Chapter Text
“Excuse me,” called a voice as it brushed by Draco’s left shoulder. Draco came to an abrupt stop in the doorway to the Leaky Cauldron, hand instinctively rising to his breastbone while the voice shifted past.
With an inhale of breath, he turned to see who the voice belonged to. A small, older wizard was squeezing through the doorway. As Draco's gaze lingered on the mass of gray curls on her head and the wrinkles set around her eyes, his heart rate normalized. She had to be at least 60 years old.
Not her, then.
He continued through the doorway and stepped into the warm spring air of Diagon Alley. As he made his way back to the ministry, his right leg jerked painfully, reminding him that he should probably pay a visit to the Healer’s Office. He'd been experiencing random pains for a week and had been stubbornly ignoring them, hoping they'd just go away on their own. Pulling out his wand, a quick spell told him he had an extra 20 minutes of his lunch break to spare before needing to be back in the office. Jus enough time for a quick stop in the Ministry Healing Ward to have his leg examined.
He made his way through the crowds and into the familiar dark halls of the ministry. Nodding to familiar faces as he went, he hopped on an elevator blessedly alone, fanning himself slightly after his jaunt through the afternoon sun. After the elevator doors clanged shut, he directed the life to the second floor instead of his usual 4th floor stop. He waited as several other witches and wizards joined him on a stop at the third floor, and then squeezed past them once the lift reached the fourth. Striding across the cool black floors, he traveled own a long hallway before stopping at the door labeled “Ministry Healer.” He turned the bronzed doorknob and stepped inside.
Entering the room, he was greeted by the usual 10 beds lining the far wall of the ward. On the left wall stood the healer's desk, overshadowed by a large metal medicine cabinet. On the near wall to his right, several empty, black tufted chairs awaited visitors. It seemed like a quiet day in the ward, with the exception of one occupied bed which currently had a gray curtain drawn around it.
“Just a minute!” cried a melodic voice from behind the curtain. Draco resigned himself to patience and settled casually on the arm of a chair and inspected a new piece of art adorning the wall next to the desk, depicting a field of roses.
Suddenly, the curtain pulled back, and a witch in white healer's robes stepped out before shutting the curtain swiftly behind her. She had bushy brown hair, a slight build, and when her face turned towards him - Draco lost his balance on the armrest and nearly fell to the ground.
The witch was Hermione Granger.
Righting himself quickly, he awkwardly patted the armrest like it had done the job of kicking him off itself.
“How can I help you?” Hermione asked. She gave no indication that she knew who he was, but of course she did. It had only been 5 years since the Battle of Hogwarts, and he still remembered the vision of the Golden Trio standing among the ashes as his family fled the scene.
Draco looked around the room rather unsubtly. “I’m here to see the healer,” he remarked obviously.
Hermione raised an eyebrow. “That would be me,” she said, gesturing to her healer robes.
Draco couldn't hide his surprise. “What happened to Healer Primrose?” he asked as his eyes continued to dart around the room.
“She’s retired,” Hermione answered, brushing a curl behind her ear.
“And now you’re- here-? Instead of her?” Draco asked dumbly.
Hermione rolled her eyes. “Yes. I started last week.”
Draco furrowed his brow. “I thought healers had to train for 6 years before being granted healing license.”
At his comment, Hermione smiled and her cheeks reddened. “Well, you may recall that I tend to learn rather quickly. I finished my lessons and earned my license early.”
Oh, Draco remembered her brilliance. He remembered being absolutely embarrassed every time Hermione Granger, a muggle-born, had beat him in an exam. Which, as it turned out, was nearly every time they had an exam. He would’ve been top of the year if it wasn’t for her, but she always managed to edge him out. He doubted she knew that attempting to beat her marks was what motivated him into many late nights of studying at Hogwarts. In fact, her academic brilliance was part of what prompted him to start questioning his family’s negative beliefs about muggle-borns. If a muggle-born was so intelligent, he had realized, surely they couldn't entirely be beneath pure-bloods.
But he couldn’t exactly tell her that, so instead he just admitted, “Sounds about right.”
There was an uncomfortable silence for a few moments where Draco swore he could hear dust moving through the air before Hermione's voice broke into the air. “So, you need to see a Healer?”
“Oh. Yes,” Draco said hesitantly. "It's nothing major, its just that I have this pain in my right leg. It started after I got into a scuffle with a wizard trying to steal Unicorn blood last week. We exchanged a few spells and I was properly counter-cursed after we got him into custody. I thought everything was fine, but I’m still getting these twinges every now and then.”
Hermione nodded. “Alright, let’s take a look. Want to hop up on the bed here?”
Draco noticed she seemed to be avoiding any direct eye contact with him as she gestured to the cot closest to him.
Hermione Granger asking him to hop onto a bed was not something Draco had ever pictured, but a lot had changed in the past few years. His father was in Azkaban, his mother had spent 3 years on house arrest, and after a year of community service he’d started training for the Auror program. Now he worked as a full-time Auror alongside many Hogwarts classmates whom he used to look down upon in his school years. These days he even managed to get along with Harry Potter, not that he interacted with him a whole lot outside of occasional Auror team meetings.
As Draco lifted himself onto the bed, his leg seized again and he couldn't hide a grimace. “My leg just did it again now,” he explained.
Hermione lowered herself into a crouch so her eyes were at his knee level. She raised her wand, mumbling a diagnostic spell. A series of images lit up in green next to his leg, with one area glowing a violent red.
After examining the diagnostic carefully for several minutes, Hermione smiled satisfactorily. “Did you by chance get hit with a jelly-leg-jinx last during this scuffle?” she inquired, looking up at him from below.
“Yes, actually,” Draco responded. The bugger had hit him with a strong one while Draco was distracted while trying to keep a flying jar of Unicorn blood from crashing to the floor. “Quite juvenile if you ask me, but it did give me a second to stun him while he laughed.”
Hermione swallowed. "Do you stun people often?" she asked in a way that was meant to sound casual, but really wasn't.
Furrowing his brow, Draco elaborated. "Well, yes, it's part of my job. But that's really as far as it goes. We aren't cleared to do anything fully damaging. And I wouldn't want to. I've seen enough -" here, he took a moment to take a deep breath before continuing. "I've seen enough hurtful magic for a lifetime."
Hermione finally glanced up and met his eyes. “Well. You’ve come a long way since our Hogwarts days haven’t you?”
Draco looked into her golden-brown eyes, not sure if she was joking or being serious. “Yes,” he said earnestly.
Hermione blushed and turned back to the diagnostic before continuing. “Well, it seems like whoever counter-cursed you didn’t get it quite right. They probably turned their wand down instead of up at the end, so there’s a bit of the curse left in your system. That’s what’s causing the pain.’
Draco rolled his eyes. “Creevy,” he said simply. “That’s what I get for taking a newbie under my wing.”
“Dennis Creevy?” Hermione asked. "He’s an Auror now?”
“In training,” Draco replied. “He's a good guy, but not the quickest wizard. What he lacks in skill, he makes up for in enthusiasm. He wants to better the wizarding world after what happened to his brother.”
Hermione looked down at her wand and nodded. “I’m sure there are more than a few people who feel that way."
Another awkward silence fell in the room, and Draco was relieved when Hermione broke it yet again. "Well, I’m going to do the counter curse properly and then you leg should be fun."
She stood back up and pointed her wand at his knee before clearly enunciating the spell, matching the words with precise wand movements. Draco recalled that he had always thought her spell casting sounded a bit melodic, and five years later her words still had the same light, musical quality to them.
“How does that feel?” Hermione asked him.
Draco hopped off of the bed and rested his weight on his right leg, bouncing it up and down slightly. “Better, I think. But it comes and goes, so I don’t know for sure.”
“Well, if it happens again, just come back and I’ll see what else I can do,” Hermione said.
Draco nodded as he tentatively shook his right leg. “Thanks."
Once again the room filled with an awkward silence. “Well-” Draco began, but was interrupted by Hermione.
“It’s good to see you’re well, Malfoy. I mean not well, because of your leg, but - well- as in…” she trailed off.
Draco raised an eyebrow. “As in a better person who’s not throwing slurs at people based on their birth status?”
Hermione flushed. “Well - yes - that. Now that you mention it.”
Draco’s stomach churned slightly. He knew that with his past history, people would always look at him and remember what he’d done - letting Death Eaters into the castle, aiding the Dark Side. His reputation was forever scarred, just like his left forearm was scarred by the Dark Mark that remained on it. He couldn’t change the past, he could just keep pressing forward with better intentions.
Draco didn't want to elaborate more, so he swallowed and nodded back at Hermione. “Thanks again. I’m sure I’ll see you around. I’m in here more than I’d like to be.”
With that, he pulled his robes around him and headed out of the room, back up to his office. His leg didn’t hurt for the rest of the day.
------
That night, as he undressed in his flat that overlooked a quiet section of Diagon Alley, he stood in front of the mirror and pulled off his shirt. As he did so, he remembered the morning’s encounter with the woman in the entrance of the Leaky Cauldron. As he reflected, as he ran his right hand across the small letters that were embedded into his skin, directly above his heart.
Excuse me, the letters read, curling into a slight semicircle in a faint black ink that resembled a faded muggle tattoo.
When the words appeared on his 8th birthday, he knew exactly what they were. He'd woken up to a searing, burning sensation above his heart and cried out before running to his bathroom mirror and finding his soul mark. It was a mark that reflected the first words his soulmate would ever speak to him. Even more notably, it was exceedingly rare phenomenon that to date had only been recorded in Pure-blood families.
He’d seen similar marks on his mother and father, though he envied the clarity theirs provided.“You’re quite something,” read the words above his mother’s heart. “No, I’m Narcissa,” read the words above his father’s. His father had the luck of knowing the exact name of his soulmate, and he didn't have to search farther than across the Slytherin Common Room to find her.
Meanwhile, Draco had heard excuse me uttered towards him upwards of dozens of times. From people passing him in doorways, bumping into him on trains, or serving him food at restaurants. Each time he heard the words his heart skipped a beat and he wondered - but so far, he hadn’t noticed anything to signal that he had met his match.
He wasn’t in a rush to meet his soulmate. It would be nice, he supposed, to share his life with someone. But he had no indication of whether he’d already met them, would meet them in 30 years, or even if they were still alive. For all he knew, they'd perished in the War.
Of course he had dallied in romantic experiences while living in the limbo of not knowing his soulmate. He'd explored a variety of witches, and even one wizard before he’d decided that wasn’t to his taste. But when he did, he always felt a vague sense of guilt, like he was betraying his soulmate despite not knowing them. So as a matter of principle, he kept his romantic interactions brief. First dates, one night stands, friends with benefits, but nothing serious. How could he commit to any partner, when he knew he was supposed to be with someone else? Until he met his soulmate, he'd resigned himself to casual dalliances to keep the loneliness away.
But as he laid in bed that night, his mind wandered to a different reality. One where the older lady in the doorway of the Three Broomsticks was his soulmate, and he'd finally found her. In his fantasy, she wore a similar mark above her heart. And she was younger, with deep brown eyes and bushy brunette hair.