Kept

by Ms_Tavers

Summary:

Draco Malfoy had been bored out of his usually very sharp mind for precisely one hour and forty-three minutes.
Along comes Granger to upend everything.

Notes:

• In response to a prompt by PoemInTheDark in the Valentine's - Stupidly in Love collection.

Prompt:

Their Patronuses keep trying to nuzzle each other

 

Draco Malfoy, heir to the great House of Malfoy, one of the most reputable houses in all of Wizarding Britain, had been bored out of his usually very sharp mind for precisely one hour and forty-three minutes.

There was an unfortunate certainty in this knowledge, since his was the certainty of someone who had been counting. After all, it seemed adding numbers in his head was still preferable to listening to Pansy describe, for what was most definitely the umpteenth time in the evening, the beadwork on Daphne's dress.

Oh, the beadwork! The beadwork appeared to be Venetian, not that he cared, but still, he had been made privy to that information. The beadwork was an affront, as it seemed it was derivative, not that he knew how beadwork could be such a thing, and most importantly, the beadwork was not going to survive the evening, if Pansy's wishful tone was any indication.

All because Daphne was waltzing with Theo. He knew Pansy too well to know that was really what was wrong with the beadwork.

They had come together out of sheer habit, or maybe gravity. Whatever name one gave to the force that kept pulling two people into each other's orbit long after they'd established, definitely and on multiple occasions, that the orbit was decaying. He sincerely wished it wasn't because of a sticking charm, since those could be nasty to undo, especially if cast by wizards in their teens as he had been when he had been positive he and Pansy were destined to be a lukewarm, but better than most, thing.

The damning truth was that they had, indeed, dated, broken apart, mended, and broken again, in a pattern that was now so familiar it had ceased to be painful. He was, in fact, quite sure some of his classmates and even some of the professors could set their watches by it.

There was nothing wrong with Pansy. She was everything Mother would have chosen, and everything he thought he wanted: pure-blooded, exceedingly elegant and pretty, well-connected, absolutely fluent in the silent language of old families. She laughed at his jokes, looked right in his arms, and yet... Yet, though fond of her as one is of an annoying pet that belongs to your grandmother, she bored him so profoundly that he sometimes forgot she was speaking, which, he suspected, was mutual, and which, perhaps, was the kindest thing an outsider could say about them. They were an equal disappointment to each other, and he felt a twist of guilt, as he was increasingly sure that some of Pansy's acidity came down to the fact that she was deeply unhappy with him.

The Great Hall had been done up in the style of a frost-bitten fever dream, with icicles that did not drip, snow that did not melt, and a muggle contraption the Headmaster had called fairy lights, though Draco had looked and looked and no fairies were in attendance.

The paradoxical luminaires had been strung through conjured pines with the sort of relentless, aggressive cheer that made him want to hex something, anything, possibly one of the enchanted penguins that had been set to waddle between the tables and that he had already, twice, narrowly avoided kicking. He found them quite unsettling.

This was the fourth Yule Ball Draco had attended at Hogwarts, and Dumbledore's aesthetic had not matured with repetition. If anything, year after year, the Headmaster was getting more flamboyant, in the manner of an elderly uncle discovering glitter. This time, the theme seemed to be Arctic Wonderland, which, in practice, meant everything was blue and white and vaguely cold-looking. There were polar bear guards roaming the grounds, in what, he had to admit, was a display of sheer commitment.

Draco, who had seen Yule Ball preparations at Malfoy Manor since before he could walk, remembered tasteful events of restrained silver and candlelight where the music was never above a tasteful murmur and no one would dare, under any circumstances, to enchant waterfowl. He found this whole spectacle personally repellent.

As he nursed his second gillyale with a splash of very cheap Firewhisky Blaise had managed to sneak in, his mind contemplated the strategic merits of an early departure without hurting Pansy's feelings. Suddenly, his gaze snagged, as it always did, always meaning every bloody time without even asking for his permission, on Hermione Granger, making his evening considerably more complicated.

The witch in question was wearing what he thought to be a faded jewel-toned green. That he knew this was a colour was yet another sign he really should stop hanging out with Pansy. Anyway, whatever the colour, he thought it was most becoming on her. Of course, it was not Slytherin green, but something that hinted of having been deeper, richer, the colour of the Black Lake in September or of very old glass he would find at the beach when vacationing in Molène.

That colour was doing something to her skin that he was not going to think about. He was absolutely, categorically, not going to think about that. Her hair was up, pinned with small gold clips that caught the lying lights, and she was laughing at something the Weasel had said with the fake, chirpy brightness of a girl who knew she had to act on cue at a public event. Draco, who had been weaned on his mother's drawing-room smile and his father's Wizengamot-sessions charm, who knew the difference between what was real and a mask, saw straight through her and let out a deep sigh.

Pansy turned a perfectly drawn eyebrow at him and asked, "Am I boring you, Draco?"

A Malfoy could be caught, but never revealed his hand, so he diverted her attention. "Of course not, I was just noticing the beading unravelling in Daphne's train. Look!"

"Oh," and she clasped her hands in pure bliss, "you are right! Just look at it, a perfect sartorial tragedy..."

Lullabied by Pansy's droning, his mind could once again drift back to the scene happening at the table across the room. Granger and the Weasel had been together since sixth form. The whole school knew, in the way all schools had of knowing these things. There were no banns read, but there had been his proprietary arm around her slender waist in corridors, the way Weasley said my girlfriend with the content air of a boy who had acquired something valuable and wanted everyone to notice.

There were also the arguments that echoed out of empty classrooms and were never, as far as Draco could tell, resolved as much as borne. He was very aware of them, though everyone else said Granger and Weasley were inevitable. Obvious. As if obvious were a compliment. As if inevitable meant the same thing as right.

Draco had opinions about The Obvious that he kept firmly behind his teeth, because some opinions, once released, were like birds in flight, very difficult to recapture. These specific opinions were kin to vultures and liked to shred things.

The trouble with Granger... And Draco had devoted more hours to cataloguing the trouble with Granger than he would ever, under any circumstances, admit to a living soul, especially his own... Was that she was insufferable in precisely all the ways that made it impossible for him to stop noticing her.

She was loud and sometimes even brash. Pure-blooded girls were taught to be ornamental. She was right with a ferocity that bordered on the fanaticism his grandfather sometimes expressed after one too many glasses of Port. And she was right often, which made it worse.

Once, during third year and in broad daylight, she had slapped him in the face, wandless, just her fury and her hand crashing over his skin, and the memory lived in him with an alarming, lurid quality that he sometimes revisited, particularly in moments that were not quite for the pure, when his left hand travelled down into his boxers while his right one touched the place where her hand had landed on, as if to confirm it was still tender and warm to the touch.

And it was.

Always.

Seven years. He had watched Hermione Granger for seven years across classrooms and corridors and this bloody Hall, and he had called her every name his upbringing had furnished him with, and she had thrown every single one of them back in his face with interest and a markup that would have made a Gringotts goblin weep of joy.

It happened somewhere between the slurs, the comebacks, and the way she bit her lower lip when she was solving something faster than everyone else in the room, which was every single time. And he should know, because he was usually the second fastest. The view from second place was excruciatingly specific. Somewhere in all of that, the irritation had undergone an alchemical reaction he had no idea how to reverse. It was possible, he reflected, that it could not be reversed. That what had been done to his insides by Hermione Granger's relentless, impossible existence was a transmutation, permanent and disfiguring and entirely her fault.

With the efficiency of long practice, he stopped that train of thought at the station of his discontent, and drowned it in gillyale.

The evening wore on, as evenings do when one is trapped in a winter-themed hallucination with penguins. He danced with Pansy because it was expected. Because she needed to be danced with, as Theo and Daphne were still turning slow circles in the centre of the floor and Pansy's eyes were just a fraction too bright, and whatever his failings, and they were numerous, he was not so far gone in his own wretchedness that he could not recognise hers and help a friend of his in need.

He danced well. He was a Malfoy, and Malfoys did everything well or did not do it at all. It was a philosophy that sounded considerably more impressive than it felt at seventeen with the wrong girl in his arms and the right one across the room with her hand on someone else's shoulder.

So, naturally Draco saw the moment the night became skewed.

Were he to be honest, something he only did in the strictest privacy of his own mind, it had been building all evening. The Weasel had been drinking, his volume rising steadily, his laugh, that great open-mouthed laugh that showed all his teeth and none of his sense, getting looser and wider, and his arm had been slipping from Granger's waist to reach for his glass more often than it reached for her.

Lavender Brown, who, for one so pleasant-looking, irked Draco inexplicably, had appeared at their table sometime around the second hour, and was now leaning into Weasley's space with the bright-eyed, guileless tenacity of a girl who had either never learned or never cared to learn the difference between available and occupied. And Weasley... Oh, he was letting her. More than letting her, he was emboldening her, gobbling it up. He turned toward her warmth the way a sunflower turns toward light, stupid and involuntary and again, so obvious, his hand finding reasons to touch her shoulder, her arm, and once the small of her back in a gesture so casually proprietorial that Draco's own hand tightened around his glass until Blaise gave him a sideways look that said you are going to shatter that, you know.

Granger was holding her own glass with both hands, as if it were the last solid thing in a room that had begun to tilt, sitting very straight, while she watched her boyfriend rehearse his next relationship one metre from her chair. Her face had the singular, terrible composure of someone who was just trying to cling to the Arithmancy of dignity.

Everyone at that table knew it would get worse, and no one, not Potter, her supposed best friend; not the She-Weasley; not even Longbottom, who between kisses with Abbott, at least had the decency to look physically ill, was doing a damned thing about it.

The humiliated party had stayed, of course she had. Granger always had the tendency to stay too long, out of pride or stubbornness or, most likely, that absurd Gryffindor pathological inability to concede that a situation had become untenable. He wanted, with a sudden, furious clarity that startled him, to cross the Hall and take her by the hand and pull her out of there. It was insane and everything he had spent seven years teaching himself not to want and, most certainly, not to do.

And then that cursed rat of a Weasley, four Butterbeers deep, with the loose-tongued, red-faced bravado of a boy who had never in his life learned to be careful with the heart he held in his hand, because the world had never once demanded it of him, leaned back in his chair, and draped his arm across Lavender's shoulders with a grin that he probably thought was roguish, then said loudly, as someone in need of an audience:

"See, this is what I mean, Lav, you're just... You're a laugh, you know? You're actually fun." He gestured with his glass toward his girlfriend sitting right there, right there, within arm's reach if he had bothered to reach. "This one here," and the glass swirled, "is brilliant, obviously, everyone knows she's brilliant, she'll tell you herself if you forget, but she's not exactly warm, is she? Bit of an ice queen, our Hermione." The grin widened, conspiratorial, grotesque. "At least you actually seem to like blokes. At least you're not..." A vague, devastating gesture. "You know. Frigid."

The word dropped into the Hall like a boulder into still water, and the silence that followed it belonged to people who had been sitting in the gathering dark of it all evening and hoping it would not arrive and now sat in the wreckage of the awareness that it had.

Seamus Finnigan developed an intense, consuming cough. Dean Thomas looked at the ceiling. Potter, Draco watched his face with the meticulous attention of a man reading a verdict, opened his mouth and closed it, his hand moved toward Granger's arm then stopped, and he looked at Weasley with an expression that was furious and wretched and ultimately, damningly, not enough.

Lavender laughed the high, breathless, uncertain laugh of a girl who knew she was standing on someone else's ground and had chosen to claim it.

Still, Granger did not move.

What Weasley had done... This was something that hooked into the soft meat behind Draco's ribs and pulled, lodging itself there like a stone in his shoe that he would not be able to be rid of for a long time. Maybe, possibly ever, because it was not merely public humiliation. It was not merely cruelty. It was betrayal.

He had made a joke of their intimacy, because he was, at the end of it, a cad, and a wanker.

And everyone had heard. And Lavender was still laughing.

When Granger finally moved, she did it with the careful dignity she brought to everything, pushing her chair, collecting her small clutch, smoothing the green dress she had probably spent an hour choosing and that was now ruined for her, the colour of it, the way it moved, all of it stained by this, and she walked away.

She did not run, she never did. Draco knew this about her with the same bone-deep certainty with which he knew the constellations over Wiltshire, the ones Mother had taught him before he could read. But her chin was trembling in a way he could see from across the Hall, and not a single soul followed her. The enchanted snow kept falling on everything, pretty and pointless.

Pansy, who had materialised at his elbow with the unerring instinct for the misery of others that was perhaps her most finely honed social skill, said, "Oh dear. Trouble in the Gryffindor kennel," and laughed. The laugh was exactly like Lavender's, high and bright and standing on someone else's ruin.

Draco set down his glass. "Excuse me, I'm not feeling quite well, I think the cheap Firewhisky doesn't agree with me," he lied, with no clear idea of what he intended to do next, which was so profoundly, so dangerously unlike him that it should have served as a warning.

It did not.

 

 

The smaller courtyard off the east corridor had a frozen fountain and a stone bench that no one used in winter because it was brutally cold and shadowed. The wind came through the archways like a mouthful of pointy teeth. After some searching, it was there that he found her, sitting on the bench with her arms wrapped around herself, so forlorn she had not thought of casting a warming charm, the green dress impossibly, absurdly thin and wrong against the frost. She was, mercifully, not crying, but only in the way that a dam is technically not breaking during a flood, but not for long.

The list of reasons that made it reasonable for him to leave her alone was extensive and meticulously maintained, a document he had been compiling since approximately third form. It was the very list he consulted every time he caught himself watching her too long in Potions, every time her hand shot up in Charms and he thought, faster than me, again, always, Merlin, with something that had long since stopped resembling irritation and started resembling something that, if he named it, would set fire to every carefully constructed thing in his life.

Watching her start to shake from something other than the cold glued him to the spot, mooring him.

"Weasley," he said, from the archway, and his voice came out exactly right, dry, languid, the drawl of someone with nothing whatsoever at stake, "has the emotional depth of a flobberworm. I'd say a teaspoon, but I don't want to flatter him."

Granger looked up, a perfect Pietà of misery. Her mascara was ruined in a way that suggested she had tried to fix it the muggle way, and made it considerably worse. It was so thoroughly, so achingly Granger, that the noose he felt around his heart twisted hard enough to make him forget, briefly, how to breathe like a person who was fine.

"Go away, Malfoy."

"No." There was a vague sense of alarm in the discovery that he meant it. The wind found him immediately when he stepped into the courtyard, and he refused, on principle, to flinch. "I came for the air. The Hall smells of bad punch and desperation. You are incidental."

"I'm incidental," she echoed, her voice thick and wrecked. Underneath it, there was a thread of something. Incredulity? Or disbelief? Or maybe, maybe the faintest, most reluctant trace of amusement. He reached for it the way a mariner follows the brightest star that comes and goes during a storm, because reaching for that light was easier and safer than looking at her shaking shoulders in a dress that had never been meant for the cold.

"Entirely incidental. I have absolutely no interest in whatever has occurred in that Hall. I'm here because Pansy has subjected me to a seventh, Granger, a seventh dissertation on the beadwork on Daphne's dress. Did you know that, apparently, it is Venetian, possibly derivative, and certainly doomed? I didn't, and now find myself devastated for Murano artisans. I may write them a letter of condolence. They are finished."

The sound she made was rawer than a laugh, akin to a gasp, startled out of her against her will, but it was adjacent to a laugh, and it succeeded in performing the miracle of changing the shape of her mouth. He watched it happen with the same focused, helpless attention he brought to everything about her.

"You're absurd," she said. "You are genuinely absurd."

"I'm a Malfoy. In our circles, the word is eccentric." He leaned against the archway, arms crossed, constructing a posture of absolute indifference while every nerve he possessed oriented itself toward her like a compass needle swinging north. "And for the record, whatever that Weasel said in there, it said considerably more about him than it did about you."

She went still again, but differently, as if she were entering a particularly fraught minefield. He watched that Granger mind of hers working, magnificent and relentless even in the wreckage, and he did not flinch from it.

"Don't call him that." And suddenly humbled by the look he gave her, she conceded. "That's..."

"Don't," he said. "Don't make it a thing, Granger."

"I'm not making it a..."

"You are. I can hear your little cogs working from here, and they need oiling, so just stop it."

The wind cut through the archway and she shivered, and he did not offer her his cloak because that would really be a whole event he could not walk back from, and Draco Malfoy was many things, but he was not yet ready to be in any way readable to Hermione Granger.

There was, however, a traitorous hand reaching for his breast pocket, finding his handkerchief. It was white linen, silver-edged, with his monogram and the Malfoy coat of arms embroidered in one corner by a witch in Troyes, everything that was expected from something he owned, really. And he held it out to her, because her mascara was a Greek tragedy and it was the smallest, the most plausibly deniable thing he could offer. The thing that could still, if pressed, be explained away as good breeding.

She looked incredulous.

"It's clean," he said. "I'm offering you a handkerchief, Granger. I know our Medici cousins got some bad reputation for it, but I assure you it is not a Dark artefact."

She took it. Her fingers brushed his, and Morgana, she was freezing, the green dress was sleeveless and whatever warming charm she ought to have cast two hours ago was conspicuous in its absence, did she not think, did she not plan, and he pulled his hand back with a swiftness that probably told her everything the handkerchief was supposed to be too small to say.

"He said it in front of everyone," she confessed to the linen. Quiet now. Just a girl sitting so sad and lost on a stone bench, holding a monogrammed handkerchief to her face, her shoulders bare and shaking. "That I'm... cold. That I don't... that I'm frigid." The word came out as if she were pulling a splinter from under her own nail. "As if there's something wrong with me. As if the reason I didn't want to..." and her voice was cracking, "as if it couldn't possibly be him."

And Draco understood, with the sudden, surgical clarity of a spell striking bone, that this was not about tonight. This was about every time Weasley had pushed, and she had held her ground, and he had made her feel that the ground she was standing on was a flaw rather than a choice. Months of it, probably. Maybe the whole relationship. The slow, grinding, domestic erosion of a girl being taught, in a hundred small, private, deniable ways, that the word no was a deficiency in her character.

"It isn't you," he whispered, lacking drawl, distance, with words that came out stripped of every layer of armour he had spent seventeen years constructing, and he could not even bring himself to regret it. That was how he knew, with the calm, clear-eyed terror of a man watching a fire reach his own front door, that he was in very serious trouble.

She lowered the handkerchief and looked at him, eyes squinting.

"Is this some sort of trick? Why are you being nice to me?"

"I'm not," he said with a little pure-blooded huff. "I'm being accurate. There's a distinction, Granger." He should stop here. He should absolutely, categorically stop here, and the part of his brain responsible for self-preservation, which had served him faithfully for seventeen years and through considerably more dangerous situations than a girl on a bench, was screaming at him. "A man who tells a room full of people that his girlfriend is cold is a man who has never once considered that the problem might be his hands and... other things."

She snorted a decisively not Sacred-28 snort, making him open his face in a wide smile. Then, self-consciousness caught up with them both, and the courtyard went very quiet.

The fountain was frozen mid-arc, water caught in a shape it had never intended to hold. The snow, real snow, had begun to fall in slow, aimless flakes, and one of them landed on her bare shoulder and did not melt immediately, and he watched it, and wanted to brush it away, and did not.

"You'll catch something odious out here," he said, stepping back into the archway, back into the shadow where the cold couldn't reach him and neither could she. "Pneumonia. Or feelings."

"Malfoy."

He stopped.

"Your handkerchief."

"Keep it," he dismissed, without turning around, because turning around would mean looking at her again, and he had already looked at her too much, had already said too much, had already left more of himself in this courtyard than was safe or sane or recoverable. "Consider it reparations for the beadwork conversation. You've saved my life tonight, Granger. The least I can do is sacrifice the family linen."

He left before she could answer. This was critical because if she had said one more word in that voice, that raw, startled, half-broken, almost-warm voice, he would have done something worthy of Sophocles.

 

 

Three days passed before his handkerchief made its way to him.

He had expected two. After all, Granger was, if nothing else, a girl of rigorous promptness. The sort of person who returned library books a day early and arrived at classes with time to spare, and would, he had always suspected, arrive at her own funeral ten minutes ahead of schedule with seating arrangements, which was something that he could also say about his mother, but he didn't want to dwell on that.

That it took Granger three days to return a handkerchief told him that either she had been deciding whether to return it at all, or she had been working up to something, and both possibilities made that troublesome space behind his ribs act out again.

It was after Potions, when the corridor still held the usual post-class drip-drip of stragglers who moved through Hogwarts with the purposeless momentum of slugs feasting on his mother's prized Moss roses, but it was empty enough. He heard someone approaching and, when she fell into step beside him without preamble, he was slightly surprised to find it both alarming and so Granger it would be endearing, if he considered things endearing.

"Malfoy."

"Granger," he dragged her name and found it gave him great pleasure, his traitorous mind reminding him of other things he would probably not mind dragging.

She held out the handkerchief, and when he took it, he found it to be laundered, pressed, and folded with a geometric precision that bordered on the aggressive, as if she had ironed her feelings into it and expected him to accept delivery. He glanced at it, at her, but she was looking straight ahead with the fixed, determined expression of a girl walking toward something she had rehearsed.

"Your handkerchief," she said. "Laundered. Pressed. Returned."

"I thought I told you to keep it."

"And I chose not to. I don't collect other people's linen, Malfoy. Particularly linen with crests on it. It feels dangerously close to a trophy."

"A trophy," he savoured, and despite everything, despite the fact that his pulse was doing something utterly undignified, he felt the corner of his mouth twitch. "You think I'm a trophy."

"I think your handkerchief resembles a trophy. There's a distinction. You taught me that."

Oh. Touché, his mind screamed, but it surprised him to see that instead of feeling piqued by it, all he could think was that it was something so entirely, so devastatingly her that he almost stopped walking.

In the next moment, he did, in fact, stop walking, choosing to accept the not-trophy. Their fingers did not touch; she had been careful about that, which told him that she had been thinking about the last time, which told him more than the handkerchief did.

"You pressed it," he observed.

"I'm a muggleborn, not a barbarian."

"You pressed it with starch."

"It's linen. Linen requires starch. There's a whole chapter on textile care in..."

"Of course there is." He slipped the handkerchief into his breast pocket. It smelled, faintly, of something that was not the Troyes witch's lavender. Something warmer. Something that he was absolutely not going to identify, because identifying it would mean acknowledging that he would notice if it faded, and that was a door he was not walking through. "Well. Thank you for the impeccable laundry service. I'll be sure to weep into your textbooks next time I need the favour returned."

There was a birdlike flutter coming from her end, something that belonged to daylight and corridors and the ordinary world where they were supposed to be two people who barely tolerated each other. It was, if anything, more dangerous than the courtyard laugh, because it suggested that this could be easy. That this could become a thing they did, this parry and riposte, this careful exchange of blows that landed soft.

"You don't weep, Malfoy," she said. "You brood. There's a distinction."

Touché, once again.

And she turned down the east corridor before he could respond, which was, he suspected, deliberate, and which left him standing in the emptying hallway with a pressed handkerchief smelling of vetiver and of something in his chest that he could no longer pretend was anything other than what it was.

The inescapable truth that he was, most profoundly, fucked.

And still, vetiver called to him.

 

 

Two weeks later, Blaise came to him with that unique, languid malice that only he knew how to bring to all forms of information exchange. He was going to make the finest diplomat the Ministry had ever seen.

"Your Gryffindor had a bad day," he offered, without looking up from his Transfiguration essay, as if he were remarking on the weather or the quality of the pumpkin juice.

"She's not my Gryffindor."

"Mm..." Blaise turned a page. "Weasley's taken up with Brown. Very publicly and in the Great Hall. Over breakfast. There was an egg involved."

"An egg."

"He fed her a piece of his toast. With egg. From his fork." Blaise's expression suggested that this was, in his estimation, a crime against civilisation on par with the sacking of Rome, going so far as delivering the details while his face turned ashen. "She giggled."

"Revolting, truly. And?"

"And Granger left before the giggle. I thought you'd want to know." He paused, and Draco could swear that, had Blaise a moustache, he would be twirling it. "Since you don't care."

"I don't."

"Naturally."

"As much as you don't care if Pansy is free to campaign for Theo."

"Oh, but that is the difference between us, old chap." And Blaise had the nerve to smile (!!!) at him. "I make no secret of the fact that I intend to have Daphne, and because of that, I will." And he paused, adding. "Maybe you could learn something from me."

"If you build it, it will come?"

"Ah, yes! Muggle wisdom!"

That tasty morsel of information was ember-hot, but Draco did not go looking for her. He wanted this on the record, even if the record existed solely in his own mind and his mind was, at this point and at best, an unreliable narrator. Instead, he headed to the Astronomy Tower because he always went to the Astronomy Tower when the castle became too full of people and noise and the singular, cloying weight of pretending to be someone he was increasingly unsure he had ever been.

The Tower was his. Had been since the fifth year, when he had discovered that no one, not even Filch, bothered to patrol it on nights when there was no class scheduled, and that the stars over Scotland were savage and wild and free and so close in a way that the stars over Wiltshire were not.

Even though he knew that he would always end up in Wiltshire, the guardian of a thousand Malfoy souls and all their secrets, destined to have another Malfoy who would replace him, a secret, untamed part of him loved Scotland and belonged to it.

He was not looking for her. He was looking at Cassiopeia, high and clear in the northeastern sky, when he heard footsteps on the stairs. His body knew who it was before his mind did, because apparently his body had developed its own intelligence network where Hermione Granger was concerned and neglected to owl it to the rest of him.

The top of the stairwell framed something perilously close to animal fur. Then, there was a whole girl with her book bag still over her shoulder, ringlets coming loose from whatever she'd pinned them with that morning and her eyes red in a way that she had clearly tried to fix but failed, and she froze when she saw him, and they looked at each other. The silence was the kind that could go either way, cowardly retreat or something else entirely.

She held her ground, queenly.

"The Tower's occupied," he informed from his position against the parapet, because he could not say I'm glad you're here. Because he would never say that, as saying that would be the end of the palisade he had built so carefully and the beginning of something, a breach, a hole, an open field, where he did not know which defence tactic to employ.

"I can see that," she replied, not leaving as she was supposed to when graced with that tasty-morsel of information. Instead, she stood in the doorway with her ridiculously heavy bag and her chin set at the angle he had come to recognise as I am going to do this and you cannot stop me. She then walked to the parapet, set her bag down and stood beside him, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her through the cold air between them, and she looked up in that adorably demanding way that was entirely Hermione.

"What are you looking at?"

He should have said nothing. He should have said the view or the sky or mind your own business, Granger, any of the hundred deflections that would have preserved the status quo. He loved a good status quo, didn't he?

"Cassiopeia," the truth slipping out, because apparently his mouth had joined the mutiny his body had started, and his brain was now outvoted in the Dracogamot. "There. The winter W." He pointed, the subject rousing him from the kind of enchanted sleep he seemed to feel around her. "One, two, three, four, five stars. See it?"

She followed his long finger and he watched the wonder in motion that was Granger's mind locking onto it with that unique hungry focus she brought to anything she did not yet know, but certainly intended to.

"I see it!" There was a little delighted jump that made something warm wash over him. "It's the queen on the throne."

"The vain queen on the throne," he corrected because he could not help himself, because correcting Granger was one of the very few pleasures in life that was both exquisite and permissible. "Cassiopeia boasted that she was more beautiful than the Nereids. Poseidon, a most avenging father, was clearly not amused, so he chained her to her throne in the sky, doomed to circle the pole star for eternity, half the year upside down, which Poseidon apparently found hilarious." He paused. "The Greeks had a specific kind of cruelty for women who were... too much. Too beautiful, too proud, too loud. Always a punishment. Always a chain. Maybe not just the Greeks..." He stopped himself because that would mean giving Granger an opinion, and an opinion was something so personal that his self-preservation was screaming.

She was quiet for a moment, but her Grangerness won. "That's not the wizarding version."

"No." He leaned his forearms on the parapet, looking up rather than at her. Looking at her right now would be an error from which he would not recover. "The Blacks, my mother's people, have always named their children after stars. It's a family tradition that goes back centuries: Sirius, Regulus, Bellatrix, Andromeda." He paused for a half-note. "Well, my mother is Narcissa, after the myth..."

"Not a star? Why?"

Always so bloody curious. "Well, she was a third daughter, and I think my grandparents thought that third daughters are meant, not to shine, but to reflect the light." There was a hint of bitterness to what he knew came next. "The principle holds. You are what you're named for, and you carry it."

"Andromeda..." there were pages turning in that relentless mind. "Harry's mentioned... She was disowned, wasn't she? For marrying..."

"A muggle-born." He said it flatly, no hint of emotion. "Ted Tonks. They burned her off the family tapestry. My mother's sister. I've never met her." A beat. "I've never seen the scorch mark; it hangs in the drawing room at Grimmauld Place. The Blacks were always meticulous about their cruelties."

The wind moved across the Tower and he noticed how she always, always seemed cold. It was again a pearl of fascinating Granger-related facts he hoarded gladly. Ran cold, didn't dress for it, or simply refused to cast warming charms out of some Gryffindor conviction that physical discomfort built character, and that meant he almost, almost said something about it.

"Why do you come up here?"

Lying had its merits, as a lie was ever so easy, second nature to him really, the same as other people breathed or blinked, a reflex so deeply embedded that it barely registered as a choice. But the stars were out and she was there beside him, eyes still red from crying over a boy who fed toast to another girl at breakfast. He found, to his considerable alarm, that he did not want to lie to her.

Ever.

"Mother taught me the constellations," he said. "It was before I could read. We'd stand in the gardens at the Manor and she'd point them out, and tell me the stories, the Greek ones, but the ones I loved best were our family's. Who was named for what, and why, and what happened to them. Do you know I am the last Black?" He paused, his voice gaining a liquid quality that stubbornly clung to his throat, but he pressed on, fighting. "The sky is so different here, wilder. Wiltshire is south enough, and our grounds are spelled enough that you only see what's meant to be seen. Up here, we can see it all. And it is such a glorious mess. I find that..." He recalibrated just in time before the crash. "I find it preferable."

She was looking at him with the expression he had first seen in the courtyard, that open, bewildered look, as if he kept turning the screw. He needed her to stop looking at him like that, or he needed her to never stop, and both options were equally apocalyptic.

"You're named for a constellation, too." There was a softness. "Draco."

"The dragon. Yes." He smiled a small, private smile that he rarely let anyone see, precisely the kind that belonged to dark towers and conversations that shouldn't be happening. "It's over there, see?" And he pointed again, elation rising when he spied from the corner of his eye how she followed his movements. "Coiled around the north celestial pole. It never sets and it never rises. He's an eternal guardian. Mother thought it was very romantic and Father thought it was powerful. I've always thought it sounded rather lonely, honestly, to guard something from a distance, but I've never told either of them that."

That was, not exactly a lie, as much as an imprecision, because the absolute truth was that he had never told anyone that, and the enormity of it landed on his chest a half-second after the words left his mouth. He felt something shift, a rumbling, irreversible tsunami, washing away all those palisades he had been leaning against for years, and he was now standing in the dreaded open field with nothing between him and whatever came after.

She didn't say anything for a heartbeat, just stood beside him looking at the sky, the wind blowing her curls across her face, while she pushed them back with fingers that were trembling slightly. Then her voice a murmuration:

"It is a bit lonely, isn't it? Always watching and never setting?"

And he understood then that maybe she would be the one to see him.

"Cassiopeia is circumpolar too," he offered, after a while. "The queen and the dragon. Both of them up there all year, circling and circling. Never below the horizon. The Greeks would have said they were both being punished. Now Mother would say they were being kept."

"Kept," she repeated. "Now that's a very different word."

"Mother has a talent for making doom sound like it's a precious heirloom some ancestor bequeathed." He pushed back from the parapet. The cold had worked its way through his robes and settled into his bones. She must be frozen, must be perishing, and he could not, he absolutely could not offer her his cloak because that would mean something neither of them was ready for it to mean. "You should go in, Granger. It's late, and you're not dressed for this. I mean," he righted himself, struggling to make sense and put order into all of this entropy, so he reached for the familiar. "If you catch pneumonia, I'll have no one to compete with in Charms, and I refuse to let Theo take second place. His ego couldn't bear it, and neither could mine."

"What a noble concern."

"I'm a deeply selfless person," he shrugged, then dared her. "Ask anyone." He moved toward the stairwell and then stopped because the thing he wanted to say was pressing against his teeth with an urgency that alarmed him, and the part of his brain responsible for not ruining his life was, apparently, off duty that night. "Granger," he nodded.

"Malfoy," she nodded back.

He had already made up his mind that he had to let her go when something reckless took over him. "The stars are different every week, you know? The sky moves to tell us different stories." He was not looking at her. He was looking at the door to the stairs, and his voice was careful and measured and gave away absolutely nothing, except, possibly, everything. "I'm here most nights. When there's no class scheduled. If you... if you were ever inclined to... for the astronomy of it, I mean. The academic interest. I know you can't resist an academic interest," he teased, a hint of a dimple blossoming on his left cheek.

He rushed down the stairs since waiting for her answer would mean standing in the silence while she decided, and he could not chance that she would say no, or worse, far worse, the chance that she would say yes.

Behind him, only silence, even when he looked back for a fraction of a moment.

 

 

Two nights later, he was sitting against the parapet with a star chart he didn't need, because he knew every constellation by heart, but the chart gave his hands something to do, when he heard footsteps on the stairs.

Her hair was done in a French braid, begging to be entwined with flowers come spring, and she was wearing an ugly, heavy jumper over her school shirt. She had a cup of tea in each hand, clearly procured from the kitchens, the mismatched kind the house-elves used, and she handed him one without ceremony. As if they did this all the time. As if they now were simply what they had always been, two people who drank tea in towers and looked at stars. She sat down beside him, closer than she had been last time, close enough that he couldn't stop noticing how her naked knee almost touched his.

"I have an academic interest." She took a sip of her tea and looked up at the sky with an expression of such determined, defiant calm that he wanted to laugh or weep or both. Possibly both. Decidedly both.

Though he was living in absolute turmoil, there were still some vestigial traces of Slytherin cunning in him and he intended to make all their moments linger. Armed with that special heartwarming conviction, he did not tell her about Corvus that first night.

Instead, Cygnus was his choice because it was safe, a swan. Who didn't love swans? It was also a problematic love story, with Zeus in disguise. The sort of myth that could be told with appropriate academic distance and enough dry commentary about the sexual proclivities of Olympians to keep the conversation firmly in the territory of intellectual exercise, rather than whatever it was actually, terrifyingly, becoming.

Hermione laughed at his commentary and argued with his interpretation of Leda's agency. Their duelled words were as damning as hexes. Both of them basking in that rare and exquisite pleasure that was finding someone who could keep up. By the time she left, her tea long cold and her cheeks flushed from the wind and from something else, he had learned three things.

Firstly, Hermione Granger took her tea with milk and no sugar, a fact he filed in the ever-expanding archive of All Things Granger that his mind kept without licence and curated with a diligence that would have impressed the librarians at Alexandria.

Secondly, she knew more about Greek mythology than anyone had any right to know. Her breadth of knowledge was almost indecent and almost, almost matching his, which meant she had been reading. Which meant she had been preparing, which meant she had anticipated the evening and planned for it as one plans for an exam. And the thought of Hermione Granger revising for a night on the Tower with him made him want to set something on fire, before his own composure burst into flames, something that he feared was already too late to look out for.

Lastly, he was positively, adamantly sure that the way she said you're wrong, Malfoy, leaning forward, eyes bright, one finger raised like a conductor about to bring in the whole orchestra of her correctness, was going to be the thing that killed him. Not a hex, not a curse, not his father's disappointment. Hermione Granger, telling him he was wrong about Leda, with Cygnus’ light tender over her braid. That was how he would go, and he found he had made peace with it.

The following weeks acquired a rhythm that he had not planned and could not, would not stop, the way tides have a rhythm, or heartbeats, or the slow turning of constellations across a Scottish sky.

She came on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sometimes Fridays, if the week had been particularly long, or if the accursed redhead who-must-not-be-named had been particularly feral, which was, as far as Draco could tell, a chronic condition. She always brought tea and sometimes biscuits. Nay, sablé biscuits. Because he had mentioned once, once, in passing, with deliberate casualness, that those were his favourite. Of course, the vault that was her mind had kept it, filed away alongside Arithmancy theorems and library call numbers, and the knowledge of it made him feel simultaneously honoured and haunted.

They ventured into Perseus and Orion, with her arguing that Orion's mythology was troubling. To which he responded that all mythology was deeply troubling, that judging the Ancient Greeks through a modern prism was silly. As being troubling was rather their raison d'être, just like the tales in Beedle the Bard, or in the stories muggles told their children.

Never a quitter, she dogged him fiercely, rolling her eyes at his French, and said that's reductive, Malfoy, and he said that's rich, coming from a girl who loooves a footnote, and she threw a piece of sablé at his head, and he caught it, and ate it.

The look on her face when she swiped the drop of strawberry jam lodged in the corner of his mouth... And tasted it on her fingertip. Oh, that delighted look, with something mischievous and so dangerous flickering, stayed with him for three days, like that one time in Positano when he and Theo ignored Mother and fell asleep in the sun, acquiring a sunburn in a prawn colour that no salve seemed to heal.

There was the night he told her about Gemini, the twins, because he was thinking of how different they were and yet how well they fit. He told her about Canis Major and there was a quiet whisper of Sirius to which all he could offer was a yes that had them sitting with the name between them. When she reached out and touched his sleeve, just his sleeve, barely a touch, he let her. The stars above them were the same stars Mother had named, that his family had claimed, and here was this girl, this impossible, brilliant girl, learning them as if they were hers too, and perhaps they were, perhaps that was the point, perhaps she was always meant to be his.

 

Corvus came on a bad night.

Draco knew it was a bad night because she was late, and Granger was never late. Granger arrived at things the way other people arrived at duels, with preparation and precision and the expectation of combat. So when the footsteps on the stairs came twenty minutes past the time his body had learned to expect them, slower than usual, and heavier, he simply knew. And he was already looking at Corvus when she appeared at the top of the stairwell because he needed somewhere to rest his eyes that was not her face, which was bound to break his heart with all her forlornness.

She came empty-handed, no tea or biscuits. Just Granger, in her heavy jumper and her school skirt, with her hair as a veil, which she did when she was upset. It was another entry for the archive, another piece of evidence in the case he was building against his own sanity. He hated it so to see her like this. It made something wild, reckless, and dangerous swell in him. So he knew he had to tread carefully, otherwise he would burn the world and then, then where would they be? So, he did the proper, pure-blooded thing.

"Corvus." That avoided what happened, was it him again? Because asking those questions would crack open the careful architecture of constellations and biscuits and strawberry jam and arguments about Greek gods that they had built together, this fragile, improbable shelter in the landslide, and he could not bear to open the hatch, not when she needed it to stand for her sake. "The crow. Four stars, just south of Virgo. Do you see it?"

"I see it." So despondent.

"He's Apollo's bird, and the story goes that Apollo sent his crow to fetch water in a cup, which is Crater, see? That constellation just beside it." He waited to see if she was following. Reassured, he continued. "But the crow got distracted. He was a gluttonous little bird and found a fig tree and waited for the figs to ripen instead of doing as he was told. When he finally, finally came back, late and empty-cupped, he brought a water snake as his excuse." Another breath, coming closer to her. "That's Hydra, there, see it?" Sensing her birdlike hum of approval, he willed himself to proceed. "And he had the nerve to tell Apollo the poor serpent had blocked his path." He let the night air hold the words. "Apollo, who was the god of truth among his other, less savoury, talents, was not fooled. He threw all three of them into the sky, the crow, the cup, and the snake, and cursed the crow with eternal thirst. Corvus lives right next to Crater, his beak almost touching the rim. Close enough to see the water, never close enough to drink."

Granger was church-mouse quiet. The wind moved her hair across her face, tangling the veil. She reminded him of a Moira.

"That's a rather cruel punishment." And there was pity. "Just for being late."

"Well, Granger, Apollo was not known for proportional responses. Neither, for that matter, are most of the powerful. Mercy and power seem to be a rather combustible combination, in mythology and," he nearly stopped, but this time, reckless as he was now feeling, pushed on, "elsewhere." He turned the star chart in his hands, so his fingers could worry about what was not the hem of her sleeve, not the loose curl by her ear, not any of the things they actually wanted. "The wizarding families adopted Corvus, though. The LeStranges liked the idea of the eternal vigilance, the eternal hunger. They thought it was aspirational, which tells you rather everything you need to know about them, really."

She almost smiled at that. Almost.

"I always thought it was a terrible constellation to be proud of," and his voice had gone quieter than he intended, closer to the register of the courtyard, closer to the register of it isn't you. "A poor, famished animal punished for wanting something sweet."

He had not planned to say it like that. He had planned to say something about the LeStrange family motto, or about the right ascension coordinates of Beta Corvi, something numerical, safe, but what came out instead was a poor, famished animal punished for wanting something sweet, and he heard it, and she heard it, and the space between them became subliminal.

"Draco," she said.

It was the first time she had used his name.

His name, his actual name, the one Mother had chosen from the stars, the one Father thought sounded warlike, and manly. And it went through him like a spell he had not thought to shield against, like something cast without warning that struck him centre-mass and rearranged whatever it found there, organs, certainties... The careful filing system of a life lived behind glass. And he gripped the star chart hard enough to hear the parchment crumple and, by some miracle of breeding or cowardice or the peculiar Malfoy talent for appearing composed while internally detonating, he did not make a sound.

"It's late," he said. His voice was almost right. Almost. "You should go in."

"You always say that."

"And you never listen. It's one of your most exhausting qualities, and the competition for that title is, I assure you, stiff."

The angle of her looking up at him did something to the planes and freckles in her face that he could not bear, the way the starlight pooled in the hollows of her throat, the way her eyes caught light from sources he could not identify, and she almost smiled. And the almost was worse, so much worse than the smile would have been, because the almost contained everything he wanted to keep locked, the wanting and the not-yet and the slow, terrified lean toward something neither of them had agreed to fall into.

"Same time Thursday?" she scheduled.

"Same time Thursday."

Draco came down the stairs on legs that did not feel like his, and somewhere between the Tower and the dungeons, in a corridor made of old stone and centuries of magic, he stopped and pressed his forehead against the wall and said, very quietly, to no one and to the entire history of his poor, besotted bloodline:

"Fuck."

The wall, unmoved by the troubles of past, present, and future Malfoys as walls tended to be, did not reply.

 

 

It happened on a Thursday, in the library.

The library was Granger's territory the way the sky was his, the physical space where she was most fully herself, most sovereign, most dangerous, and Draco had taken to studying there with a frequency that he justified as strategic.

When his friends saw him leaving the common room at odd hours, they gave him strange, knowing looks, but he told them NEWTs were approaching and that the library had the finest reference section north of Wiltshire.

Theo had argued that he needn't truly worry about NEWTs as he was, after all, a Malfoy, one of the Sacred 28. There would be no need to debase himself with working for a living, counting the time in weekdays and weekends. But Theo couldn't understand because Theo's father expected nothing of him, except distance, while his expected everything.

So it was merely logical and practical. The fact that Hermione Granger sat at the same table every evening, the one near the Restricted Section, tucked behind a shelf of Advanced Arithmancy texts that afforded privacy without appearing to seek it, was entirely, completely, absolutely incidental.

Draco had started across from her. Then, over the course of several evenings, beside her, as the light was better from that angle. This was true and also had nothing whatsoever to do with why he moved, and they both knew it, but neither of them said so, because the not-saying was its own language by now.

To his surprise, they actually studied. He had expected the proximity to be annihilating, had expected to spend every session vibrating at a frequency that precluded thought, but studying near Granger was like studying inside a force field of terrifying competence. She radiated focus the way a hearth radiated warmth, and it was, against all probability, both calming and contagious. He accomplished more in an evening beside her than he managed in a week in the Slytherin common room, where Blaise's commentary, Theo's philosophical crises, and Pansy's pointed, loaded silences created an atmosphere better suited to psychological warfare than revision.

They spoke little during those evenings when, having ingratiated themselves to Madame Pince, they were granted permission to stay after hours. But, there was contentment in their silence. The Tower was for talking, for myths and stars and the slow, careful exchange of truths dressed up as stories. The library was for something else, something quieter, something that lived in the peripheral awareness of another body's breathing, the scratch of their quill, the specific sound they made when they found a passage that interested them.

Thus came the knowledge that Granger hummed when she was thinking. It was a small, unconscious sound, barely there... Some muggle melody he had never heard, and yet... Yet, coming from those plush lips, it sounded as if it were the most melodic song of the most melodic songbird. He found himself so shamefully attuned to it that he could map her intellectual progress by the pitch alone.

So, that Thursday.

The library.

A passage in Moste Potente Potions with which he did not, strictly speaking, need help. But he leaned toward her and asked anyway, and she leaned toward him to look... And they were close, closer than the Tower ever allowed, because the Tower had the alibi of the sky, which made you look up, not at each other. And the library, the deserted library at that hour, with just a book between them and nowhere to look but down. And her hair smelled of vetiver again, and she was explaining the difference between a stabilising agent and a catalyst with the earnest, exacting passion she brought to everything, and his hand...

His hand, which had been resting on his own knee, moved.

It did not move far. Four, five centimetres to the left, perhaps, which in the grand cartography of human gestures was negligible, the sort of motion that could be attributed to restlessness or discomfort or the simple mechanics of a body adjusting itself in a hard library chair. Five centimetres, maybe only four. The exact distance between his knee and hers.

His hand came to rest on her knee. Lightly. Through the rough wool of her school skirt, his fingers barely pressing... A touch so tentative it was almost a question, almost a whispered may I, and he did not look at her. Oh no, he kept his eyes fixed on the page, on the passage about stabilising agents, as if his hand were an independent entity with its own agenda and the rest of him bore no responsibility whatsoever.

The word catalyst, was left half-formed, suspended between them like a firefly caught in amber, and the silence that followed was so complete he could hear the candle on the far side of the table guttering in a draught from somewhere.

The time compressed in the wait gained such palpability that it became torturous; he felt as if his limbs were being torn apart, but desire trumped self-preservation, and his hand stayed, chaperoned by his heart in a stampede that would have alarmed any Healer in St. Mungo's.

She did not move his hand, nor her knee. She drew one breath, and then she went on, as if this, this event, this happening, didn't alter the constellations or the Earth's very axis.

"... the catalyst, as opposed to the stabilising agent, is consumed in the process of the reaction," and her voice was admirably, almost impeccably steady. Except for the faintest tremor on consumed, a tremor so slight that no one in the world would have caught it but a boy who had spent seven years studying this girl the way others studied for their NEWTs. And he caught it. He caught it like a Snitch in his closing fist when they would beat Gryffindor, and the terrified, euphoric triumph of it spread through his chest like Firewhisky, warm and reckless and entirely without regard for the consequences.

She went on. He went on looking at the book. His hand stayed. Her voice found its footing.

After a while, a few minutes or centuries, his thumb moved. A single, small stroke against the wool of her skirt. Then, braver, back and forth. Back and forth. The smallest possible motion, the kind of thing that could still, if absolutely necessary, be denied as a fidget, an unconscious habit, a thumb with an agenda of its own and no consultation with its owner.

She lost her place.

Hermione Granger, swot extraordinaire, the witch who had never lost her place in anything, who could cite page numbers from memory and retrieve references blindfolded, the marvelous girl who held entire libraries in that magnificent, terrifying mind, lost focus on her eyes, and blinked, asking, ever so softly:

"Where was I?"

And Draco Malfoy, who had spent his young life playing dress-up to power, inherited and purchased, the blunt and loveless power of a name and a seemingly bottomless vault, Draco Malfoy looked at the girl beside him and understood, with the force of revelation, that true power was in a thumb moving half a centimetre across a woollen skirt, and Hermione Granger forgetting what she was saying.

He restrained his smile because if he dared it, she would see it, and she would know, and the whole thing would become real in a way that neither of them was ready to survive. So he kept his face neutral, and his eyes on the page, and said, with a calm so perfect it deserved an award:

"Catalysts. Consumed in the reaction. You were making a distinction."

"Right," she said. "Quite right. The distinction." And she went on, and his hand stayed on her knee, and the candle guttered, and outside the library windows the Scottish night was enormous and star-filled and full of constellations that neither of them was thinking about, because for the first time, what was happening at this table was so much more interesting than anything in the sky.

When they packed up that evening, their hands did not touch. They walked to the place in the corridor where their paths diverged, with Gryffindor Tower to the left, the dungeons to the right, and they stood for a moment in the kind of silence engorged with every unsaid thing. There was a Goodnight, Malfoy followed by a Goodnight, Granger, and they turned away from each other.

Both looked back, but their eyes did not meet.

That night in his dormitory, curtains drawn, the dark wrapped around him like a cloak, Draco lay on his back and pressed his thumb against his own knee and tried to remember the precise texture of the wool, the warmth beneath it. He thought about the crow who wanted something sweet. He thought about catalysts consumed in the reaction. He thought about the way she had said where was I, that soft surrender of a girl who never, ever lost her place, and he did not sleep for a very long time, his left hand travelling the familiar path, and his right thumb pressing against his knee, as if to confirm the warmth of her still lived there.

It did. Still.

Draco had been saving Lyra.

The other constellations had been little offerings, stories told with the appropriate academic distance, myths that could be discussed without exposing the tender, pulsing thing that lived beneath the discussions. But Lyra was different. Lyra was Orpheus, and Orpheus was about looking back, and Draco, who had spent his entire life training himself not to look back, not to look too long, not to look at all, knew that telling her about Orpheus was going to cost him something he could not recover. Still, he told her.

It was a late February night, past Imbolc, bitter and clear, that dead, gorgeous stretch of Scottish winter when the sky was so cold it seemed closer, as if the stars had drawn in on themselves for warmth. There was once again tea, biscuits, a knitted scarf wound three times around her neck and a copy of something she wanted to argue about. She sat down beside him, close enough that their arms touched through the layers of wool, making it burn through the fabric like a brand, and he thought: I am going to tell her about Orpheus, and it is going to ruin me... But, I am going to do it anyway, because she brought tea and my sablés and she sat close and she is wearing that scarf and I am, as previously established, profoundly fucked.

"Lyra. There, the small parallelogram, with Vega at the top. You know Vega, obviously, it's..."

"Fifth brightest star in the sky," was the retort with the faintly wounded tone of a girl who could not abide being told things she already knew, which was most things. "Part of the Summer Triangle, though visible year-round at this latitude."

"Show-off."

"You started it. You've been showing off since Cassiopeia."

"I've been trying to educate. There's a..."

"If you say there's a distinction, I am pushing you off this Tower."

His laughter rose in bubbles, higher and higher, as if it were a paper lantern rising with all the well-wishes of whoever launched it. A laughter so genuine it held something that came from somewhere lower and less defended, somewhere that had apparently been colonised by a girl with a French braid and strong opinions about Leda, and he saw her react to it, that small, startled stillness, as if she had heard a chord she hadn't expected from an instrument she thought she knew, and he looked away quickly, because the way she looked at him when he laughed was something he could not absorb without consequences.

"Lyra," he recovered, barely. "Orpheus's lyre. The instrument with a sound so beautiful it could move the dead, and any number of Slytherins who have been known to be emotionally equivalent. You know the story."

"Orpheus and Eurydice. He played so beautifully that even the stones wept. He went to the underworld to bring her back, and Hades agreed, on the condition that he not look back at her until they reached the surface."

"And?"

"And he looked back." There was the calm finality of someone stating a law of nature. "He looked back and he lost her."

"Everyone tells it as a failure of trust." He was looking at the constellation, at the small, bright shape of it, Vega burning at its apex like something that refused, absolutely refused, to be extinguished. "Don't look back. Trust the process. Have faith. An exercise in obedience really, which, I have to say, is a very classical and tiresome moral."

"And you don't think that's what it's about."

"No." He was quiet for a moment. The wind was steady and sharp and smelled of ice and moss and that unique, clean emptiness of very high places, and she was warm beside him through the wool, and his thumb remembered her knee with a vividness that embarrassed him. "I think it's about the terror of having something so precious that you cannot stop yourself from checking whether it's still there. Not because you don't trust it. Because you can't believe it's real. Because the thing you want most in the world is walking behind you in the dark, and you can't hear its footsteps, and the only proof you have that it exists is a god's word, and gods," he paused, "are not historically reliable."

Words hung above their heads, and he could hear their metal clinking. There it was, in a crescendo. the wanting and the disbelief and the fear... The whole disastrous, undeniable shape of what he felt, and he could not take anything back, and the stars were blurring slightly, which was the wind, obviously, nothing but the wind, and he was fine, he was absolutely fine.

"Draco," his name on her lips.

It was the second time, on this very Tower, from those same perfect lips, and it went through him the same way as before, his palisades on fire. And he turned to look at her because he was, it turned out, Orpheus after all, constitutionally incapable of not looking, incapable of not turning toward her even when the turning might be the thing that destroyed everything.

She was ready. Her eyes were very dark and gigantic in the starlight, and her lips were parted, and the knitted scarf in odious Gryffindor red had loosened around her neck, and her hair was half out of the braid now, and she looked, she looked like something he had dreamed in the curtained dark of his dormitory and mourned upon waking, and here she was, real, breathing, close enough to...

"The moral of Orpheus," she said, very quietly, "is not that he looked back."

"No?"

"No. The moral is that he went. He walked into the underworld. He walked into the worst place in existence because she was there, and he played his way through it, and he almost, almost brought her back. Everyone remembers the failure, but nobody ever talks about the courage it took to go."

He looked at her and she looked at him and the space between them was very small, smaller than it had ever been, smaller than the five centimetres between his knee and hers, so ridiculously minuscule that he could see the pulse in her throat and the exact shades of brown her eyes held. Not one brown but several, amber near the centre, darker at the rim, the brown of old wood and autumn and things that were warm and alive and infinitely, terrifyingly temporary.

And he thought, with a clarity that was either revelation or total surrender: I would go. For you, I would walk into the underworld and play every song I know, and I would not... I would try not to look back, but I would fail, because it's you, and I have never once succeeded in not looking at you.

She kissed him.

Or he kissed her. Or, most truthfully, they met in the middle, which was how most true things happened. Not one person's choice but a mutual, simultaneous, terrifying act of gravity... And her mouth was cold from the wind and then immediately warm, and her hand came up to the side of his face where she had slapped him in third form, and the symmetry of it... Her hand on his jaw, this time gentle, choosing, made something inside him shatter along a fault line he had not known was there, that had perhaps been there since the slap, since her hand first met his skin and branded him forever.

The kiss was not a thing of proficiency. It was not smooth or practised, nor any of the things that kisses with Pansy had been, all correct mechanics and no soul. This was clumsy and desperate and slightly off-centre, and her nose bumped his, and he didn't care, he didn't care, because her fingers were in his hair and she tasted of tea and of something beneath the tea that was simply and irrevocably her. And he realised he was shaking, hands were trembling where they had come to rest on her waist, as if his body had finally and completely abandoned the pretence that it was not in the grip of something immense.

There was a minute pull-back, possibly only an eyelash away from him, and her breath was visible in the frozen air in between. Her hand still on his face, on the place where she had hit him, on the place where he touched himself in the dark, and she was looking at him with an expression that held everything at once... The terror and wonder and the fierce, determined clarity of a girl who had just walked into the underworld on purpose and did not intend to come back empty-handed.

"I looked back," he said, and his voice was wrecked, unrecognisable, stripped bare. "I couldn't... I looked."

"I know," she said. "I was counting on it."

He kissed her again. Properly this time, or shamelessly improperly, one hand in her soft curls and the other pulling her to him by the waist, and she kissed him back with equal hunger, and the stars wheeled overhead. There was Lyra, Vega, Orpheus's lyre still singing after all these centuries, and Draco Malfoy, who had been taught since birth that wanting was a vulnerability and needing was a defeat, held Hermione Granger on the Astronomy Tower and needed her with every cell of his miserable, miraculous, mutinous body, and the sky did not come crashing down on them.

The sky, if anything, had never held more multitudes.

 

 

On a Monday, in the corridor between Transfiguration and Charms, she walked toward him and he walked toward her, and the distance closed the way it always closed in public, inevitably, unbearably, with the entire weight of everything they could not say pressing against the inside of his chest like a creature trying to break free.

The corridor was full with the usual Monday-morning chaos that Hogwarts produced without effort. There were students with half-zipped bags and crooked ties, first-years in panicked clusters, the She-Weasley arguing about Quidditch tactics; Potter ambling along looking vaguely heroic in the effortless, maddening way that Potter always looked vaguely heroic just because he was set to play pro after graduation. His family famously less strict than the Malfoys in terms of career choices, though equally rich and old. This had annoyed Draco for seven years and now barely registered, because Hermione was two metres away, closing in, and his entire nervous system had rearranged itself to track her.

Blaise was on his left, talking about Transfiguration. Pansy was on his right, plotting about Theo. He heard neither of them. He was watching her approach with the peripheral precision of someone who had trained himself, across seven years and thousands of corridor crossings, to track her without appearing to look. It was the most sustained act of covert surveillance since the Ministry's founding, and considerably more competent.

She was laughing at something Potter had said, and it made him slightly jealous that it was her real one, the one that changed the shape of her mouth. And he knew it, as he could identify it from across a crowded corridor the way a jeweller identifies a stone by the way it catches light, and her bag was over her shoulder and she was wearing that ugly jumper, that had turned pretty in the Tower.

One point five metres, one metre, fifty centimetres.

The Crossing.

Eyes forward and faces schooled in indifference, just two people who shared a school and a year and a set of classes and nothing else, nothing at all. Certainly not a tower of stars or a library of discoveries or a kiss under Lyra that had rearranged the molecular structure of his entire existence.

At the last possible second, the margin so thin it was almost theoretical, his left little finger, the one with the Malfoy signet ring, brushed her naked one.

It was more the ghost of a touch, the rumour of what a touch might feel like if it were brave enough to exist. His smallest, ringed finger against hers for a fraction of a second so brief that the sensation was almost imagined, a thing that happened in the space between heartbeats.

Almost.

Each kept walking in the opposing directions of their day, the corridor carrying on around them, oblivious, and Blaise was still talking, and Pansy was still plotting... and the distance between moated them away, once again. One metre, one point five metres, two metres, and he could still feel it in his chest, in that place behind his ribs where a fishing hook had lived since the Yule Ball. He was like a trout, snagged and pulling, but never breaking free. And he would never be free, because it was permanent now, it carried a lead that pulled him under, to the deepest, darkest parts of the lake that was his life and he would carry it forever, this small, impossible, devastating point of contact, a fingertip and a fraction of a second, more intimate than anything he had ever done with his clothes off.

He looked back; he had to make sure she was real.

The door to the Restricted Section was not, strictly or otherwise, restricted.

This was because Hermione Granger had been granted complete access in fifth year by Professor Vector, who had been unable to resist her campaign for expanded Arithmancy research privileges with the same helpless inevitability with which continents yield to tectonic drift. Naturally, the access had never been revoked, because no member of Hogwarts staff had yet to regret giving Hermione Granger access to more books. The books themselves, Draco suspected, had opinions, her notebooks, which were extensive and merciless and occasionally profane, but the books had not been consulted. Draco thought they would surely have opinions, especially because she consistently failed to use Post-It-Itus to write like a little Barbarian.

It was late on a Friday, the library being empty well-past an hour ago, Madam Pince's closing patrol sweeping through like a small, bespectacled weather event... and they had waited in the silence that followed, tucked behind the Arithmancy shelf with the stillness of two people who had, over the preceding weeks, become indecently good at not being seen.

The Restricted Section smelled of old leather and the faintly metallic tang of books that had been spelled against rot. There, the shelves were taller and closer together. The aisles narrow enough that two people could not walk side by side without touching. And the lighting was dim, a handful of enchanted candles that swayed and guttered as if they, too, had opinions about what was happening, and the shadows did things that suggested the books were breathing, or watching, or both.

She had come in to retrieve a reference. She had said this in the brisk, no-nonsense Granger tone of someone categorically here for academic purposes and not because the aisles were dark and narrow and he was behind her. "I need Hartwick's Compendium of Defensive Theory, third shelf, I'll only be a moment."

"Of course," and Draco had followed her in, because he was, as comprehensively documented, done for.

She actually found the book, pulling it from the shelf with the efficiency of a girl who knew where every volume in this library lived, and opened it, and even began to read, standing in the aisle with the book propped against the shelf at chest height, and for a moment she was simply Granger in her element, Granger as he had watched her for seven years, lost in text. And he stood behind her and watched the candlelight move across the back of her neck where the braid was pinned up and felt something that went so far beyond want, so far beyond the ordinary minutiae of desire, that it arrived somewhere in the vicinity of worship, if worship could be this specific, this embodied, this focused on the fine hairs at the nape of her neck and the curve where her throat met her shoulder and the small, unconscious sigh she made when she found a passage that interested her.

"Hartwick's theory of cascading defensive barriers is fundamentally flawed." And a page was turned, with the page-turner apparently oblivious to the fact that he was perishing behind her. "The resonance frequency he proposes for a sustained Protego is based on a sample of twelve. Twelve, Draco. And he doesn't account for wand-core variance, which..."

He put his mouth on her neck.

Just below her ear. Just where the tendon ran taut beneath the skin. It was not quite a kiss, more like a question pressed into her skin with his lips, warm and relentless, and she stopped talking the way she had stopped in the library the very first time.

To Hermione's credit, the book stayed in her hands. She was Hermione Granger, and she would not drop a book if the castle were actively crumbling around her, and he loved, loved this about her, and he pressed his mouth more firmly to her neck, sucking slightly, sensing her pulse thundering under his lips and hearing the small gasped moan she made, private and involuntary and his, his, and he was going to remember it for the rest of his natural life and probably the unnatural part as well.

"Sample of twelve," he murmured against her skin. "Scandalous."

"Don't..." A sharp breath as his hands found her waist. "Don't make fun of me while you're..."

"I am not making fun of you. I'm genuinely appalled by Hartwick's methodology. Please, do go on."

"You're impossible."

"And yet," his lips traced the line of her tendon, and he nibbled the fine skin above it, feeling her shiver, "here you are."

Gently, his hands on her hips, he turned her and she allowed herself to be turned, the book still in one hand, because of course, of course, it was still there, while her other hand found the front of his shirt, fingers curling into the fabric as if deciding between pushing him away and pulling him in, the decision yet to be made. He looked at her. Flushed, breathless, her eyes nearly black in the candlelight, her lips parted, and he thought that every constellation he had ever shown her was a pale and distant substitute for her face, in this light, in a room full of books, looking at him as if he were a volume she had stumbled upon in the stacks that she hadn't known she was looking for but now could not put down.

"Here I am," and there was a kiss.

It was different from the Tower. The Tower had been cold and desperate and new, two people stepping off a cliff together, not knowing if the fall would kill them. This was slow and warm and deliberate, her mouth blossoming under his, her hand fisting in his shirt, his back against the shelf of Defensive Magic Theory, which creaked in dignified protest, and he thought, with the last functioning part of his mind, that the irony was rather perfect and he would savour it later when his brain resumed normal operations.

There was movement from his shirt to his tie, loosening the knot, tugging him down to her. She was shorter than him, had always been shorter, and he liked it so, revelling in the way she reached for him, the way he had to bend. His hands slid from her hips to the small of her back, pulling her closer, and she made that sound again, the one from before, but louder now, less guarded, as if the Restricted Section had given her permission to be unguarded, and the sound unmade him.

"Granger," he managed, against her mouth, rough and half-gone. Then, because the old name suddenly felt like a wall and he was so tired, so endlessly tired, of walls, there was a Hermione.

All four syllables of it. Her name, her beautiful, queenly name, the one he had never spoken aloud to her face, and she shivered against him, and the shiver had absolutely nothing to do with the cold.

"Say it again," she asked.

"Hermione."

She pulled his mouth back to hers with a fierceness that surprised them both, and Hartwick's Compendium on Defensive Theory, four hundred pages of it, hardbound, an authoritative if statistically questionable text, slipped from her fingers and hit the stone floor with a thud that echoed through the Restricted Section like a small explosion, and for the first time in what he was prepared to swear was the entire recorded history of Hermione Granger's relationship with the written word, she did not pick up a fallen book.

Did not even look at it.

Instead, her eyes were on him, her hands in his moonbeamed hair that reflected the fire in the candles, her body soft against his leaness, her breathing quick and shallow and uneven, and her eyes wider and darker and certain, and the certainty was the most erotic thing he had ever encountered. More than the kiss, more than the sound, more than the heat of her through wool and cotton, it was that certainty, the Grangeresque absolute refusal to do anything by halves, applied now to him, to this, to the two of them in a dark aisle surrounded by books that were almost certainly watching them, biding their time to loosen their tongues.

His hands, which could brew Amortentia and cast hexes and hold a quill with the copperplate Mother insisted upon, were not steady as they traced the line of her jaw, as his thumb brushed her lower lip, as he looked at her and tried to commit every detail to memory because he was, at his foundations, a boy who had been taught that the things he wanted most were the things most likely to be taken from him.

"We should probably stop," someone had to say it, and that someone was clearly not going to be her, because Gryffindors did not know when to stop, it was practically in the charter.

"Probably."

"This is the Restricted Section."

"I have access."

"There are books watching us, Hermione."

"Let them watch, or do you want to deny sad, lonely books, their one opportunity for voyeurism?"

"For..." and he couldn't even say it, Draco Malfoy, incapable of speech.

"Voyeurism," she whispered against his ear, and the sheer, brazen, magnificent nerve of it, Gryffindor to her marrow, brave past the point of all sense, made him laugh against her mouth. And she swallowed the laugh and kissed him harder. And his hands found the hem of her jumper and then the warm skin beneath, and she arched into his touch with a sharp inhale that erased Hartwick and his twelve test subjects and his cascading defensive barriers and every other thought that had ever existed in Draco Malfoy's head, leaving only her skin, her breath, her hands in his hair, the absolute and obliterating present tense of the Hermione Granger wanting him back.

He pressed her against the Ancient Runes shelf, and she wrapped one arm around his neck and pulled him closer and the kiss became something slower, deeper, a conversation conducted entirely without words, and his hand moved up her ribcage, his thumb tracing the edge of her bra through the cotton of her shirt, and she bit his lower lip, and the sound he made in response was undignified and un-Malfoy and entirely beyond his ability to control, which he found he did not mind in the least.

"Hermione," he said, for the third time, because he could, because she had asked him to, because her name in his mouth had become a kind of spell that existed before wands, when magic was just a word spoken with enough want behind it to reshape the world.

She trembled against him, and he understood that his name in the dark was a constellation to her the same way hers was to him, and they were both circumpolar now, orbiting each other with the fixed, unbreakable devotion of stars that never set.

Their fingers and mouths started an age of Discoveries.

Later, after, when they had reassembled themselves into something approximating respectability, when she had retrieved Hartwick's Compendium from the floor and smoothed its pages with a murmured apology so earnest that it made his entire chest ache, when they stood in the narrow aisle with their clothes straightened and their hair a mutual catastrophe and the evidence of what they had done written in the flush of their skin and the swollen, conspicuous state of their mouths, she looked up at him and said:

"We can't keep doing this in secret."

"I know."

"Eventually..."

"I know." He straightened his green tie, which was a ruin, which she had ruined. He had never been fonder of a piece of silk. "But not yet. Give me... not yet."

There was a long moment of study, and he could see the shadow that took over her beautiful face, his girl's face, and he had done it and hated himself for it, while she was lost in the Arithmancy of patience weighed against desire weighed against the risk of what not yet might cost them both, and then she nodded, his brave Gryffindor.

"Not yet," she agreed. "But soon, Draco."

"Soon."

"I need..."

He kissed her once more at the corner of her mouth, soft and deliberate, a period at the end of a sentence, and then he left the Restricted Section first, because they always left separately, because their double-led existence required staggered departures, and he walked back to the dungeons with the taste of her on his lips and Hartwick's cascading barriers running idiotically through his head and the knowledge, settling into him with the quiet, irreversible weight of a constellation finding its place in the seasonal sky, that soon was both a promise and a fuse, and when it reached its end, everything: his name, his family, the careful, curated castle of cards of his entire life, it would tumble.

He found, walking through the dark corridors with her vetiver on his skin and her certainty in his chest, that he was terrified, yes. But where once his terror had all been about failing his house and his name, now the terror had changed.

This was the terror of flying, the same terror, perhaps, that a falcon feels the first time it leaves the glove and discovers that the sky is very large and very empty and entirely, breathtakingly, its own.

His terror was made entirely of curls, of freckles and vetiver skin, and he had no choice, no choice but to spread his wings.

 

 

He saved Aquila for last because Aquila was his, and giving her the things that were his was the most frightening act of his life.

More frightening than his father's silences, which could fill a room like smoke. More frightening than the weight of the Malfoy name, which he had worn like a second skeleton weighing him down since birth. More frightening even than the moment in the courtyard when he had said it isn't you and meant it so completely that the words had come out without any armour at all.

It was Ostara. The sky was clearing after weeks of low Scottish cloud, and the constellations were returning one by one like old friends arriving late to a gathering. Aquila was there, high and clear in the east, the eagle with its wings flung wide, and Draco looked at it and thought about his father, and thought about his mother, and thought about Tiercel.

Hermione arrived with her tea and sablés for him, though she always complained that they would ruin his teeth.

"Have you ever seen a wizard with bad teeth, Hermione?" he would tease her, but not even the biscuits could make him tease her tonight.

"You're awfully quiet," she started, and there was an uncertainty in her voice while she settled beside him. Close, now. Always close, these days, her shoulder against his, her knee touching his, the careful distances of the early weeks collapsed into something that was not yet public but was no longer afraid. Her hand found his and their fingers laced as naturally as breathing, and he looked at their intertwined hands, thinking this. Just this. For as long as the sky allows.

"I'm thinking."

"Oh, that is dangerous," and that oh and how it molded her lips just about undid him, but it also set him free, because she was uncertain no longer, and he felt relief.

"For a Malfoy? Invariably." He sipped the tea. Let the warmth spread. "I want to tell you about Aquila."

He watched her register the shift, the change in his voice, the way the drawl had thinned to something more careful, as if he were carrying something fragile across a room and could not afford to stumble.

"Aquila," she said. "The eagle."

"The Malfoy constellation." He pointed with the hand that was not holding hers, because he was not letting go of hers, not tonight, not for Aquila, not for anything. "Altair. The twelfth brightest star. The name is Arabic, and it means the flying one. My family claimed Aquila centuries ago, the way the Blacks claimed Sirius and the LeStranges claimed Corvus. The eagle. The raptor. Power and precision and the long, arrogant view from above." He paused. "Very Malfoy, as I'm sure you've noticed."

"It suits you," she said, and there was no irony in it, only warmth, and the warmth undid him as if he were a dreidel in spinning motion.

"My father gave me a falcon when I was seven." He had not planned to start here, but the story, like most stories that matter, was choosing its own beginning, and he had learned, over these weeks with her, that the stories worth telling were the ones you couldn't control. "A peregrine. He said it was time I learned falconry, because falconry was a Malfoy tradition, and Malfoy traditions were not optional. I was terrified of it. It was, for a seven-year-old, absolutely enormous. Wild and enormous and with these eyes that looked like they could see through you, into the parts you thought you'd hidden, and I didn't want to touch it. I told my father I was scared." A breath that cost him. "He said Malfoys are not afraid. Which was not, I think, a comfort."

Her hand tightened around his, and she asked, intent, "Did you name it?"

"Oh yes, the silliest name one can give a male falcon."

"Which was?" and she leaned against his heart.

"Tiercel, and before you ask, as I know you will, it's a falconry term and means..." he was teasing her with suspense now.

"What does it mean? Tell me," she commanded.

"Male falcon."

And that was it. She burst out laughing and her laughter filled the Tower, up and up, all the way into the rafters, and he held on to it, to her, and the stars swam a little, and he continued, because she was there listening to his heartbeat and the falcon story wanted to be told and he had spent his whole life telling other people's stories on this Tower and it was time, it was past time, to tell his own.

"Mother taught me." His voice had gone viscous, tar-like, the way it did when he spoke of the woman who bore him, the way it always would. "Not Father, Mother. She grew up a Black, who knew about wild things and patience, because she lived in a house full of madness and brilliance, and she survived it all. She showed me how to hold my arm steady. How to wear the glove. How to wait." He paused. "She said the falcon doesn't come because you call it. It doesn't come because you're stronger or louder or because you have the right name. It comes because your hand is the safest place to land. And you make your hand safe by being steady. By being patient. By being the one thing in the world that doesn't flinch."

He looked at their joined hands, his paper pale, hers slightly golden, together in the dark, and the contrast was something he did not have a word for, or had too many words for, beautiful and inevitable and right, right, the simplest and most terrifying word in any language, and after all the baroque machinery of seven years of denial and longing and stars, it came down to the insurmountable truth that her hand in his felt right, and he was done pretending otherwise.

"The falcon always comes back," and his voice was low, and rough, and more honest than it had ever been, more honest than the courtyard, than Corvus, than the Restricted Section even. "That's the point of falconry, and it took me years to understand it. The bird flies. Miles, sometimes. Out of sight, beyond reach. You stand in a field with your arm out and your glove on and you wait, and you have to believe that it will return, even when you can't see it, even when everything tells you it's gone. And then it comes back. Not because it's captive. Not because it's trained, not really. Because it has chosen your hand, out of the entire sky."

She was very still beside him. Her thumb was moving over his knuckles in the same steady rhythm his thumb had traced on her knee in the library, the gesture completing its circuit, returning to him.

"I'm not telling you this because of the constellation," he said. "I'm telling you because I need you to know what I am. What this is." He looked at her, and he let her see him, all of him, the whole defenceless mess, the boy behind the name and the drawl and the centuries of careful, curated mimetism. "I'm the falcon, Hermione. And you are the hand I land on. And I am asking you to be steady. Because I will always come back. I will always, regardless of what happens, of who knows, of what my father says or writes or threatens. I vow to always, always come back to you."

The silence that followed had its own weight. Warmth. The distinctive density of something that has been building for months and has finally, finally come to rest.

"Draco." Her voice was unsteady. Hermione Granger's voice was always steady, and it was unsteady now, and her eyes were bright, and she was gripping his hand hard enough that he could feel the small bones shift, and she said: "I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here."

He kissed her slowly, carefully, with both hands on her face and her tears against his thumbs, and the stars turned overhead. There was Aquila, Lyra, Corvus, Cassiopeia, Draco the dragon coiled around the pole. All of them. Every story he had told her, every night on this Tower, every truth disguised as myth, converging on a boy and a girl and a sky full of witnesses.

"Soon," she said against his mouth.

"Soon," he agreed.

And above them, the eagle soared.

Professor Riddle, one of their strictest professors, stood at the front of the combined seventh-form Defence Against the Dark Arts class and said, with the mild, slightly threadbare composure of a man who had survived considerably worse things than teenagers including, if rumours were to be believed, a very murky time when he had been tempted to pursue the Dark Arts himself.

"Today, class, in preparation for your NEWTs, we will attempt the Patronus Charm."

The class purred and hushed in a wave, half-excitement and half-dread. Draco, leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed and his expression fixed at its factory setting of ennui, felt something tighten in his stomach that had nothing to do with indifference.

Evidently, he knew the theory, as his own father had explained the Patronus Charm when Draco was fifteen, with the characteristic, fastidious distaste Lucius Malfoy reserved for magic that required emotional exposure. A useful charm, certainly, though somewhat theatrical. The caster must summon a memory of profound happiness, which I have always found unnecessarily exhibitionist. One's happiness is one's own affair. It was, it seemed, a famously difficult charm to master, one that eluded even skilled wizards, such as Aurors. Worse still, it was famously difficult for members of Sacred-28 families to master, for most obvious reasons.

Never one to fall behind, Draco had practised it alone, in the curtained dark of his dormitory, and had produced wisps, sad half-formed shapes, silver ghosts that dissipated before they could become anything, because the memories he reached for, Christmas at the Manor, his first broom, Tiercel landing on his glove for the first time, were happy in the way that heirlooms were valuable, the happiness of things that one acquired or expected to acquire by birth or throughout life.

What he had not done was try it since the Tower, since the library, since the corridor, since the Restricted Section. He had not tried it since the constellation of moments that had, over the preceding weeks, rebuilt the interior chart of his happiness so completely that whichever old memories he held, Manor, broom, glove, felt like portraits of someone else's life, like the string of Malfoy ancestors in the East Gallery, correct in every detail but lit by the wrong sun.

He was, he understood, with a feeling somewhere between terror and exhilaration, about to discover what his Patronus looked like when it was built on her.

"The incantation," Riddle was lecturing, pacing slowly, hands clasped behind his back in that impeccable posture that was rumoured to have made many witches and wizards swoon, "is Expecto Patronum. Now the wand movement requires finesse. It's a forward thrust, like a flèche, but decisive, not aggressive, children. The key, as many of you will know from theory, is the memory." He paused, looking at them over the rims of his spectacles. "It must be powerful, not merely pleasant, or nice. A memory that fills you..."

He thought, not for the first time, that there was something almost unbearably precise about Professor Riddle teaching the Patronus. He knew, because Father had told him, that he was standing with a man who had stared at the abyss at its very lip, to be pulled from its edge only by Dumbledore's stubborn, inconvenient faith that he was worth saving. That was the man now in a classroom asking young witches and wizards to find their happiest memory, as if happiness were not, for some of them, the most dangerous thing they could be asked to hold. Draco had never dared to speak to Riddle about this, but that didn't mean he failed to recognise the measure of a man who had rebuilt himself from the foundations, because he was, in his own smaller, less dramatic way, doing the same thing.

The professor's voice reeled him back in.

"That is the distinction."

There's a distinction.

Draco caught her eye across the room. She was near the windows with Potter and the Gryffindor Patil-twin, a shaft of grey Scottish light on her hair, and the look she gave him was so quick and so private that no one in the room could have read it, but he could, because he was now fluent in the language of glances they had built together over months of secrecy, and looks that whispered, I know, I'm thinking it too.

Potter went first, because Potter always went first, because Potter had spent seven years stepping forward with the golden, reflexive courage of a boy for whom bravery was as involuntary as a heartbeat. He was, after all, the youngest champion in the history of the Triwizard Tournament. The thought of that alone made Draco roll his eyes in condescension.

"Expecto Patronum!"

The stag burst from Potter's wand like a prisoner released. It was massive, silver, magnificent, flooding the room with light, its antlers like a crown, its hooves ringing against the stone floor, the class applauded, and Riddle smiled his proud smile for one of his best pupils. Potter looked appropriately humble, which Draco would have found nauseating at any other point in his life but now merely noted, because his attention was elsewhere. Because it was always elsewhere. Because it was always on her.

Others followed. The Gryffindor Patil produced a rather elegant white swan, which her twin, the Ravenclaw one, followed with a luminescent black counterpart, as she was the most interesting of the two. Longbottom managed a hedgehog on his third try, to cheers that Draco privately conceded were warranted. Seamus Finnegan produced a fox on his first attempt without apparently concentrating at all, as if he had simply asked the universe for a favour and the universe, recognising a deep fire within, had obliged without paperwork.

Then it was Hermione's turn.

She stepped forward, and he watched her the way he always watched her, with the entire apparatus of his devotion, and she raised her wand and closed her eyes, and her face did the thing he knew from the Tower and the library and the moment before she kissed him. It went still, and open, and luminous with some private light.

"Expecto Patronum."

The hummingbird erupted from her wand in a cascade of silver sparks, and the class made a collective, soft, involuntary oh, because it was truly exquisite. Tiny, impossibly tiny, a bird no bigger than her fist, but it moved with a speed and precision that belied its size, cutting through the air in sharp, iridescent arcs, its wings beating so fast they were a blur of light, and it hovered, before her face, then above her head, almost as if pretending to nest there, then near the window where the real light caught the conjured light and the two became one. Draco thought that yes, of course. It should have been evident her soul would take the shape of something small and fierce and iridescent and impossibly fast, something that could fly in any direction, including backwards, and that hovered in front of the things it loved with the focused, patient intensity of a girl reading a book that had captured her completely. Something alien to British shores, as much of an invader as she.

"Wonderful, Miss Granger," Riddle paid her a rare compliment. "Truly wonderful."

The hummingbird circled her once, nesting briefly in her hair, and the class laughed, and she was smiling that brightening real smile, the one that made dawn break in his heart, and the hummingbird shimmered and hovered and waited.

"Malfoy," Weasley dared, eyes sharpening.

The name cut across the warmth of the room. Draco looked at him while he leaned against a desk with his arms folded. His expression was challenging, knowing that Draco's example would probably set the tone for the whole Slytherin cohort

"Oh yes, Mr. Malfoy," Professor Riddle agreed. "Your turn." He gave him an encouraging nod. He was, after all, head of Slytherin.

However, Weasley was now joined by Potter. "Unless you can't."

"Harry!" Hermione's voice, a warning dressed as a plea for classroom peace.

"What? It's not easy. Requires a certain... what did Professor Riddle say? Profound happiness." Weasel's mouth twitched in something adjacent to a smirk. "I'm just curious, that's all. About Malfoy's happy memory."

A few people laughed, but Draco heard Theo and Blaise's sharp intake of breath, the pre-strike inhalation of friends who went for the jugular on his behalf as reliably as trained attack kneazles. He lifted one hand slightly, a gesture that said not today, because he did not need their defence, because the thing Weasel and Pottery did not know, that no one in this room knew except one person with a hummingbird shimmering in her hair, was that Draco Malfoy was not, at this singularity of a moment, short on happiness.

He was drowning in it. He had been drowning in it for months, quietly, invisibly, the way a man drowns in a still lake, simply going under and reveling in it.

"By all means." He pushed off the wall with the languid grace that was both his inheritance and his shield. He walked to the front, rolling his sleeves with deliberate, theatrical care, because that was what Malfoys did; they performed, and the performance was all that stood between him and the annihilating truth of what he was about to feel in front of everyone. "I would hate to deprive you two of entertainment."

He raised his wand.

He closed his eyes.

And the memories came, all at once, in a constellation, because that was what she had become. A constellation of moments that his mind could not separate into individual stars. There was the courtyard and the handkerchief and the look on her face when he had said it isn't you. The first tea, the mismatched cups. His biscuits. Cassiopeia and the queen in her chains and Hermione's voice saying it is a bit lonely, isn't it. Corvus and an animal punished for wanting something sweet, and the way she had said Draco for the first time and the world had rearranged itself around the sound. His hand on her knee. Her hand in his hair. Lyra and the kiss and I was counting on it. The corridor, their fingers brushing, his ring on her naked skin, the fraction of a second that contained the world. The Restricted Section and the fallen book and let them watch. Aquila and Tiercel and I'm not going anywhere.

Her. All of it was her. Every room in the home of his happiness had her name on the door and her vetiver in the air and her voice saying his name as if it were a spell she had only just learned and already mastered. She was his Stella Maris, guiding him home.

Wand pointed, flèche.

"Expecto Patronum."

The falcon tore from his wand.

Words were unlearned in that moment. It was something, larger than enormous, grander than magnificent. A peregrine, silver-white, incandescent, its wingspan wider than his outstretched arms, and it screamed as it formed, the high, wild, killing cry of a raptor claiming its sky, making the class flinch, retreating to some primitive instinct, because the sound was savage and the bird was savage and there was nothing tame about it, nothing safe.

Draco opened his winterborn eyes.

The falcon hung in the air before him, beating its immense silver wings, and it was him. The shape of his soul, made visible, and it was a predator, yes, fierce and sharp and built for speed, but also beautiful in the way that all dangerous things are beautiful when they have chosen not to harm you.

"Well," his voice was silk over steel, the Malfoy drawl at its most polished, because the performance had to continue, because the alternative was feeling everything at once and that would probably kill him, "I believe that settles the question of whether I can manage it."

"The peregrine falcon," he continued, because he could not help himself, his bravado the only thing holding him upright, "is the fastest creature on the planet. Over two hundred miles per hour in a hunting stoop. The Malfoy family has kept peregrines for eleven generations..."

The class gasped, making him halt.

Because the falcon was no longer in front of him.

The bird had turned with the sharp, decisive pivot of a raptor that has sighted something, a snap of silver wings, a realignment of the entire body toward a single point, and it was moving. Across the room. Very fast, two hundred miles per hour distilled into pure, unwavering intention, and it was heading for...

Sweet Circe.

Hermione.

The hummingbird was still there in Arcadian bliss, still shimmering near her shoulder in its nimbus of silver sparks, and the falcon was crossing the classroom arrow-like toward the tiny bird, and someone gasped, and someone said oh Helga, and Weasley, from somewhere to the left, said bloody hell, and Granger's eyes went wide, and Draco's wand arm was still raised and the word no was forming in his throat because it looked, Salazar, it looked like...

The falcon reached the hummingbird.

And it did not strike.

It did not do any of the things that a peregrine falcon does to a bird one-fiftieth its size. It did not do what everyone in the room had braced for, the violence that had seemed inevitable given the speed, the trajectory and the fundamental, inescapable nature of what a falcon is.

It stopped.

It hovered impossibly for a bird its size, held aloft by magic and perhaps something older than magic, and it folded its great silver wings, and it bowed its head, and it pressed its beak, with a gentleness that made the air in the room go thick and still, against the hummingbird's shimmering crown.

A nuzzle. The softest, most deliberate gesture in the world. The falcon, the predator, the fastest thing alive, the Malfoy bird, eleven generations of power and precision and the long, arrogant view from above, bowed its silver head to the smallest bird in the room and nuzzled it. The hummingbird did not flee, did not dart away in terror, did not do what any sane creature would do when a thing that could destroy it drew so near.

The hummingbird turned, mid-hover, and pressed back. Its tiny iridescent beak against the falcon's silver throat, and the two of them hung there, suspended in light, predator and prey rewritten, the whole brutal taxonomy of power unmade in an instant by tenderness.

The classroom was mausoleum quiet.

Draco's wand arm was still raised. His face, he could feel it happening, could feel the mask falling away, the drawl and the sneer and seventeen years of pretend crumbling like wet paper. It was open in a way it had never been open in front of anyone but her. And he could not fix it. He could not reassemble it, because the falcon had crossed the room and the falcon was him and it had gone to her, it had gone straight to her, as if there were no other direction in the world, as if she were magnetic north and he had spent his whole life pretending the compass didn't work.

A Patronus is built from your happiest memory.

Everyone in the room now knew what made Draco Malfoy happiest.

The silence held. The falcon and the hummingbird turned slow circles around each other, silver light spiralling like a helix, like a spindle and yarn, like a story being written in light that only two people in the room could read, and even they were only beginning to understand it.

Weasley was staring, gobsmacked and looking from the Patronuses to Draco to Hermione and back, his expression undergoing something seismic. Pansy made the small, knowing sound of a girl who had dated him and left him and dated him again and was now, in this single silver moment, understanding everything.

And Hermione, Hermione was standing by the window with her hand over her mouth and her eyes full and the hummingbird in her hair and the falcon circling her, circling and circling, and Draco thought of Cassiopeia and Draco the dragon, circling the pole, kept, his mother would say, rather than punished, and yes, that was it, that was exactly it, he had been kept, kept for her, kept by whatever force moved the stars and the tides and the terrible, beautiful, ungovernable thing in his chest.

He lowered his wand.

The Patronuses held when they should have faded.

He crossed the classroom.

Ten metres, the width of a Defence classroom, the same distance his falcon had just crossed in silver light. It was not a long walk. But every step was visible, and every step was a choice. Every step took him further from the chart he had sailed with and closer to somewhere where there was no chart at all, just open waters and the stars to guide him.

He was aware of every eye. Pansy's silence. Blaise, somewhere behind him, with an expression that probably said finally, you colossal idiot. Potter's stunned, recalculating face. Weasley's open mouth. Longbottom's quiet, unexpected smile. He was aware that this would travel through Hogwarts at a speed that made light look sluggish, that the owls would fly by morning, that his father would know before the toast was served, that the Malfoy name and the Malfoy expectations and eleven generations of falconry and purity and careful, curated power would buckle and crack and possibly shatter under the weight of what he was walking toward.

It was an event that would start a season for setting tapestries on fire.

He did not slow down.

He reached her. She was looking up at his face, and that made something warm and familiar light up in him, and her hand was still over her mouth, and her eyes were bright with something that was not tears and not joy and was both at once, the way the best and truest things always were.

He took her hand. The one over her mouth. Drew it down, gently, held it between both of his, her small, ink-stained, brilliant hand in his pale, shaking, certain ones. He cradled her palm, he raised it, pressing his lips to her thenar eminence, while he lowered his body to kneel.

It was called the pure-blood bow. The formality of eleven generations deployed, for the first time in its long and meticulously curated history, in the service of someone his ancestors have gone to war for to erase from existence.

He turned her hand and kissed the back of it, over her ring finger.

Then he looked at her, at his Hermione, the girl on the bench, the girl on the Tower, at every constellation he had used to say the thing he could now, finally, say plainly, and he smiled for real.

"I suppose," he said, and his voice carried across the silent room, clear and calm and steady and shaking only in the notes where she would hear it, "it's time my father hears about this."

The silence broke.

It broke the way dawn breaks in undertones, light entering a room by degrees. First there was a murmur, then a gasp, then something that was unmistakably a laugh from Blaise, who had known, who had always known, and then a swell of sound that was the beginning of a story that would be told and retold across common rooms and corridors and owleries for years to come: the day Draco Malfoy's Patronus crossed a classroom and the boy followed it.

But Draco heard none of it. He heard only the half-laugh, half-sob Hermione made, and felt her fingers tighten around his, and overhead the falcon and the hummingbird turned one last, slow, luminous circle before dissolving, finally, gently, into silver mist that settled on their shoulders like snow.

Like real snow. Not Dumbledore's Yule Ball pantomime. The kind that falls without reason and settles where it will and does not care who is watching.

They did not go to the Tower.

This was, in itself, a kind of revolution, because the Tower had been theirs for months, the only place in the castle where they were allowed to exist, and now the secrecy was in ruins, blown apart by a silver falcon in a Defence classroom, and there was nowhere left to hide, and Draco, standing in the corridor with the whole school's whispers still buzzing behind them like a hive that had been struck, did something that surprised them both.

He took her hand. In the corridor. In front of a cluster of fourth-year Ravenclaws who would, he was quite certain, dine out on this for a decade. He took her hand, and he turned, not left toward the Tower stairs but right, down, toward the dungeons.

"Where are we going?" Her voice with the trepidation of a girl who was accustomed to knowing exactly where she was going at all times and found the absence of that knowledge both alarming and, if her flushed cheeks were any indication, not entirely unwelcome.

"The dungeons." The words came out with a steadiness that astonished him, given that his internal organs appeared to have reorganised themselves into a configuration incompatible with life.

She did not ask why. She did not argue, or qualify, or request a footnote. She simply tightened her fingers around his and walked beside him, and the trust of that, the plain, undecorated trust, was so enormous that he had to look away from her for a moment, at the stone walls, at the torches, at anything that was not her face, because her face was doing the thing it did on the Tower before she kissed him and if he looked at it too long in a public corridor he was going to do something that would make the falcon incident look restrained.

The Slytherin common room was, mercifully, not empty. This was actually preferable to empty, because empty would have meant silence, and silence would have meant significance, and significance would have meant Draco Malfoy walking Hermione Granger through an empty dungeon with an intentionality that left nothing to interpretation. A scattering of younger students provided camouflage. Two fifth-years looked up from a chess game, registered Granger, their joined hands, and experienced what appeared to be simultaneous cardiac events.

Blaise was in his usual armchair. Of course Blaise was in his usual armchair. Blaise inhabited that armchair the way certain cats inhabited windowsills, all languor and ownership. He looked up from his book, looked at their hands, looked at Draco, looked at Hermione, and said, with the measured calm of a diplomat acknowledging a minor border dispute:

"Good evening, Granger. The dungeons suit you. Has anyone offered you tea?"

"Blaise," Draco said, in the tone of a man requesting that the universe provide him with slightly fewer obstacles.

"Going so soon? What a pity. Granger, you must come back when you can stay longer. I have opinions about Hartwick's Compendium that I suspect you'd find..."

"Goodnight, Blaise." Draco was really ready to strangle him.

"Wait! Where will we..."

"Here, the Room of Requirement, find yourself a girl from another House, Zabini."

"Ohhh, the hummingbird has a sharp beak! I suppose I shall have to stand guard here... Oh well, goodnight, children," Blaise waved at them, and returned to his book with a smile so small and so knowing that Draco made a mental note to hex something of his at the earliest opportunity.

His dormitory. The door closed behind them and Draco cast the locking charm and the silencing charm in quick succession, because he was a Slytherin and Slytherins planned, and because the alternative, Theo walking in, his head lost between Pansy and Daphne, Goyle coming for the foul snacks his mother sent from their Manor, or worse, Blaise deciding he was bored in the common room and walking in with commentary, was a scenario that belonged in a nightmare, not a dream.

Hermione Granger was standing in his room. He let the fact of it wash through him, the absolute improbability, the girl from the courtyard and the Tower and the library standing on Slytherin stone, surrounded by green hangings and his Quidditch things and the star charts pinned above his desk and the curtained bed where he had, for months, pressed his thumb to his own knee and thought of her. She was in the place where he had imagined her, and she was real, and the collision between fantasy and fact made the air in the room feel sulphurous.

She was looking at his star charts.

Evidently, in a room containing a bed and a boy who had just crossed a classroom for her, Hermione Granger's eye went first to the annotated astronomical diagrams pinned to the wall with fastidious precision. She stepped closer, studying them, and he watched her read his handwriting, and trace Draco, which he had circled, with her finger, and Cassiopeia beside it, which he had also circled, and the faint pencil line he had drawn between the two, connecting them, because he had drawn it one night when he could not sleep and the drawing had felt like a confession too dangerous for words.

"You drew a line," her voice came, ever so softly.

"I did."

"Between Draco and Cassiopeia."

"Yes." He swallowed. "It's not astronomically accurate. They're not actually connected. There's no line. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted there to be one."

She turned from the chart and looked at him, and the look was the Lyra look, the look that held everything, and he thought: I have to lead. I know how to do this, mechanically, I know the steps, and she doesn't, and if I make her lead she will, because she is Hermione Granger and she would simply charge ahead and figure it out, but she shouldn't have to, not this, not for our first time, she should be allowed to follow someone who is steady, someone who doesn't flinch.

He crossed the room to her. Slowly, deliberately, just as he had crossed the classroom, but this was different. This was private. This was the crossing that no one would see, and he stopped in front of her and lifted his hand to her face and ran a hand over her silky curls, and the gesture was so small that it ached.

"I need to tell you something," he said.

"You're shaking," she observed.

"I am aware. The something I need to tell you is that I have done this before. With Pansy. And it was..." He searched for the word that would be honest without being cruel to a girl who had done nothing but fail to be loved by him. "It was very competent and mutual. And absolutely devoid of anything that mattered." He paused. "I'm telling you because you deserve to know, and because I need you to understand that I have no idea what I'm doing."

"You just said you've done it before."

"I've had sex before. I have never done this before." He held her gaze. "There's a distinction."

She breathed. The word landed like their private incantation, their shared spell.

"I haven't," she said. "At all. And before you say anything noble or reassuring, I need you to know that it's not because of what he said. It's not because I'm cold. It's because..." Her chin lifted, that Granger angle, defiance and vulnerability fused into a single gesture. "Because every time he touched me, I felt like my body was a test and I kept failing it. And I decided..." her voice wavered and steadied, "... that the first time should be with someone who wasn't grading me."

The fury that moved through him was swift and total and had nothing to do with Weasley, who was not worth the energy, and everything to do with her, with the months she had spent believing her body was the problem, with every negotiation reframed as her failure, with the slow, grinding, domestic cruelty of a boy who had made her feel that desire was an audition she was failing rather than a language he had never learned to speak.

"I will never grade you," he said. "I am categorically unqualified. I failed my own practical, as established. I got a T. A Troll, Hermione. The lowest possible..."

He was silenced with a kiss and he let her. For a moment, just a moment, he let her lead, let her set the pace, because the kiss was her way of saying yes, and the yes needed to come from her, and then, gently, carefully, he took the lead back. He deepened the kiss, one hand in her hair, the other at the small of her back, and she made a sound against his mouth, that sound, the one from the Restricted Section, and he guided her, walking her backward toward the bed without breaking the kiss, and when the backs of her knees hit the mattress she sat, suddenly, and looked up at him.

He looked back.

She was sitting on his bed looking up at him, and he looked back, because he had to, because he had to confirm she was real, and she really was breathing and flushed and sitting on his bed in the dungeons with her hair coming loose from its twist and her eyes enormous in the green-tinged candlelight. Alas, to him, the confirmation did not bring relief. It brought instead a wave of feeling so vast that he had to brace against it, had to lock his knees to keep from buckling, because confirming that she was real meant confirming that this was happening, and that he could lose it, and that every beautiful thing he had ever been given had eventually been taken away or revealed to be conditional, and she was here, and she was staying, and he could not, he could not bear the thought that this might not...

"I'm here," she anchored him, now fluent in the language of his silences. "I'm not going anywhere."

Then, down in the dungeon, he became just a boy kneeling to take off a girl's shoes, practical and tender and absurd, and she laughed, startled, as he unlaced them, first the right, then the left, and set them beside the bed with a care that made her laugh harder.

"You're unlacing my shoes."

"I am."

"Why are you unlacing my shoes?"

"Because your feet are going to be cold." He set the second shoe down. Looked up at her from the floor. "And because I can't reach your mouth from here, and if I kissed you right now, I'd skip approximately nine steps, and you deserve all nine."

"Nine? You've counted?"

"Hermione. I have star charts for the visible sky above Scotland annotated by month. Do you genuinely believe I haven't counted?"

She pulled him up by his tie. The green silk, her favourite lever, the ruined thing he would never wash, and he landed beside her on the bed, and they were lying together, face to face on the narrow dormitory mattress that had never been designed for two people but was, he decided, going to have to manage, and he kissed her again and his hands found the hem of her jumper.

He paused in question. She answered by sitting up and pulling the ugly-pretty jumper over her own head with a brisk, practical efficiency that was so devastatingly Granger that he said, without thinking, "Merlin, I love it when you do that."

"Do what?"

"Just... decide. The way you decide everything. It's..." He stopped himself from saying the word. Not yet. Not until it could land clean.

"It's what?"

"It's very you."

Her school shirt next. His fingers found the buttons, and he was grateful for the borrowed confidence of having done this before, because the mechanical memory helped, because his hands knew buttons even when his mind was collapsing, and he opened her shirt slowly, and what was beneath it was a surprising toile de jouy, green against plain white, with a cotton crochet trim, as if he needed any other proof that his girl was going to be the death of him.

He kissed her collarbone. The hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse hammered against his lips. His mouth traced down, following the edge of cotton, and she drew a sharp breath and her hand found the back of his head, fingers threading through his hair.

"Your hair actually feels nice," she said, slightly breathless. "Once I swipe away all the product."

"This is the pillow talk you're choosing?"

"I'm just stating my preferences."

"How Grangeresque."

He didn't unclasp the bra because she reached behind herself and did it, because she had been managing this private contraption since she was thirteen and he was absolutely not going to fumble it while she watched, and the practicality of it, was somehow more intimate than if he'd done it himself, because she knew she belonged there, in his room, in whichever room he would sleep in, from then onwards.

He stopped. Looked at her. Looked back.

She was bare from the waist up and sitting on his bed, and the candlelight did something to her skin that he would spend the rest of his life trying to describe and failing, warm gold on warm tan, and he looked, and he kept looking, and his face was doing the open thing again, the mask falling away, and he could not help it, could not reconstruct the drawl or the distance, because she was here, in the place where he had imagined her, and reality was so far beyond imagination that imagination felt like a child's drawing compared to the painting it had attempted to reproduce.

"You're staring."

"Yes." He didn't look away. He was done looking away. He had spent seven years looking away, and every time he had looked away he had lost something, some fraction of a moment that could never be recovered, and he was not losing any more. "I'm going to keep staring. You may want to accustom yourself."

He eased her back against the pillows, the pillows where his head rested every night, and she lay there with her hair fanning across the green silk. There were inexplicable Gryffindor curls on a Slytherin pillow, the whole impossible story of them in one image, and he kissed her, and his hand moved down, and he paid attention, because paying attention was the thing he did best, the thing he had been doing since the courtyard, since third year, since the day a girl slapped him and rearranged the interior furniture of his entire life.

His shirt. He unbuttoned it because she was watching and because reciprocity mattered, because she had given him her skin and he owed her his, and her eyes followed his fingers down the buttons with a focused interest that made his stomach tighten, and when the shirt was open she reached up and placed her palm flat against his chest, directly over his heart.

"Fast," she observed, and he was back to Earth again.

"Your fault. Exclusively. Chronically."

He let the shirt fall. Her hands explored him with the Granger thoroughness, the line of his collarbone, the ladder of his ribs, the thin wheat-coloured trail below his navel that made his muscles contract involuntarily when the tips of her fingers traced it, learning him the way she learned everything, with focused attention and the occasional sound of scholarly approval that he found so arousing it was going to become a serious problem.

"Here," she touched a scar on his left side, thin and silvery, barely visible. "What's this?"

"Quidditch. Third year. Bludger to the ribs. Madame Pomfrey healed it, but the scar is... well, you can see."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not anymore."

She kissed it. Just... bent her head and pressed her lips to the scar, a gesture so simple and so unbearably tender that something behind his ribs cracked open and he had to close his eyes, had to breathe through it, had to physically survive the fact that Hermione Granger had just kissed a wound he'd been carrying since he was thirteen, and the kiss had reached, somehow, not just the skin but the original hurt beneath it.

He led because he had to, because she needed someone to lead who would go slowly enough for her to follow and stop the moment she needed him to stop. He kissed down her body with the unhurried, meticulous devotion of a boy who had been saving this, and she responded in increments. A caught breath, a bitten lip, a small involuntary arch, her body learning a new language syllable by syllable, and he listened to it the way he had listened to her humming strange muggle songs in the library, attuned to every shift in pitch, every tremor, mapping her. Later, he would remember he had been meaning to ask her what in the devil was a zigazig ah.

His hand found the zip of her school skirt, that wool he had touched with his thumb in the library in a gesture that had felt, at the time, like the bravest thing he would ever do. The zip was mundane, and the sound of it was mundane, and the mundanity was sacred, the ordinary mechanics of undressing elevated by the extraordinary fact of who they were and what they had crossed to get here.

She lifted her hips to help, and the skirt came off, and his trousers followed, he managed them himself, which was a small mercy, because the removal of trousers was not, in his experience, a dignified operation, and he preferred to execute it without witnesses, though she watched anyway, sitting propped on his pillows with an expression that hovered between amusement and something warmer.

"You're very thin," she said.

"I prefer svelte."

"Svelte is what estate agents say about narrow flats."

"What is a flat?"

"Nevermind that, you are a nice flat. With good bones."

"I cannot believe you are speaking in tongues while I'm..."

"While you're what?"

He was kneeling between her legs in his boxers, thanking all the goddesses he hadn't chosen the ones with little golden snitches that flapped their wings, with his pale chest bare and his hair falling into his face without its usual armour of product and his heart going so fast it was practically visible, and he looked at her, looked back, confirmed again that she was real and here and looking at him with those brown eyes that held seven shades of warm, and he said:

"While I'm trying to be brave."

The humour left her face. Not abruptly, but like a tide going out, leaving something rawer underneath, and she reached for him, and he went, and they were pressed together, skin to skin, and the warmth of her, she who ran cold, who shivered in towers, who never cast warming charms, was staggering, a banked fire finally unbanked, and he pressed his face into her neck and breathed vetiver and underneath it the base note that was only and entirely her.

His hand travelled down. Over her hip, the cotton of her knickers, a set to the bra that surprised him so, and he paused at the waistband, and the pause was the question.

"Yes," she said, before he could ask.

"You don't know what I was going to..."

"Yes I do, and yes."

He laughed against her neck, and the laugh was warm and shaky and his. He eased the cotton down, and she helped, and the rest of their clothes followed in a graceless, human, imperfect tangle, his boxers caught on his ankle, her knickers flung somewhere toward his star charts...

"Careful," he chided, "those are annotated..."

"I will annotate you if you don't..." And then they were bare, entirely, and the laughter died into something quieter, something that lived in the catch of her breath and the way his hand trembled on her hip.

He looked at her. Looked back.

She was real. She was here. She was naked in his bed with her hair fanning on his pillow and the candlelight on her skin and her eyes wide and dark and trusting. The trust was the thing that nearly broke him, because trust was the most dangerous thing she could give and she was giving it to him, to him, the boy who had called her names, who had spent seven years on the wrong side of everything, who had been handed a life of careful cruelty and was only now, only here, only with her, learning to use his hands for something other than holding a wand or tightening around a glass.

"Tell me if anything is wrong," he said, and his voice was the Corvus voice, stripped bare. "Tell me if anything hurts, or if you want to stop, or if..."

"Draco. I will tell you. I am not a girl who suffers in silence. You know this."

"I know. I am asking you to confirm it because my brain has apparently vacated the premises and I need verbal reassurance."

"Verbally reassured. Now please..."

He kissed her. Slowly. His hand moved between them, and he found the place where she was warmest, and she gasped against his mouth, a sound so small and startled that he stopped immediately.

"Don't stop," she whispered. "That was a good gasp."

"There are good gasps and bad gasps?"

"There's a distinction."

He smiled against her lips. His fingers moved, tentative at first, then steadier as he listened, as he paid the kind of attention that seven years of studying Hermione Granger had trained him for. There was the hitch in her breath, the shift of her hips, the small sound she made when he found the right place, the smaller sound she made when he lost it, the way her hand gripped his shoulder when he found it again. He was learning her body the way he had learned the constellations, all patience and system.

She tensed, and he slowed but didn't stop.

"Oh this is new..."

He froze.

"I know. We can go slower."

"You're already going impossibly slowly."

"I'm being thorough."

"You're being..." and whatever word she'd intended dissolved into a sound that was not a word, a sound that went through him like a spell and settled low in his stomach and made every nerve in his body light up with a single, unified, unambiguous message, which was: more of that, whatever that was, more.

He gave her more. He matched his rhythm to her breathing the way tides match the moon, because his mother had taught him that the falcon comes to the steady hand, and he was being steady, being the hand that doesn't flinch, even though his body was demanding urgency, demanding now, demanding the falcon's stoop at two hundred miles per hour, and he refused it, he overruled it, because this was not about his speed, this was about hers.

She was building toward something. He could feel it in the way her body tightened against him, in the way her breath shortened, in the way her hand gripped his arm hard enough to leave marks, and he watched her face, because he was always watching her face, because her face was the only text he would ever need, the only book, the only star chart, and her expression was one of startled concentration, as if she were solving a problem she hadn't expected to solve, as if her body had just produced an answer to a question she hadn't known she was asking.

"Mmmmm," she said, very softly, and it was wondering, new, the sound of a girl discovering that her body was not the cold, unresponsive thing a boy had told her it was, and Draco thought, with a fury that was also tenderness, that if he ever saw Weasley again he might not hex him, he might simply look at him with the pity of a man who had held this girl and known her warmth and understood that Weasley had been standing next to a fire for two years and had mistaken it for ice because he had never once bothered to reach out his hands.

She came quietly. A held breath that broke. A shudder that moved through her like a wave through still water. His name, whispered, and her face, open and astonished and luminous with something that was primal and pure, as if she were meeting a part of herself she had been told did not exist.

He looked at her. Looked back.

She was real. She was here. She was breathing hard, her eyes bright, her hand still gripping his arm, and she was looking at him with an expression that held gratitude and wonder and something fiercer, something that looked like the beginning of appetite, and she said:

"Again."

There she was, his captain, armed with the same authority she used to request library access and challenge professors and announce that Hartwick's sample size was inadequate, and he was landsliding into oblivion, because she was claiming her own pleasure with the same ferocity she claimed everything else.

He obliged. Because she had asked. Because denying Hermione Granger anything she had requested with that sweetened tone of voice was both impossible and inadvisable. Because the second time, her body already knew the way, and the climb was faster, and when she broke this time, it was louder, less controlled, and she buried her face in his neck and made a sound that he would remember when he was old and grey and sitting in a garden in Wiltshire watching the constellations wheel overhead.

Then she reached for him.

Her hand, the hand that had slapped him, the hand that had taken his handkerchief, the hand that had laced its fingers through his in corridors and on towers and across a classroom. Her hand, purposeful and curious and brave, wrapped around him, and the sound he made was so spectacularly undignified that it would have mortified him under any other circumstances but which, given that she was touching him and her grip was firmer than he expected and her thumb was doing something investigatory that suggested she had read about this in a book and was now testing the theory against the practice, he could not bring himself to care about.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," she said, with the scholarly composure of a girl presenting a thesis, "but I believe the grip should be..."

"Hermione, I am begging you, do not cite your sources right now."

"I wasn't going to cite..."

"You were. I know you. You were about to say according to..."

She tightened her hand and the rest of the sentence left his body as a sound that was not language. She smiled. It was, he reflected through the haze of what she was doing to him, the most dangerous smile he had ever seen on a human face.

"There," she said, with satisfaction. "Much better than Hartwick."

"I cannot, you cannot, we are not comparing this to academic..."

"Why not? Everything is data."

"I am going to die. You are going to kill me and the coroner will rule it a... Hermione, if you keep doing that, I need to tell you that..."

"That what?"

"That this is going to be over significantly faster than either of us..."

"Then we should move on."

She said it with such calm, such Grangeresque pragmatism, as if the transition from this to that were merely the next step in a well-planned revision timetable, and he loved her, he loved her, the word arrived in his chest with the weight of a planet settling into its orbit and he caught it before it reached his mouth, held it there, because it was too large for this moment, it needed its own moment, it deserved to land in silence rather than in the middle of the most ridiculous and sacred and terrifying night of his life.

The contraception charm. His wand, doing one thing, at least, that he could do with competence. She watched him cast it with the approving eye of a girl assessing spellwork and finding it satisfactory.

"Good form," she said.

"I'll put it on my NEWT application."

"Draco."

"Mm?"

"Less talking."

He could do less talking. He moved over her, and she opened for him, and there was a moment, the threshold, the last breath before the dive, when he stopped and looked at her, looked back one more time, because this was the final confirmation, the last chance to make sure she was real and willing and here, and she met his eyes and said nothing, just nodded, the smallest nod, and it contained everything.

He entered her slowly. The control it required was staggering, every instinct demanding speed, and his mind overruling every instinct, because she had never done this, and her body was adjusting, and the adjustment was visible in her face, that intense concentration of a girl processing a new sensation and refusing, on principle, to do it passively.

"All right?" he asked, and his voice was barely there, wrecked, a ruin.

"Yes. Just... give me a moment."

He gave her a moment. He would have given her a century. He held himself still, his arms shaking with the effort, his forehead against hers, their breathing mingled, and he waited, the steady hand, the patient hand, the falcon coming home to a glove that doesn't flinch.

"All right," she said. "All right."

He moved. Slowly. Carefully. With a deliberateness that was both tenderness and terror, because he was terrified of hurting her, terrified of this being another performance she would have to survive rather than an experience she would want to keep, and she moved with him, finding the rhythm, losing it, finding it again, and there was a moment... There, yes, there... There was a moment when they found it together, when his hips met hers in a rhythm that neither of them had invented but that their bodies had apparently agreed upon without consulting either of their minds, and the sound she made, a low, surprised "Jesus," told him that the rhythm was right, and he held it, held it, steady, patient.

It was not graceful. It was not the fluid, practiced thing he had known with Pansy, when he had thought himself very proficient. This was clumsy and real, punctuated by small adjustments. There was his elbow, making her flinch for a moment, or her command as she rolled her hips and he fetched a pillow to prop her, and his "Merlin, yes, exactly like that", a collaborative dance, discovering just how much of a good team they made.

Instinct made her wrap her legs around him, and the change in angle made them both gasp, and her hand found the back of his neck, pulling him down to her, and she whispered, against his ear, "don't hold back," and the permission in it, the absolute, fearless, Gryffindor permission, broke something in him that he hadn't known was dammed, and he stopped being careful, stopped being measured, let himself move with the urgency his body had been demanding since the classroom, and she met him, matched him, her hips rising to his, and the bed creaked in protest, and he thought distantly that his dormitory mates were going to have opinions about this and that Blaise's opinions specifically were going to be extensive and annotated and delivered with a level of detail that would haunt him for years.

He looked at her. Beneath him, around him, her face open and flushed and fierce, black eyed with something that was beyond desire, beyond pleasure, that was the look of a girl who was, for the first time in her life, fully present in her own body, occupying her space entirely, claiming it, claiming him, and the ferocity of that claim was the most erotic thing he had ever experienced.

He lasted longer than the first time with Pansy. He lasted shorter than he wanted. When it broke over him it was not like anything he had known. This was something that started in his chest and spread outward, a wave that carried feeling with it, actual feeling, not just sensation but emotion, the two fused so completely that he could not tell where the physical ended and the rest began, and he said her name, her full name, all four syllables, Hermione, and the word cracked open on the last syllable and became something that was almost the other word, the word he was holding back, the one that would need its own moment but that lived in her name and always had.

He pressed his face into her neck. Breathing hard. Heart slamming. Every nerve singing. She held him, her arms around his back, her fingers drawing slow lines between his shoulder blades, and the gentleness of it after the urgency was almost too much, the contrast too sharp, and he felt something hot and mortifying behind his eyes and pressed his face harder into her neck to hide it, and she knew, because she always knew, and she didn't say anything, just held him and let him breathe and traced those slow lines on his back until the tightness in his throat eased.

After a while he rolled to the side, because he was crushing her, and she said you weren't crushing me, and he said I have seven inches and three stone on you, I was absolutely crushing you, and she said I liked it, and the honesty of that, the undefended simplicity, made him pull her against him and bury his face in her hair.

Then, because he was Draco Malfoy, and because Draco Malfoy did everything well or not at all, and because she had not come while he was inside her and this was factually, empirically, categorically unacceptable:

"We're not finished."

"We're... what?"

"You didn't..."

"Draco, it's fine, it was..."

"It was not fine. It was insufficient. I will not accept insufficient. There's a distinction, Granger, between satisfactory and..."

"Oh, we're back to Granger now?"

"We are back to Granger when you are attempting to let me off the hook for an incomplete performance. I have a reputation..."

"You have a reputation for being insufferable."

"... a reputation to maintain, and I refuse, I absolutely refuse, to be the sort of man who..."

She kissed him, and the kiss was laughter, and his hand slid between her thighs, and the laughter softened into breathing, and the breathing quickened, and he found her again, and this time he knew the way. There, that rhythm, that pressure, steady, patient, the hand that doesn't flinch, and she let herself go, let herself be loud in a way she hadn't been before, as if the first time had been a reconnaissance mission and this was the full campaign, and the sounds she made were uninhibited and unperformed and utterly, devastatingly real, and when she came it was with her face pressed into his shoulder and her body curving against him and his name bitten into his skin, and he held her through it, held her steady, the falcon and the glove, and thought: I would cross every classroom. I would kneel on every floor. I would look back every single time.

They lay in the wreckage of his narrow dormitory bed, sheets tangled, pillows displaced, the green hangings slightly askew, the candles burned low. She was curled against him with her head on his chest and her finger tracing the scar she had kissed earlier, the bludger mark, the old wound.

"I always thought," she said, and her voice had the quality of someone speaking from the edge of sleep, slow and warm and unguarded, "that there was something wrong with me."

"There is something wrong with you," he said. "You cite sources during sex. You make strange muggle metaphors. You told me my hair product was a war crime while I was naked."

"I meant..."

"I know what you meant." He kissed the top of her head. "And the answer is that there was never anything wrong with you, silly. All you needed was attention. And I have been paying attention to you since I was thirteen years old, and I have never once stopped, and I never will."

She was quiet for a long time after that. He could feel her breathing against his chest, could feel the exact moment it began to slow, and his hand moved in her hair, and the candle nearest the bed guttered and went out, and the room settled into the singular darkness of the Slytherin dungeons, green-tinged, underwater, like the inside of a lake.

"Your bed is very narrow," she murmured.

"It's a dormitory. They're not designed for..."

"For what?"

"For this." He pulled her closer. "For keeping someone."

She smiled against his chest. He felt it, the shape of it, and knew it was the real one.

"Keeping," she said. "That's a very different word."

The stars were somewhere above them, above the lake and the grounds and the castle, turning their ancient, patient circles. He could not see them from the dungeons. He had never been able to see them from the dungeons, which was why the Tower had mattered, why the sky had mattered, why every night on that parapet had been a small escape from the stone and the green and the weight of the name.

He did not need to see them because she was here, in the dark, in his narrow bed, in the dungeons, in the place where no stars reached, and she was enough. She was more than enough. She was the thing the constellations had been pointing toward all along. He could not see them, but from where he was, he could hear them sing.

"We should go to the Tower," she said, half asleep.

"We should."

"The stars..."

"They'll wait. They're circumpolar. They're not going anywhere."

"Mm." She pressed closer. "Neither am I."

He looked at her in the dark. He looked back.

She was real.

They climbed the stairs together, hands entwined, him leading the way, and not once did Draco look back, because now he finally knew she would always be there if he looked.

The night sky greeted them from the parapet, an old friend glad to see them once again. Their impossible song was louder here, high up. There was Cassiopeia and Corvus and Lyra and Aquila and the great coiled dragon that shared his name, all burning with the steady, ancient light of things that had been there long before him and would endure long after, and for the first time, he did not need to name them.

She sat down close beside him, her shoulder against his shoulder, her knee against his knee, her hand finding his in the dark with the preternatural ease of someone reaching for something that has always been exactly where she left it.

They were quiet for a while.

"Your father," she started.

"Is going to be absolutely affronted," he offered. "I expect a Howler at minimum. Possibly a disownment. Possibly both, delivered simultaneously, which would be a first in the history of wizarding correspondence, and the Malfoys do love to set a precedent."

"Are you frightened?"

Now there was an honest answer he had pondered, which was terrified, and the Malfoy answer, which was Malfoys are not afraid, and the truth, which lived somewhere between the two, in the space where all his constellations lived, the stories they had written together on this Tower out of old light and new meaning.

"Yes," he replied, shrugging. "But I was more frightened of the alternative."

"Which was?"

"Standing in a field with my arm out. Forever. And never calling you back." He paused. "That's a mixed metaphor, by the way. Falcons and Orpheus. Completely incoherent. Don't judge me, it's been a very long day."

Her aery laugh returned, the one who dwelled in rafters above them, the one he had first heard in a frozen courtyard while she held his monogrammed handkerchief to her ruined face, and it was, he realised, his Patronus memory, not one moment but all of them, not one laugh but this one, always this one, the sound of Hermione Granger finding him funny when she had every reason not to.

"For the record," and she leaned her head against his shoulder, "your falcon was magnificent."

"Wasn't it? Extraordinary wingspan. Very distinguished. I was delivering a rather fine lecture about it when the traitorous creature abandoned me mid-sentence to go nuzzle your ridiculously fragile hummingbird in front of the entire..."

"Draco."

"Mm?"

"Shut up."

He shut up. She started humming that zigazig song. The stars burned overhead, all of them, every story he had told her and every story he had yet to tell, and the wind was cold and her shoulder was warm and somewhere in the castle below them the story was already moving, through common rooms and corridors and owleries, carried by the unstoppable, ancient magic of gossip, which was, he reflected, considerably more powerful than any charm he'd ever cast and certainly more durable.

His father would definitely hear about this, and the world would shift, and there would be consequences like Howlers, silences, the slow, grinding renegotiation of a family learning to accommodate a truth it had not chosen, and all of that was coming, was already in flight, was as certain as the tide.

But not tonight.

Tonight, after the paramountness of everything that had happened, there was the Tower and the sky and her head on his shoulder and his hand in hers with him thinking her left hand needed something spectacular and needed it sooner rather than later, and the stars were not stories anymore, they were just stars, bright and ordinary, the way everything becomes both ordinary and extraordinary at once when you are no longer watching alone.

"Hermione," he called.

"Yes?"

He just wanted to say her name, out here, in the open, where the sky could hear it. He said it the way you say a spell when you are not casting it, just to feel its shape in your mouth. Just because you can.

She squeezed his hand. She always understood.

Above them, the dragon and the queen circled the pole star as they always had and always would, never setting, never rising, just turning and turning in the dark, kept, as Mother would say, rather than punished, held in the sky not by chains but by something older, something that did not require a name because it was, like the best and truest magic, its own proof.

There was, he thought, a distinction.

 

Notes:

My darling readers,

I hope you enjoyed this little trip down Fluffyland. What I won't do for V Day!

These particular Patronuses are a rip-off from the fic that got me into Dramione. It is from another ship, from the Reylo ship, but it is set at Hogwarts and it is absolutely a delight. It is called "The Falcon and the Hummingbird" by pleasereylo, and I urge everyone to read it because it is so sweet. So gooo, read.

I would like to thank Sarah for reading, and especially Kara, who cracks me up with her comments and her GIFs. Seriously, you have not lived until you have seen one of her ominous PDFs for beta'ng. They are a thing of beauty, worthy of Hermione Granger. If she had it her way, the aristocratic Tiercel would be called Allison.

A/N: I do not own anything HP-related, but a glorious English summer spent humming Wannabe and falling in and out of love with foreign boys and with being away from home will always be a fond memory to me (and as such, here's Wannabe for you).