistakable exhale. A pulse of gold moved through the air, warm instead of sharp, soft instead of strong. It was the kind of magic that felt like surrender. Like trust.
The door, ancient and thick with history, unlatched itself with the smallest click. The wood groaned softly as it opened, not like a command had been given, but like the house had simply recognised her. Like it had missed her. The ivy hanging over the archway shifted. Not wildly, just enough to bow. And the air that came from within brought with it the scent of rosemary, cedar, and something that was hers alone.
Draco felt the change all at once.
Not with his eyes—though the golden shimmer that rippled across the floor was hard to miss—but with his magic. It recoiled on instinct, pulling taut under his skin, coiling back like a hound sensing the edge of someone else's territory. Her power had been welcomed. His had not.
The wards hadn't pushed him out. But they had paused. That moment of hesitation was worse than outright rejection. A breath held at the edge of speech. A door opened just far enough to let you see it wouldn't open further.
She walked ahead without turning.
Didn't check to see if he would follow.
Didn't wait.
She didn't need to. The house had already decided. It had her. Fully, endlessly, with the same unquestioning certainty that lives in roots and rivers and magic born of memory.
He lingered on the threshold.
Spine straight. Chin high. Shoulders square with the brittle kind of pride that only held shape because there was no softness left beneath it.
Then, without blinking, he stepped inside.
The air shifted. Just slightly. Not resistance—just weight. Like something watching him cross the line between tolerated and trespasser. The space didn't lash out. It didn't shove. But it pressed. A quiet squeeze around his ribs. A hush layered beneath the sound of his breath. A murmur that didn't use words but still managed to speak.
You can walk here.
But you are not part of this.
Not yet.
He didn't react. Not on the surface.
But his magic knew. It curled low in his chest, uneasy, tight, ready.
Inside, she was already disappearing into the light. Her hair caught in the glow from the hall lamps. Her bare feet silent on the wood. Her laugh lingering behind like the last line of a poem he hadn't meant to memorize.
The scent of rosemary trailed after her.
And so did the ache of knowing that this house would never open for him the way it opened for her. No matter how many doors he learned to unlock.
She turned back toward him slowly, her fingertips grazing the edge of the doorframe as she moved. They drifted across the wood like they were tracing something sacred—pausing on the old runes, dipping into the worn ridges. It didn't feel like a performance. It wasn't deliberate for his benefit. It was reverence. As if the house spoke to her in a language only she could understand, and this was how she listened.
When her gaze lifted to meet his, it was steady. Calm. That same maddening calm she always seemed to wear around him, like armor made from something softer than steel but twice as impenetrable.
There was no mockery in her expression. No arrogance. No trace of superiority or challenge. Just a quiet amusement curling at the corners of her mouth—so small it looked more like a secret than a smile. The kind of expression someone wears when they're sharing a private joke with the air and not the person standing in front of them.
It made him feel smaller than he liked.
Like something she had found in the forest and hadn't yet decided whether to keep or release. Something feral. Something lost.
And he hated it.
When she spoke, her voice was low enough that it barely touched the walls. "It needs love," she said, like the words weren't meant for him at all. Like they were meant for the house. Or the wind. Or for whatever spirit had rooted itself in the bones of the cottage.
The words hung there. Unforced. Undemanding. They didn't bite. They didn't press. They settled.
It wasn't a judgment. It wasn't even advice.
It was truth, spoken without need for defence.
His jaw tensed.
The words shouldn't have mattered. But they did. They reached past the surface and stirred something deeper than annoyance—something old and unhealed, something knotted in his chest that he hadn't named in years.
He hated how the air still shimmered around her. How the magic of the cottage slipped up along her arms like sunlight on water. How she stood there barefoot, utterly unbothered, wrapped in the kind of ease he hadn't felt since childhood.
"It needs discipline," he said. His tone was cool and clipped, each syllable flat with precision. It was the only kind of answer he knew how to give. But the moment he said it, the words soured.
They felt wrong.
They felt weak.
She didn't respond. Of course she didn't. She never answered when it didn't matter.
Instead, she turned back to the heart of the house. Lifted her face toward the high arches, breathing in like the walls themselves still remembered her. Her eyes slipped half-closed. Her spine relaxed. Her whole body moved like it belonged to the space around her, like the cottage was exhaling in time with her pulse.
And that was when it struck him. Clear and final.
She wasn't just in the house.
She was part of it.
The way it held her. The way it mirrored her stillness. The way the light shifted when she moved, like the room was adjusting itself around her shape. The magic didn't just recognise her—it celebrated her.
The same way the ocean moves for the moon.
And him?
He stood on the edge of it all with his hands clenched tight. The air around him was tense. His magic strained just beneath the skin, reacting to the house's rejection, subtle as it was. Not loud. Not cruel. But there. A kind of refusal that didn't need to raise its voice to be understood.
This was his, technically. His by law. By name. By everything that made ownership mean something on paper.
But not here.
Not in the bones of the place. Not in the way the walls bent gently toward her. Not in the way the house had never once softened for him.
She belonged here.
And he didn't.
The silence stretched.
Not awkward. Not heavy. Just full. Pressed to the edges with everything they weren't saying.
He opened his mouth, unsure whether the words would be apology or defense. But before he could speak, she was already walking away. Down the corridor. Deeper into the house. Her dress skimmed the floor with a soft sound like a secret being kept. Her hair caught the last of the afternoon light and shimmered silver as she vanished into it.
She didn't look back.
She didn't need to.
She moved with the ease of someone who had never had to wonder whether she was wanted.
He followed.
Not because it was wise. Not because he had any plan. Not because pride allowed it.
But because staying behind, alone, outside the glow of her presence, with the house quietly bristling around him, was worse.
Far worse.
***
Draco had never hated tea quite this much.
The cup in front of him was offensively floral, steeped far too long, the scent cloying in a way that made his throat tighten. Something herbal mingled with something sweet, and none of it made sense. He preferred sharpness. Precision. A black tea that could burn the tongue and scrape the sleep from his bones.
This was not that.
The cup itself didn't help. A delicate thing with a hairline crack running from rim to base, mended not with charmwork but with gold—real gold, poured into the fracture like a badge of honour. Kintsugi, he remembered. A philosophy that turned breakage into beauty. He'd read about it once, dismissed it twice. The idea was foreign to him. Where he came from, flaws were to be hidden. Buried. Never gilded.
He reached for the sugar, but there was no spoon. Only a jar of honey without a knife or stirrer. He hesitated, then made do with the tip of a butter knife, trying not to look as out of place as he felt. The teapot, shaped absurdly like a puffskein with wide hand-painted eyes, let out a tiny disgruntled puff when he tried to pour more. He blinked at it.
The whole table was madness.
It stretched longer than it needed to, uneven in its build, sagging slightly in the middle. The surface was scarred with water rings and burn marks, half-covered by a hand-stitched tablecloth that didn't quite sit straight. Seven chairs surrounded it, each one different. One had moons carved into the back. One squeaked like it belonged to a child. Only two place settings had been laid, but the others had clearly seen years of use. It wasn't hard to imagine this room filled with noise and friends and arguments spoken over breakfast.
Draco sat in the quiet that followed. Unmoving. Teacup in hand. Stiff.
Sunlight streamed through the wide-paned window, golden and relentless. It spilled over the table, making everything feel too exposed. The room smelled of lavender and steam and something faintly metallic. It was a kind of warmth he didn't know what to do with.
Granger moved around the kitchen without urgency. She hummed softly under her breath, the notes trailing after her like smoke. He didn't recognize the tune. It wasn't magical. It wasn't classical. It wasn't anything he could place. But it was hers.
And that unsettled him more than the tea.
She belonged here. That much was obvious. Her body moved in rhythm with the space, like the house shifted around her rather than the other way around. She didn't check where the sugar was. Didn't glance at the cupboards before reaching for something. It was instinct. Familiarity, so complete it bordered on intimacy.
He took a slow sip, trying not to grimace at the taste. His fingers were tense around the porcelain.
Across the table, she finally sat. She didn't greet him. Didn't offer conversation. She folded one leg under the other and perched on a mismatched chair like she'd always sat like that, like there was no other way to be. Her dress was linen, loose and soft-looking, the colour somewhere between ash and lavender depending on how the light hit it. Her hair was a mess—long, tangled, beautiful in a way that didn't try to be. The kind of hair that hadn't seen a brush in a day or two and didn't care.
She peeled a blood orange without looking up. Slowly. Methodically. Her fingers worked with quiet certainty, separating each segment and placing them on her plate with something that looked like ritual. The juice stained her fingertips.
She still hadn't said a word.
The silence wasn't pointed. It wasn't cold. She simply hadn't made space for him in the moment. It was as though she'd been doing this every morning, just like this, long before he ever arrived—and wouldn't stop just because he was watching.
And he was watching.
He hated that about himself. Hated that he couldn't look away.
There was something unbothered in the way she existed here. Something he couldn't understand. The house bent toward her. The light lingered around her hands. The air itself seemed to hum softer in her presence. She belonged to this place, or it to her—he couldn't decide which.
He shifted in his seat. The chair let out a low creak, as if in protest.
She glanced at him then, just briefly. Not startled. Not apologetic. Simply aware. Their eyes met across the table. Her expression didn't change.
She smiled.
Small. Almost nothing. A twitch of her mouth. But it was enough.
He returned it, if only to prove that he could. His own smile didn't quite reach his eyes.
Then she looked away, reached for her tea, and brought it to her lips like she'd done this a hundred mornings in a row.
He sat perfectly still.
The cup warmed his hands, and the humming began again.
The silence between them stretched, thick and dense, settling in the space like steam that refused to clear. Draco sat opposite her with his own untouched plate cooling in front of him, the tea in his hand turning lukewarm. The morning should have meant something. Their first morning bound by magic, sealed by law older than empires. Some acknowledgment. Some shift in atmosphere. Some recognition.
She had simply begun her day.
Her gaze lifted at last, steady and unhurried. "You're up early," she said, as if commenting on sunlight.
"I didn't sleep." His voice came out rough, too sharp, like a blade that had been ground unevenly.
She nodded without surprise. "The house takes getting used to."
He let the cup touch his lips again, tasting bitterness that clung to the back of his tongue. "The house does not like me."
"It does not know you yet." She peeled another section of the blood orange, the juice bright against her fingertips.
"It doesn't want to," he said, quieter.
She did not look up from her hands. "Houses remember. They respond. They do not want or not want. They echo what we bring inside them."
The words should have sounded mystical or self-important. They didn't. She said them the same way someone might say the kettle is boiling or the rain will come soon.
It irritated him more than any sermon ever could.
The silence returned, heavier now, thick enough that it pressed at his ribs when he tried to breathe. He broke a piece of bread to have something to do with his hands. The crust cracked cleanly, but the rest of it fell apart in his fingers, soft and fragile in a way that felt pointed. Something that looked whole until touched.
"You're very tense," she murmured.
"No," he said, a coldness settling into the corners of the room. "I am very married."
A soft pause.
"Yes. That too."
His head snapped up. He was ready for mockery, triumph, some gleam in her eyes to prove she had enjoyed this. There was nothing. Her expression remained calm. Not indifferent, not warm, just calm. She lifted her cup and sipped her tea like she had been sitting at this table every morning for years.
He had no idea what to do with that.
So he said nothing. Ate nothing. Sat in the silence that wrapped itself around him like binding cloth.
She finished peeling the orange in slow, practiced movements. Her hands were stained a faint blush at the fingertips, nails short, no rings. She took a single slice and held it toward him across the table. Not offering. Not insisting. Just... holding it there.
The sunlight caught on the pulp. It looked like a small sun.
He didn't move.
She did not sigh, or withdraw, or question. She simply laid the slice on the edge of his plate, placed it there gently, and continued eating. The sound of it landing was soft. Too soft. It still managed to echo in him.
No pressure. No expectation. No attempt to soothe or provoke.
Just presence.
And that was what tore at him. That was what scraped raw at something he did not have words for. She was not playing a game. She was not testing him. She was not measuring his reactions. She was simply here, fully and without apology, and she did not need anything from him in return.
Not forgiveness. Not affection. Not understanding.
Nothing.
He could not remember the last time someone had wanted nothing from him.
And it made him feel like he was standing on a ledge, wind pressing at his back, waiting for the part of himself that would finally give way.
She ate her orange. The house breathed. The sun moved across the floor.
He sat there, unraveling.
She didn't even look at him.
She only reached behind her, picked up a book from the sunlit windowsill, and opened it with one hand. The leather was cracked at the spine. Its pages were soft and swollen from time, heavy with the weight of pressed herbs and folded corners. She didn't glance at the text. Just let it rest in her hand like it belonged there.
"I'll be in the conservatory after breakfast," she said.
Her voice was quiet. Even. Cool enough that someone else might have mistaken it for patience. For grace. But he knew better. Knew the difference between kindness and detachment. Knew exactly how much restraint it took to sound that calm.
The chair gave a soft scrape against the floor as she rose. She didn't rush. Her movements were deliberate, each one polished by years of self-discipline. He watched her cross the room, robe brushing against the wood like smoke, the morning light catching the bare line of her shoulder. It turned her skin to gold. Made her glow.
It also made him furious.
His voice broke without warning, raw and sharp, cracking like something old and splintered. "Why are you like this?"
She stopped.
Didn't flinch. Didn't turn fully around. Just stilled.
"Like what?"
He let out a hard breath, as if it had been stuck behind his ribs. "Fake," he said. "You hate me. So stop pretending otherwise. You don't get to play the saint."
That made her turn.
Only her head. Only enough to let him see her eyes. No drama, no pause. Just that slow, deliberate shift of someone who did not need the last word to win.
And what he saw there wasn't cruelty. It wasn't rage. It wasn't even contempt.
It was precision.
"Hate you?" she repeated. Her voice was steady. Smooth. Not raised, not strained. "Don't flatter yourself, Malfoy. Hate takes effort. Hate takes up space in my life. You were never worth that."
The silence that followed hit hard enough to leave marks.
She could have stopped there. He half thought she would. But when she spoke again, it was softer. Quieter. And somehow worse.
"I pitied you," she said. "Back then. Deeply. The kind of pity you don't speak aloud because it's too humiliating—for both people involved."
Her gaze moved across him once. Not with heat. Not with glee. But with the cool detachment of someone taking note of wreckage they didn't plan to fix.
"And now look at us." She gestured vaguely between them, hand loose at her side. "Eight years later. And nothing's changed. I'm still pitying you. The only difference is that now I get to do it from across the breakfast table."
He didn't blink.
Didn't breathe.
Something inside him stayed still, locked in place.
She didn't soften. Not even a little.
"And for what it's worth," she added, turning away again, her voice almost too low to hear, "I don't play saints. I just survived the kind of hell that turned boys like you into auctions."
And then she left.
No door slam. No final glare. No invitation to chase her down.
Just the quiet sound of her bare feet retreating down the hall. And the book still in her hand.
She hadn't waited for an answer.
Because she already knew he didn't have one.
***
The dining room had changed.
Not loudly. Not obviously. But the moment Draco stepped through the doorway, he knew something was different. The long rectangular table from that morning—the one that had turned their silence into something stretched and awkward—was gone. Not moved. Gone. The space where it had stood was now filled with something smaller. A round table. Pale wood, softly worn, the edges smooth from years of use. It looked like it had always been there, like the house had peeled back a layer of itself and revealed the truth beneath.
It seated two. Barely.
There was no room for formality. No room for pretense. Just two chairs. Two glasses. A decanter of deep red wine that caught the candlelight and swallowed it whole.
As he crossed the threshold, the candles lit themselves—each one flaring to life with a soft hush, their flames low and deliberate. The light clung to the room gently, stretching shadows across the walls like old stories. He smelled thyme, and wine, and something soft and floral that reminded him of a place he couldn't name. Something from childhood, maybe. Or a memory that wasn't his.
She was already seated.
Of course she was.
She looked like she belonged there. Like she had always been there. Like the table and the candlelight and the scent in the air had been conjured around her, not for her.
Her chair was slightly too tall for her frame. Her feet didn't touch the floor. She sat cross-legged, spine straight, her toes flexing slowly as she shifted her weight. The slate-gray fabric of her dress caught the light in restless waves, and her braid—loose and uneven—hung down her back, threaded through with dried lavender. He noticed it when the pieces stirred as she breathed.
Everything on the table felt uncomfortably curated. His plate rimmed in tarnished silver, hers marked with the phases of the moon. Their cutlery didn't match. One fork had a bent tine. One knife looked handmade, its handle shaped like a sleeping fox. The napkins were linen, roughly embroidered with constellations he couldn't place.
It was all too much.
Too personal. Too deliberate. Too quiet.
It was domestic in a way that made his throat tighten. Nothing polished. Nothing performative. Just two people seated across from each other in a space that made distance impossible. It made his skin itch. It made something inside him twist.
And then there was the food.
Of course.
He'd noticed the smell the moment he entered. He'd tried not to. Had tried not to breathe deeply enough to register it. But it clung to him now, curling beneath his collar and behind his ribs.
Roasted vegetables, still glistening. Flatbread, warm and golden, the edges kissed with garlic and rosemary. A bowl of lentil stew—thick, rich, spiced just enough to open the senses—sat between them like an offering. And beside it, a salad of greens he vaguely remembered seeing in the conservatory. Wild herbs. Edible flowers. Each bite chosen with care.
It was flawless.
And he knew—without asking, without even having to guess—that she had made it herself.
That knowledge hit harder than it should have. He hadn't eaten like this in months. He hadn't tasted this kind of quiet care in years. And she had prepared it like it meant nothing. Like it was routine. Like it didn't mean a damn thing that she had stood in the kitchen and cooked something just for them.
He didn't thank her.
Didn't compliment a single thing.
Instead, he sat down like he was preparing for war. Straight spine. Raised chin. Eyes fixed just above her shoulder. He reached for his fork like it might draw blood.
She didn't acknowledge him. Not with words. Not with a look.
She only served him.
Without flourish. Without sweetness. Just steady movements that felt too practiced to be anything but second nature. She ladled stew into his bowl like it was a ritual. Placed the bread beside his plate without hesitation. Passed the wine without a single word. No invitation. No expectation. No pretense of welcome.
It wasn't performance. It wasn't manipulation.
It was worse.
It was normal.
And that normality, that ease, that quiet care offered without affection or anger—it undid him more than cruelty ever could.
She spoke, of course. She always did.
Not idly. Never just to fill silence. Every word she chose had weight, threaded with meanings most people had long since stopped noticing. Her voice moved through the room like smoke, slipping between the candles and shadows, curling around things he couldn't hold on to. She spoke of old magic. Sacred things. Stories too strange for him to argue with.
Covenant-bound candles. Wandwoods that could hold memories. Languages that only trees understood when morning was close and the world was still soft with mist. She spoke about dreams passed down like heirlooms, about spells that survived only in the space between two breaths, shared in whispers between generations of women who had learned to survive quietly.
He gave her nothing.
No questions. No encouragement. Just a few nods, a crease at his brow, the bare minimum required to maintain the illusion that he was listening. He didn't speak. Didn't interrupt. Just kept cutting his food with clean, precise movements, like his plate was a problem he could solve. He ate without tasting. Swallowed without thought. Let her fill the air while he stayed rooted in silence.
Then she poured the wine.
Her hand was steady as she tilted the bottle, filling his glass first.
"Are you always this quiet," she asked, voice level, not unkind, not mocking.
"Or just around women who own you?"
It landed like a blade slipped beneath armor. Quiet. Clean. Deadly.
His fork bent in his hand. Not enough to break. Just enough to protest. The sound it made—metal giving way under pressure—was soft but final. His knuckles blanched. His mouth was a flat line. No words came out.
She didn't look at him.
Didn't pause.
Didn't wait to see what damage she had done.
She just finished pouring. Her own glass this time. A sip, calm and smooth, like nothing had happened. As if the temperature of the room hadn't shifted. As if the tension in his spine hadn't turned to steel.
He stared.
Waited.
Willed her to flinch.
She didn't.
Instead, she kept talking. Changed the subject like it had never left her lips. Back to magic. Trees this time. The way their roots touched underground. How they sent warnings through soil when danger came. How they held memory. How they gave without asking anything back. How the earth itself remembered every tree that had been cut down.
It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't kindness. It was control. Utter, terrifying control. And she wore it like it cost her nothing.
He said nothing. Couldn't.
His chest ached.
The wine burned as he drank it.
Not drinking would've meant surrender. Would've meant admitting the words had struck deep. Would've meant showing her she'd drawn blood. And Draco Malfoy did not show wounds.
Not if he could help it.
Not when the rules had never felt further away.
***
It was nearly midnight when Draco stepped outside. The door shut behind him with a quiet click, too soft to be casual. It felt like the house was sighing him out, finished with him for the night.
The air was sharp the second it hit his skin—cold and still in a way that didn't soothe, only unsettled. It felt thin in his lungs. Electric. The kind of silence that came with old magic, the kind that made everything feel like it was waiting to break.
The moon hung heavy and low above the cottage, casting silver light across the grass. Each shadow stretched long across the frost, reaching for something that wasn't there. The mist from earlier still clung to the ground, dense and low, curling around his boots like it was watching him.
He hadn't bothered with a cloak. Just a thick jumper pulled tight across his shoulders and worn gloves over his hands. The cold didn't bother him. The cold was honest.
What bothered him was the house.
He hadn't slept. Not properly. Not since arriving. The ceilings were too high, the air too dense, the silence too layered. The magic that moved through the walls didn't feel right. Not to him. The wards shifted strangely—slow pulses, like a breath catching in the back of a throat. Like something watching.
Not Granger. Not even the cottage.
Something older.
Something buried in the stone and timber and earth.
Something that remembered.
And whatever it was, it didn't want him there.
He walked along the edge of the garden, boots silent on the damp grass. His wand was steady in his hand, runes spilling from it in soft, controlled arcs as he whispered spells under his breath. Each stroke of light hung briefly in the air before fading. He was trying to embed his own magic into the land, trying to anchor it, settle it. Make it his.
The spellwork was clean. Flawless. It should've held.
But every time, the result was the same.
His magic touched hers—and vanished.
Not rejected. Not broken. Just… absorbed. Softly. Completely.
Like ink soaking into thick parchment.
Like breath drawn in and never let out.
Her magic was everywhere. In the wards. In the walls. In the soil. In the mist. In the air itself. And his, no matter how sharp or precise, couldn't get a foothold.
It didn't push back. It just wrapped around his spells and swallowed them.
The way roots wrap around something buried.
The way a place settles around the person it belongs to.
Because it was hers.
This land had chosen her.
And everything else—him included—was already caught in that choice.
He kept casting. Adjusted the phrasing. Changed the runes. Nothing worked. His magic disappeared every time. Not erased, not twisted—just gone, as if the land had breathed it in.
It should have made him furious. And it did.
But beneath that, something else curled low in his chest.
A reluctant, stubborn flicker of respect.
Because this wasn't brute force. It wasn't flashy. She'd done it quietly. Deeply. Bound every charm to the bones of the house and the rhythm of the land. There was no way to carve through it. No way to overwrite it. Not without breaking the whole foundation.
And even then, he wasn't sure it would budge.
He let out a slow breath and lowered his wand. His hand ached. So did his jaw.
Magic didn't ignore him.
But hers had.
And that stung more than he expected.
The sound came soft at first. Bare feet on old wood. The kind of sound that was not meant to carry, but did. It drew his attention before he could think better of it. There was something too intimate in the quiet of it, something that felt like a secret drifting through the dark.
He turned toward the porch. He already knew who it would be. He already felt that familiar pull in his chest, that strange mix of bracing and wanting that he had not found language for yet.
She was walking toward him.
Slow. Barefoot again. As though the frost-kissed grass was warm beneath her skin. As though the cold belonged to her and she was simply returning something that had always been hers. Her nightgown was thin and pale, nearly translucent where the moonlight touched it, the fabric whispering along the ground as it followed her.
Her hair was loose. Of course it was. It tumbled over her shoulders in tangled waves, catching the silver of the moon wherever it fell. She did not shiver. She did not hesitate. She just moved. She was humming, too. A tune without structure, without beginning or end, the kind of sound that barely qualified as song. It settled in the air like something old. Something familiar. Something that had always existed here.
She did not look at him.
She walked right past him as if he were a shape cut out of the night, a shadow at the edge of her world. Her calm scraped against him, steady and unbothered, and it made something inside him twist.
He could not stand it.
"Do not wander at night," he said. The words came out harsher than he meant, sharp in the air between them. "You will catch cold."
He heard the fear under it the second it left his mouth, and it made his jaw clench.
She stopped. Slowly. Her body still facing forward, her hand falling still at her side. Then she turned her head, just enough to look back at him over her shoulder. The moonlight rested across her face, soft and pale. Her expression unreadable.
"Are you worried about me?"
No teasing. No mockery. No accusation.
Just a question. Bare. Simple. Real.
And that was somehow harder to bear than anything else she could have said.
He had no answer. Not one he could give out loud.
Because yes. He was. He was furious with himself for it. He did not want to care, and he did. And he did not know how to say her name without admitting exactly how much space she had already taken inside him.
The silence stretched. A single breath. A quiet pulse in the night.
Then she smiled. Not a full smile. Just the faintest curl at the corner of her mouth. A private thing. Something almost gentle.
She turned away again. Her gown brushed over the grass with a sound so soft it could have been imagined. She walked toward the deeper dark, toward the garden that seemed to open for her as she moved. She did not say goodnight. She did not ask him to follow.
She did not look back.
And still, he followed.
Not because she asked. Not because he wanted to. But because standing in the cold without her felt wrong in a way he could not ignore.
He crossed the space where she had stood.
The wards did not stir.
No shimmer in the air. No hum beneath his skin. No acknowledgment.
They had risen for her. They had moved like breath drawn toward a familiar touch.
For him, nothing.
The land had made its choice.
She was home.
He was not.
***
He lay awake in the bed she'd given him.
Though calling it a gift felt wrong. Nothing about it was generous. He hadn't been welcomed into this room so much as placed in it. Like something breakable. Like a relic to be kept undisturbed. The bed was enormous, the kind that might have once implied indulgence, but here it felt like isolation. An expanse too quiet. Too soft. Too careful. It had the stillness of something designed for someone who might shatter if touched.
He hadn't moved much. One arm bent stiffly behind his head, the way soldiers rest when they pretend sleep is optional. The other lay beside him on the cool sheets that refused to hold his heat. The room didn't want him any more than the house did. And he hadn't relaxed. Not once. His body didn't know how to do that here.
The mattress was too forgiving. It gave under him like it was trying to cradle. The pillows remembered the shape of his skull too well. The comfort wasn't generous. It was invasive. Like being studied. Like being known.
And then there was the scent.
It wasn't perfume. Nothing worn for show. It was her. Subtle and stubborn. Lavender, crushed and warm. Parchment left in the sun. A flash of mint still clinging to stone. Sage after flame. It lived in the seams of the sheets. Rose faintly from the blanket folded too neatly at the foot of the bed. It sank into the air and waited.
He hated that he could name it. Hated that it registered without effort. Hated that some part of him responded before he could shut it down.
Because his body settled.
Just a little. A fraction.
Like it remembered her before his mind allowed it.
He clenched his jaw. Shut his eyes. Tried to push the softness out of his lungs.
But it stayed.
She stayed.
And the worst part—the part he couldn't name without shame—was that he wasn't sure he wanted her to leave.
Moonlight fell through the tall window, sliced through the half-drawn curtains, and poured across the room in long silver stripes. It ran over the floor, the walls, across his chest. Cold and clean and indifferent. It caught the edge of his collarbone and lit it up like a warning. He stared at the light until his eyes ached. Until the sting of it distracted him. Until it blurred.
The room didn't change. The air didn't shift. The silence stayed thick.
He didn't know how long he'd been lying there. Time moved wrong inside this house. Shadows didn't fall the way they should. The candles burned unevenly. He'd stopped checking the hour. It didn't matter. Whether it was midnight or morning, the bed would still feel too large. The space would still feel borrowed.
And then, faint beneath the wind, beneath the slow hum of old magic in the walls—he heard her.
Humming.
The same wandering tune. The same aimless melody. Never loud. Never purposeful. Just present. Just hers.
It reached him like it always did.
And he saw her.
Not with his eyes. With memory. With imagination. With the part of him that hadn't stopped bracing since she signed his name onto that parchment.
He heard her voice in his head. Not humming now. Speaking.
Soft. Close. Saying his name like it was a secret she hadn't meant to reveal.
It wasn't seductive. That would have been easier. It was something else. Something that soaked in quiet. Something intimate in the way a sigh is intimate. Or the way water finds its way through stone.
He imagined her breath catching. Laughter soft enough to mistake for breath. Fingers curling into the collar of his shirt. Not pulling hard. Just enough. Just enough to ask.
And then he saw it.
Her skin against his.
Not in the way that broke. In the way that healed.
Her hair against his chest. Her leg tucked over his thigh. The way her body might settle into his like it had always belonged there. The way she might say his name into the hollow of his shoulder, like that space had been waiting.
He didn't want to picture it. But he did.
The pads of her fingers, slow and certain, tracing shapes into his side. Her thighs warm against his hips. Her mouth—barely parted, not smiling, just present—pressing against the edge of his jaw.
And gods, the sound she might make if she breathed too close.
His breath hitched.
The heat came, low and steady, curling through his chest and dragging down to his stomach. His hands moved. Reflex. Want. And he hated it. Hated how fast it had taken hold. Hated that it wasn't hunger, not really—it was longing. It was the softness. The quiet. The impossible safety of her.
He turned sharply in the bed, threw the covers off like they'd burned him, and sat up fast, spine taut, lungs working like he'd just surfaced from deep water.
But it didn't leave him.
The room was still full of her.
And the humming?
Still there.
Still coming from the hall.
Still threading itself through the dark like silk.
She hadn't touched him.
Hadn't spoken to him beyond civility.
And still she was everywhere.
The flowers she'd placed in the windowsill. The shape of her hands in the folded blanket. The tune that reached through walls.
None of it had claws. None of it cut.
It was worse than that.
Because curses, he knew how to survive. Pain made sense. Sharpness made sense.
But Granger?
Granger was water.
And water didn't break things.
It wore them down.
And she was already inside him.