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It’s eight months to the day since Draco Malfoy was dragged into the house on Stony Drive, bruised and bleeding from the temple, that Hermione first finds him in her bed.
It isn’t really her bed in a proprietary sense, like it isn’t her pillow or room or house. Just one of a half dozen half standing structures the Order has commandeered over the course of the war.
Safe homes, they call them. A turn of phrase that’s just a bit too ironic for Hermione’s liking.
It is her blanket, though. Half a blanket, if she’s being technical, the edges frayed by time and use and the scissors she took to it in sixth year, back when things were just on the edge of going bad and getting worse all the time. It’s one of a small handful of things she travels with. A reminder of home, of Hogwarts. A softness she can’t quite part with, not with the way the world has hardened so thoroughly around her. Not with the way she herself has had to harden in turn.
Malfoy is wrapped up in that blanket, eyes closed tight against the slant of mid afternoon sun slicing through the sheet tacked across the window. Hermione had used the last of her energy to pin it there that morning. She’d caught a few hours of fitful sleep, then woke to this. To him. Sleep warm and half dressed, lips slightly parted.
Hermione watches the steady rise and fall of his chest, notes the blood crusted in his hair, white blonde streaked through with sunset orange. Then she shoves him. Hard.
It isn’t the kindest choice, perhaps, but why should she be kind to Malfoy? Malfoy, who rarely speaks outside barking orders on the battlefield. Who never fails to eat the last of the biscuits. Who skulks around the safe house like an ill tempered ghost.
He crashes to the floor with a satisfying thud. Hermione revels in the sound for all of three seconds before he’s back on his feet, his wand pulled from god knows where and trained right at her.
“What the fuck, Granger?” he spits, color sparking high on his cheeks.
Hermione gives an exaggerated yawn. “What is it?”
“You kicked me,” he grits through clenched teeth.
“Did I? Must have been dreaming.” She shuts her eyes, presses her cheek into the pillow. “Best find someone else to bunk with.”
Malfoy huffs a breath through his nose. “Everywhere else is taken. Obviously. That’s why I ended up here.”
“Use the couch.”
“Finnigan's there.”
“Then the floor,” she bites, briefly tempted to forgo the Order's ban on non-lifesaving magic performed in the safe houses. Transfigure him a cot just to get him out of her face. It wouldn’t be worth the scolding from Kingsley, though. Or the paperwork.
It’s a problem they’ve been dealing with for a while now. Never enough safe houses, never enough beds. They’re lucky to have enough food. Magic would easily solve half their troubles if not for the other side’s constant monitoring for heightened magical activity. Gold would solve the rest but they never have quite enough of that either.
“You know, Seamus is always going on about how lonely he is now that he and Lavender have broken up. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to have you join him.”
A muscle tics in Malfoy's jaw as he glares at her. In the shaft of light, his eyes are the color of a frozen lake.
“Hilarious,” he drawls.
“Glad you think so,” Hermione replies, then turns her back to him.
It’s quiet for a long moment after that. Hermione keeps her eyes squeezed shut in a vain attempt to will him away with her mind.
After another dozen or so heartbeats of silence, he sighs. A quiet, long-suffering sound she recognizes in her own exhaustion, her own deep buried grief.
“Granger, please,” he says. So quietly she could almost pretend she didn't hear.
When she turns back toward him, there's something about the slant of his shoulders, the angle of his mouth that softens her by a fraction.
How many times has she wandered into bed with Ron? With Ginny or Neville or Dean? Harry too, on the rare occasions they let her go to Grimmauld. On those endless, sun bright mornings that seem to dawn only after the bloodiest of battles. Times when she's needed the warmth of someone else's body beside her to fight off the cold she sometimes thinks has burrowed right into her bones. Times when the thought of being alone is worse than losing, worse than dying, worse than literally anything else.
It never occurred to her that Malfoy might have times like that too. That he might need someone, anyone. Even if it's her.
“Fine,” she breathes, not meeting his eye. “Just keep to your side.”
She rolls to her back, staring up at the ceiling as Malfoy's weight dips beside her on the mattress. The bed isn't big enough for two, but he manages to keep a respectable distance between them anyway.
His heat pulses against her shoulder, her arm, all the way down the left side of her body. It’s strange how warm he is. Unsettling.
She’d always assumed he’d be cold.
- - -
Malfoy is gone by the time she wakes for her patrol shift and Hermione assumes that will be that. That he got whatever temporary comfort he was looking for from her and it won’t happen again.
And it doesn’t. Until it does.
Until the morning, three weeks later, when the door to Hermione’s room creaks open and Malfoy steps quietly through.
He’s clean this time. And fully clothed. Dark circles rim his eyes and when he crashes facefirst beside her, she catches the scent of cigarettes mixed with spearmint gum.
“You know those things will kill you, don't you?” Hermione asks, eyes still closed in the hope she can trick her body into sleep.
“I dodged three severing curses yesterday. If the muggle cigarettes are what take me out in the end, I'll count it as a blessing.”
“Even if they rot your teeth and stain your lungs and make it so you won't be able to run a mile by the time you're thirty?” Hermione counters.
He shifts slightly to look at her, one blonde brow raised high on his forehead. “You just made all of that up.”
“Malfoy, my parents are dentists. If anyone's been educated on the dangers of tobacco exposure, it's me. Haven't you heard me lecturing Collin when he smuggles them in?”
“I usually try to tune you out actually.”
Hermione rolls her eyes. “It's your funeral.”
She settles back onto her pillow and tries very hard to ignore the weight of Malfoy's presence beside her. He's still as a stone, his head cradled in his arms with one foot dangling off the edge of the bed.
His breath comes slow and even, like he's just on the edge of sleep or maybe already there and it infuriates her, that he can drift away so easily while she lays there wide awake.
“What are you even doing in here, Malfoy?”
He merely grunts in response until she kicks him in the shin.
“Fucking Merlin,” he seethes, lifting his head to glare at her. “Are you always this violent in bed?”
She smirks slightly. “Wouldn't you like to know.”
He barks a laugh, a short burst of a sound that betrays his surprise. Hermione thinks she spies a small bit of color rising on his cheekbones, but it’s entirely too dark to be certain.
“Seriously though,” she presses. “Should I expect this to become a regular occurrence?”
Malfoy sighs. “No, Granger.”
“Then why?”
He turns to face her, blonde hair falling across his forehead and a fierce expression in his eyes. “I'm madly in love with you.” He leans toward her slightly, one pale hand raised like he's about to stroke her face. “I’m mad with it. Aching, actually. Positively desperate.”
“Right,” Hermione replies, unmoved.
Malfoy steals his hand back, places it flat on his chest as if in pain. “Break my heart.”
Quiet settles between them again. If Hermione strains her ears, she can hear someone pacing up and down the halls. Neville, most likely. He never seems to sleep anymore. Just roams the safe house until someone can manage to get a sleeping draught down his threat.
“So there's no reason then?” Hermione asks after a while.
He sighs, very loudly, through his nose. “The reason,” he bites through gritted teeth, “is that I’ve been awake for the past twenty-seven–” he checks his watch, squinting in the dark, “ –and a half hours. The reason is that I'm so tired I can hardly see straight and given the choice between a bed or the floor, I’m choosing the sodding bed. Even if it’s you who happens to be in it with me.”
Hermione hums. It’s entirely possible he's telling the truth. It really could be as simple as an unbalanced equation. Too much physical exertion extended over too long a period of time, divided by not enough beds.
She’s never been able to look at a thing like that and see just one explanation though. It’s part of the reason why she’s only passable at dueling. Why when fighters are pulled for missions that might actually count for something, she’s almost never chosen.
Hermione looks at a thing and can’t help but see a galaxy of infinite choices. Infinite realities. Dodge left on the battlefield and avoid a nick to the carotid. Dodge right and the curse coming your way, the one that was meant for you, strikes someone else instead.
She can’t understand how anyone can possibly know what to do when confronted with such a vast array of possibilities. She can’t understand how anything can ever be as simple as just because.
Hermione shivers as she considers what to do. The heat in the house keeps going out and no one seems particularly motivated to fix it.
She could keep pressing Malfoy. Pepper him with questions until he retreats to the floor. Or she could let it be. Take his warmth as a consolation prize, rather than his answer.
“Go to sleep, Granger,” Malfoy says quietly, voice muffled from the way his head is cradled in his arms.
So she relents. She steals her blanket back from where he’s slowly snuck it for himself, but she relents. She turns on her side and closes her eyes and tries very hard not to feel like every single choice she makes is somehow always the wrong one.
- - -
The winter drags on.
The heat stays broken.
For weeks, Malfoy doesn’t come back.
- - -
The door doesn't creak open so much as it explodes, the knob banging so hard off the wall it leaves a crumpled bit of plaster when it swings closed.
Hermione wakes with a gasp, fingers stretching for her wand before she's even fully opened her eyes. Malfoy's undressing by the bed once she does, shirt and shoes and trousers and socks disappearing from his body with a blistering efficiency.
He says nothing as he slips between the covers. Doesn't so much as look at her as he yanks the blanket over himself, leaving her half uncovered.
“Malfoy,” Hermione says after a while.
In the dark, his eyes shine bright as coins. Silver and otherworldly, like he’s lost sudden hold of whatever tenuous grasp he had on his humanity.
“Granger, please,” he says sharply. “Just let me sleep.”
“But…”
“Granger.” Her name is a curse on his sharpened tongue. A lash she wouldn’t feel half as deeply if she’d managed to get more than a handful of hours of sleep over the past several weeks.
Hermione takes a series of small, measured breaths. Then she gestures with her chin, looking down her nose at him as she says, “You're bleeding all over my blanket.”
A grimace twists his lips as he cranes his neck to see the long gash running along his back. “Fucking hell, I thought I got them all.”
“What do you mean you thought you got them all?” Hermione clips. “You didn't go to the healing house?”
Malfoy ignores her, straining now with his wand between his teeth. He can't quite reach the wound with his hands, but that doesn't stop him from trying. He reaches and strokes with pale, bloodstained fingers, muttering muffled curses under his breath all the while.
All his straining and stretching achieves is a slight widening of the wound, a fresh wave of blood slipping down his back and onto Hermione's precious scrap of a blanket.
She sighs as she looks at it. It’s long been too fragile for muggle laundering and with the magic ban at the safehouse there’ll be no chance now of cleaning it. Her heart constricts slightly. After more than a decade of comfort and companionship, this is the fate she’s managed to seal for it. Snipped to shreds and bathed in Draco Malfoy’s blood.
“Fuck,” he barks, his finger just managing to graze the edge of the wound.
“Stop touching it,” she says, swatting his hands away. He growls at her and she clucks her tongue. “Unless you’d prefer to bleed to death.”
With much effort, he closes his eyes and takes a forcedly calm breath.
“Better,” Hermione clips as she gets up out of bed. “Now watch your eyes.”
The room floods with a rush of yellow light that has them both squinting. When Hermione’s eyes adjust, she gasps.
The sheets are drenched, his skin a shade paler than normal. Two shades, probably. The gash, too, is larger than Hermione initially thought. Straight and clean, but deep.
“Idiot,” she seethes. “Wait here.”
She flies down the stairs in socked feet, heading straight for one of the emergency medical kits they keep stored in the kitchen. When she returns with it, Malfoy’s gone another color altogether. Grey more than white, with a touch of seasick green.
“Turn on your stomach,” she says. “And for Merlin’s sake, stop moving your shoulders.”
For once, he does exactly as he’s told. He grits his teeth against the pain, glaring at her with such fury you would think Hermione was torturing him rather than saving him. She ignores the heat of his gaze as she rifles through the bag in search of gauze and blood replenishing tablets.
When she finds the pills, she slips two from the bottle and stuffs them in Malfoy’s mouth, his protest vibrating against her palm.
With that done, she places a layer of gauze against the wound and holds pressure. He hisses, teeth gritted so tightly she worries they'll break.
“Sorry,” she mutters, exchanging the quickly soaked gauze for another.
It takes several rounds of gauze before the blood finally starts to slow. Hermione releases her grip and eyes the wound, watching to see if it will start up again.
“How is it?” Malfoy asks gruffly. A sheen of sweat covers his face, long fingers gripped tight around the pillow. With the light on, Hermione can see a half dozen other slices and nicks he must have healed himself before disapparating back to the safe house.
“You'll live,” she replies. “But this next part won't be fun.”
She grabs a suture kit from the medical supplies. They’ve all been trained on the process in case of situations like this, but her hands still shake slightly as she threads the needle.
She misses her magic so desperately in that moment she could cry. It's something she doesn't let herself think about most days. How her magic has been whittled down by the war. How she's not allowed to do anything with it now but hurt.
“Are you ready?”
The blood replenishers seem to have taken quick effect. Malfoy’s still as pale as ever, but his skin is at least warm now under her touch. His shoulder blades strain and jump as she brings the needle to the edge of the wound and he hisses, “Just do it, Granger. Don’t draw it out.”
She treats it like a sewing project. A menial task that simply needs doing, the same way she boils water for tea or chokes down buttered toast or stands under the shower spray until the blood and dirt and grit are rinsed from her skin.
The hardest part is Malfoy. The way the muscles in his back strain under her touch. The little gasps and hisses that keep slipping from between his clenched teeth. The way he looks at her. Not angry now, but dazed. Far off. The way Neville looks so often these days, the way Hermione often feels and has to pry her way back from.
“Why didn't you go to the healing house?” she asks, hoping to distract him back to himself.
“I told you I thought I got them all.”
“But why go to the trouble at all? The healers could have had you fixed up in minutes.”
“The others were worse off. Seemed like a waste of resources.”
“But…”
“Granger,” he cuts in, the word half caught in a gasp of pain. He breathes slowly through his nose as she winds the needle through his skin again and again. “I just wanted to come back here. I just wanted…I just wanted to go to sleep.”
Hermione ties off the final suture the way she was taught and clips the excess with a pair of medical scissors. “I’d get that checked tomorrow, but you should make it through the night at least. Do you want something for the pain?”
Malfoy releases a long held breath as he slowly pulls himself up to a sitting position. He’s covered in blood. Hermione is too for that matter. With the way the sheets are soaked through, the scene is like something out of a horror film.
“No, I'm fine.”
He looks everything but fine with his face pale as moonlight and his features twisted in pain, but Hermione doesn't have the energy to fight him on it. With the adrenaline fading from her body, she's having trouble standing, let alone convincing anyone else to care about their mortality.
“Well, I'm going back to sleep then,” she says, stripping the sheets from the bed in one fluid motion.
Malfoy looks at her like he wants to say something more. Instead, he flips the light switch, bathing them once more in darkness. The bare mattress dips beside her a moment later. They’re both asleep in minutes.
Later, in the shower, Hermione finds a bloody handprint on her ribs, the shape of a thumb pressed to the center of her sternum, like Malfoy had reached for her sometime in the night.
Like he'd held her there with his hand, for so long she can see the lines and ridges of his fingerprints. For so long she swears she can still feel the heat of him on her skin.
- - -
“What do you think of Malfoy?”
Ron wrinkles his nose as he brings a handful of popcorn to his mouth. “Why?”
“Dunno.” Hermione shrugs. “You go on a lot of the same missions together. I guess I’m just curious.”
“Fancy that,” Ron replies, brows raised in mock wonder.
They’re lounging together on either end of a threadbare sofa. Legs sprawled, popcorn bowl balanced precariously between their knees. Hermione nudges him in the stomach with her socked foot and he gives an exaggerated oof.
“It’s just a bit weird, isn’t it? The way he keeps so much to himself?”
Ron gives her a look. “What did you expect, that he’d join our weekly card games?”
“No,” Hermione says, nibbling on a piece of popcorn. “Maybe. I mean, he defected, right? Swore his allegiance and all. Why not join in at that point? Why insist on this tortured, self-inflicted isolation?”
“Because he’s a git,” Ron answers simply. Hermione opens her mouth to respond and he continues, “Look, he does alright in battle. And Merlin knows where we’d be without his intel, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to hold hands and sing with us around a campfire.”
Hermione snorts at the mental image. “I suppose not.”
“Absolutely not,” Ron insists. “Now what’s the real reason you’re asking?”
Hermione avoids his gaze, toying instead with a burn mark on the arm of the sofa. “That’s the real reason,” she replies with forced casualty. “You know me. I like to understand things and even after more than a year of him being around, I feel like I still don’t understand Malfoy at all.”
Ron doesn’t look convinced, his blue eyes a touch too sharp where they look at her. Hermione fights down the flush threatening to creep up her face, then steals the popcorn bowl and dashes off with it to the kitchen.
“Oy!” he calls after her, laughing all the while.
- - -
“Go to sleep, Granger.”
Hermione startles. He’d come into the room an hour earlier, not saying a word and reeking of smoke. Not the kind from smuggled cigarettes. The kind from battle. Acrid and sharp.
“I haven’t said anything,” she sputters.
“No, but I can hear you thinking. It’s like a gnat buzzing around my ear.”
Hermione scoffs. “Auditory hallucinations are a sign of severe mental illness, Malfoy. I suggest you get that checked.”
Of course, she was thinking. Had been for hours, sleep evading her like a fleeting shadow and a shifting sun. If Malfoy’s bothered by it, he can go somewhere else.
He doesn’t though. He stays curled on his side, facing her, his head propped on one arm. “Out with it, then.”
Hermione glances at him. “Out with what?”
“Whatever’s bouncing around up there,” he says, pointing to her head with a slim, pale finger.
“You really want to hear it?”
“I really want to go to sleep and this seems like the quickest path to that end,” he replies, smirking.
“Fine.” Hermione sighs, rearranges herself on the pillow. “I’m thinking of a house.”
“Go on…”
“It’s something I do when I can’t sleep. I close my eyes and build a house. Board by board, stud by stud, room by room. I usually drift off somewhere around the third floor, but it isn’t working the way it usually does tonight.”
“What does it look like?”
She shrugs. “Just a house. Porch, kitchen, living room, bedroom.”
Malfoy’s brow furrows. “That’s it?”
“What else is there?”
“I don’t know. A bit of wainscoting at least. Windows that look out toward the sea.” He quiets for a moment before adding, “A garden.”
“Should I throw in some peacocks too then?”
“God no, they’re menaces.”
“Hm,” she hums, thinking. “A garden actually does sound nice.”
“We had one at the Manor,” he says quietly, eyes dazed like he isn’t quite there with her anymore. “It felt like another world sometimes. Big enough to get lost in, back when I was a child.”
Malfoy never offers much of himself to the conversation in general and he certainly never talks about his family, his home. It must be hard, to do the things he does now for the Order, knowing who it is he’s doing it against.
Hermione isn’t quite sure what to do. What to say. In the end, she just whispers, “Maybe you’ll see it again some day.”
“I won’t,” he says quickly.
“How do you know?”
His eyes slide firmly closed as he says, “Because I just burned it to the ground.”
- - -
Hermione has little concept of time beyond the changing of the seasons, the slow shift from endless, frigid grey to something marginally more alive. It's one of the things she hates most about the war, the way it chips away at things she once thought immutable.
Time, reason, empathy and rationale. It all feels poisoned to her now. Changed.
It’s the lack of feeling, most of all. The way vicious curses glide so smoothly over her tongue. Again and again sometimes, until she feels like there's no part of her soul left to shred.
She's busy staring up at the ceiling when Malfoy slips into the room. It’s been weeks since he nearly bled to death in her bed and she’s fairly certain he’s been avoiding her. It bothers her like a toothache, the irritation often fading to the back of her mind until something–a clenched jaw, a cold wind, too much honey in her tea–lights her nerves like fire, the flare of sudden pain demanding to be felt.
She doesn’t feel much of anything right now, though. That’s what she’d been lying there thinking about before Malfoy came in. How she should probably feel more than she does. How she should probably feel anything at all.
His arm brushes hers as he slips under the covers, skin damp from the shower. It's a breath of a touch, there and gone before she has time to fully register it but the aftershock sinks through her skin like a burn.
Malfoy settles onto his back, his jaw a sharp outline in the dark. “Let's get it over with then,” he says gruffly.
Hermione blinks. “Get what over with?”
“Your questions,” he replies, like it should be obvious. “It's been a long night and I don't particularly feel like getting poked or prodded or kicked so let's just get it out of the way this time.” He turns on his side when she doesn't respond. “Well?”
“I don't want to talk tonight,” she finally says.
Her mind keeps replaying the battle they just got back from. It was one that seemed never ending, like they were stuck in a timeloop, and for an objective Hermione wasn’t entirely clear on.
Though, if she’s being honest, that’s how all of them have felt to her lately. Another numbers game. Another unbalanced equation. The Order’s dwindling forces versus the other side’s dwindling forces, multiplied by how far any of them were willing to go. The fact that nearly none of it mattered without Harry or the horcruxes was a truth kept tightly wrapped. It eats at Hermione now, the way almost none of them know the truth of what they’ve been doing. Treading water. Buying time.
The whole thing is awful and terrifying and yet she feels none of it. Feels nothing except a great, yawning emptiness she’s a breath away from falling into.
Malfoy looks at her for a long time, his brows pulled down in a line. There's a bad bruise on her throat, a curse that seemed to wrap and squeeze like a lasso before she could work out how to sever it. Malfoy's eyes linger there. She can feel the burn of them even with her eyes closed.
“What do you want, Granger?”
When Hermione opens her eyes, he’s much closer than she expects. Closer, certainly, than he’s ever consciously been with her in this bed. So close all she has to do is breathe–one long exhale–and his lips are there for her to press herself into. So that's exactly what she does.
His mouth is warm and wet and pliant against hers, easily opening to accommodate her tongue, the drag of her teeth. She kisses him with a fervor she didn’t know she was still capable of, the downward flick of an ignition point, the spark that gives way to flame and it is everything, everything she’s needed.
There’s nothing graceful or dignified about the way she presses into him, the way she rolls him to his back and settles herself across his thighs. It’s something she just does, her endless thoughts sweetly tamed by the thrum of want pulsing through her body.
His hands glide over her hips, up her sides, up and up until they tangle in her hair. She bites his lip until he gasps, eyes flying open and shining silver like they did that night all those weeks ago.
“I always wondered,” he says, hand winding through her curls and lips brushing her jaw, “how your hair might feel wrapped up in my fingers.”
Hermione kisses him again and again, until she can barely breathe. Until it almost hurts.
She feels it though. The press of his hands, the glide of his lips–gently, so gently–along the bruises at her throat, the length of him between her thighs. There in the bed with Malfoy, she’s as far away from that yawning emptiness as she’s been in years, since before she knew a thing like that would one day exist inside her.
Malfoy draws her shirt over her head with warm, steady hands. He nips at her breasts then soothes the marks with his tongue and as good as it feels, it isn’t enough.
“Malfoy, please,” she says, her thighs trembling where she’s still seated across his waist. And she isn’t even sure what it is she’s asking for, what it is she needs until he rolls his hips into her core.
Her gasp is swallowed by a bruising kiss that he only pulls back from long enough to say, “Take whatever you want, Granger. Take anything.”
It should be the kind of choice that paralyzes her. The kind with so many infinitely branching possibilities that she can’t possibly know which path is the right way forward. It isn’t, though. A certainty simmers in her blood, her bones, that the thing she wants is right there under her hands, right there pressed against her lips, and there’s no choice but for her to take it.
Malfoy’s hand tremors slightly as she takes it with her own, guiding him down between her thighs. He slips beneath her underwear as easily as anything, fingers gliding through her heat.
She chokes, back arching as he draws circles around her clit with his thumb. Small, torturous movements that are somehow too much and not enough. He holds her gaze as he shifts the angle, the pressure, barely breathing as he drinks in every shift of her hips, every swallowed moan.
His cheeks are flushed with want, his lips swollen and bruised. His hips buck ever so slightly beneath her, a quiet, restrained little movement Hermione isn't sure he's consciously aware of making. It goes to her head, his parted lips. His rapturous face. And when his fingers move to hook slowly inside her, her eyes slip closed and her head falls back on a barely contained moan.
“Look at me, Granger,” Malfoy says, voice like gravel. “That's all I ask.”
She gives him that, her eyes opening and locking on his, and he gives her everything.
- - -
Hermione’s so sure he’ll be gone when she wakes that she isn’t entirely sure what to do when she opens her eyes to find him still wrapped around her. His chest is warm and solid against her back, his breath coming so slow and even she assumes he’s still asleep. It isn’t until his hand tightens on her ribs, thumb pressing into her sternum, that she realizes he’s already awake.
She needs to get up. She needs to shower. She needs to put one foot in front of the other, again and again and again, until this thing is finally over. Instead, she cranes her neck to kiss him.
It isn’t slow and languid, but fast and burning, like he’s been awake for hours and waiting for her to catch up to this, to him. She turns and his hands tangle in her hair, his fingers notching along the back of her neck where he fists her curls in his hands and tugs. Not hard. Not enough to hurt, just enough to feel and Hermione moans into his mouth.
He keeps her on her back this time, slinging his own body around to cage her in, his forearm pressed to her belly and his hand running down. Her underwear disappears faster than seems possible without magic, there and gone before she can register the difference, her thighs spread wide and Malfoy’s hand pressed tight to her center.
His fingers hook inside her, a glide and stretch as he starts with one, then two, then three and it’s so close to enough she nearly cries, her hips bucking off the bed in greedy pursuit of just that little bit more.
“Shh,” he soothes in her ear. “I’ve got you.”
He pumps them slowly, a steeled determination in his eyes, drawing her pleasure out and then backing away from it when she gets too close to the edge. Hermione’s muscles tense and constrict to the point of pain as she learns just how close she can come to that chasm without falling into it.
When she’s sweat soaked and teary eyed, desperate in a way she’s never felt before, Malfoy hooks his hands around her knees and sinks into her with his cock, inch by torturous inch.
“Fuck,” he hisses, eyes flitting from the point where their bodies meet to Hermione’s face, drinking in her open mouthed sigh when he finally bottoms out. From there, he sets a pace so slow and luxurious Hermione can barely breathe. She nearly forgets how to, so busy bearing down on his length, tensing all her muscles in pursuit of what he’s steadily building toward that he licks along her jaw and twines his hand around her throat.
“Breathe, Hermione,” he tells her. “Breathe and I’ll get you there.”
Her lungs expand with air, like she was only waiting for him to remind her what to do and from there it’s only a handful of heartbeats, a smatter of exacting thrusts before she’s gone.
Malfoy smothers her moans with his lips, the hammer of his cock unrelenting, urging a surge of pleasure that feels fundamental. Like knowledge unearthed. Like the magic she’s missed, the magic she hasn’t felt for so long in the safe house. Like that magic is alive and well in her body. In her blood.
- - -
When they finally manage to pull themselves out of bed in search of food, they run nearly right into Ron. He’s on his way out of the bathroom, red hair tousled and damp from the shower. He stops short at the sight of them, a small smirk playing on his lips and a devious glint lighting his blue eyes.
Malfoy stiffens slightly beside her, offering a stiff nod and curtly muttered, “Weasley.”
“Malfoy,” Ron replies, openly grinning now as a flush fights its way up the blonde’s neck.
“I’m going to head downstairs,” Malfoy says to Hermione, offering her hand a quick squeeze before he disappears around the corner.
Then it’s just her and Ron in the hall, the rest of the house strangely quiet around them.
“Well,” Ron says cheerfully, “Looks like you finally figured him out then.”
Hermione bites the insides of her cheeks to keep from smiling. “Shut up.”
- - -
It’s a slow build between them from then on. A warm pulse and a steady beat Hermione sets her heart to when everything else swirls so frantically around them. He comes to her, again and again. In the morning, in the night, in the midst of battle when things feel hopeless and dark. Those moments when Hermione loses sight of herself, when the emptiness takes hold and she could so easily relent to the pull of it, could so easily let herself drown.
He’s there in those moments to kiss her. To lay with her. To pry the thoughts from her tangled mind.
He’s there with her, always, to pull her back up again.