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In afteryears, Hermione would remember the beginnings of that night in a series of flashes: Neville returning from Honeydukes with an armload of sweets for which the proprietors hadn’t let him pay; Ginny drinking massive Harris Higgenboom under the table; Luna twirling in the center of the room, hair charmed to float about her. There had been crates of butterbeer piled high on tables, banners covered in lions spelled to roar, masses of Triple-W products bouncing off the walls. There had been cheer and goodwill and a desperate sense that they owed it to their younger selves to have fun. After all, it was the last night. Tomorrow, they would be unleashed on the world proper and such occasions only came around once in a lifetime — if they ever came at all, which some of these seventh and eighth years had spent a year thinking they wouldn’t.
Eventually, firewhisky had appeared. Tired bodies hit sofas. The reminiscing began in earnest. Stories were volleyed around (“Did — did Dean ever tell you,” Seamus managed to choke out through laughter, “about the time the Bloody Baron caught — a ha! — him snogging Daphne Greengrass and he — oh, Merlin — gave them the talk? Except — Jesus Mary — it was all medieval and about cat gut and fecking feverfew!”) and someone thought to nip down to the kitchens for afters. It was at about this point that Hermione found herself sandwiched on a sofa between Harry and Ron — a bottle of Ogden’s going round between them, their shoulders warm, their faces flushed, elbows all entangled — and memory became narrative.
There was a comfortable hum beneath her skin. She hardly knew where she ended and the boys began. Or perhaps there were no endings. Perhaps they were all one: she, and the boys, and the universe. She tipped her head back and imagined dissolving — into the sofa, the boys, the stones of the castle which had cocooned them for the last ten months, sheltering them from the fallout. She could be forgiven for pretending for one last night that its limits were those of the universe.
Harry’s voice, sounding oddly hopeful beneath its alcohol-induced lilt, broke upon the lull: “D’you think it’s still there?”
“Spa… pefissics… specifics, mate.” Ron’s eyes were half-closed, the tips of his ears crimson.
“You know,” and Harry sounded more alert now. Hermione raised her head from the back of the sofa to look at him, which meant she heard the next bit through the lens of a swirling, spinning room: “The trap door… Fluffy… well, not Fluffy… but — the tentacula.”
“Dunno,” said Ron. He took a swig. “Wanna find out?”
Which was how they ended up traipsing tipsily through the halls beneath an invisibility cloak that scarcely covered even one of them anymore, ankles on show for all to see, down down down to the third floor corridor in search of a door that had seemed so big all those years ago but now turned out to be nothing more than a standard-issue, thousand-year-old Hogwarts door.
Beyond it, covered in dust: an empty room with a trap in the floor.
They’d sobered up then, for a moment, but it hadn’t lasted long. Ron threw off the cloak and heaved open the door by its iron ring and there it was: a dusty darkness so much smaller in reality than in her memory.
“Who’s first?” he asked, as if this were the natural question — and maybe it was because Hermione saw no reason not to aim a cushioning charm at her feet and jump.
Not fifteen minutes later they were back up, having stumbled through a succession of perfectly ordinary rooms (albeit one containing some rather dusty chessmen), and they were sitting around the hole in the floor, legs dangling into darkness, passing the whisky around again, since Harry — clever, clever, lovely, wonderful Harry — had thought to shrink it and stick it in his pocket.
“Funny how small it all is,” Hermione murmured, leaning into Harry. “Like carousel horses.”
“Cara-come again?” Ron was doodling in the air with his wand, little swirls and stars and popping balloons. She couldn’t tell how much of their swirling was magic and how much double-vision.
“Caribou,” said Harry nonsensically.
“We were so small.” Hermione took another swig of whisky, to see if the swirling would change.
“Don’t get weepy,” Harry warned, stealing the bottle.
Hermione concentrated, chose the left Harry, and threw her arms around his neck. “Shall if I want to.”
“Merlin.” Ron cancelled his doodles. “No blubbing. No time. It’s — it’s —” he struggled to interpret his watch, needing to trace its face with one finger and count under his breath “— two in the morning — and we haven’t been anywhere yet.”
“Can you walk and weep?” Harry asked solicitously, turning his nose into her curls.
And Hermione, now feeling that she really might lose control of her tear ducts, sighed and said that of all the things she’d ever had to do for their lord and savior Harry Potter, hero of heroes, king of kings, prat of prats, that might just be the hardest, but she’d give it a go.
Which was how they made a pilgrimage to the Whomping Willow. And then — since no one felt like paying the Chamber of Secrets a visit — the classroom where the Death Day Party had been held, the bathroom in which the troll had nearly done them all in, the scorch-marked stretch of corridor that had once held the Room of Requirement, and the tower from which Hermione and Harry had released Norberta. They tumbled into the Hospital Wing next (mercifully empty, on this, the last night) and tucked their knees up on a single bed to do alternating shots of whisky and hydration solution out of medicine glasses, Hermione frantically shhhh-ing the boys all the while.
Their giggling lapsed into contemplative quiet after the second round — interrupted only by Ron’s hiccuping.
“Which of us… spent the most time here, d’you think?” Harry sounded like he was fumbling for each word in the dark. Hermione conjured bluebell flames in a beaker.
“Well, — hic! —” Ron held up his fingers, beginning to count, “my Norbert bite —”
“Norberta,” Hermione corrected automatically, for the millionth time that night.
“— then McGonagall’s murderous —” he stifled a hiccup “— chessmen… Sirius broke my leg…”
“The brains,” said Hermione, shutting her eyes with a shiver and leaning into his side.
“Ri’ the brains. And Malfoy’s bloody mead.”
“He didn’t mean to.” Another automatic correction.
Ron snorted, jostling her head on his shoulder. “’Course, sorry, nothing against your — hic! — charity case.”
“He’s not my —”
“Reckon you pip me with Malfoy and the brains,” Harry interrupted. The whisky glugged and sloshed. “Was never in that long… not all at once.”
Hermione cracked an eye, watched Harry swallow. “Silly competition,” she said, sounding sleepy even to her own ears. “’sides, I win on second year alone… was a cat for ages.”
Ron let out a guffaw that fully dislodged her head. She looked at him, disgruntled, but he was bent double laughing, teetering toward the edge of the bed and clutching his sides.
“I’d forgotten!” he wheezed through whisky-laced snorts, completely oblivious to Hermione’s attempt at a death glare. Harry was no better, fizzing away behind tightly closed lips, evidently trying not to spray Ogden’s everywhere. Hermione reached for the bottle, put-upon.
“And that was before the basilisk! And Dolohov. Gimme that, Harry — I win, s’mine.”
“Thought — thought it was a —” Harry fought for the s sound, eventually forced it out, “silly competition.”
She sniffed and attempted to draw herself upright, but moved too fast and saw stars. Ron’s laughter redoubled and he fell off the bed, where he lay giggling something about hairballs.
And then Harry — so, so drunk and still clinging to the bottle — slurred something about its being such a pity she’d never gotten to see the Slytherin common room, which made Ron laugh even harder. Hermione said it had never been high on her priorities anyway and really Harry would you give me the whisky and besides polyjuice tastes so awful.
Harry sat bolt upright, the blue light of the flames flashing off his glasses. “Polyjuice!”
“Yeah,” said Hermione, nabbing the Ogden’s. “Never again.” And she took another swig, straight from the neck of the bottle. (Later she would decide this had been the fateful swallow.)
“No.” Harry’s head was bobbling on his neck. Some fuzzy part of Hermione’s brain recognized the effort to focus. “I’ve got some!”
“You — wha’?” Ron surfaced from the floor, elbows splayed on Madam Pomfrey’s formerly crisp white bedspread.
And Harry, with the impenetrable logic of Ogden’s and the wee hours of the morning, laid out a foolproof plan for Hermione to see — finally! — the Slytherin common room, which ended with the triumphant clincher:
“Bulstrode’s in the common room!”
And because occasionally Hermione’s life conspired against her, Millicent Bulstrode was in their common room (sprawled all over Sally-Anne Perks) and she found Harry and Ron’s slurred rendition of Hermione’s second year misadventure delightful (“And you lot were the heroes?!”), couldn’t believe Hermione had polyjuiced into her cat, demanded to know if there were photographs, crowed over the one Ron somehow managed to make zoom down from the boys’ dormitories (“You made such a grumpy cat!” “What a darling tail!”), and then happily plucked a hair from her head and handed it over to Harry.
By this time, a crowd had gathered. Harry added the hair to the vial of potion he’d gotten from who knew where (but a niggling corner of Hermione’s brain told her she needed to discuss it with him when not three sheets to the wind) and hoots and hollers began. Harry held it up, grinning, in a strange parody of that night so many years ago when he’d been the center of attention with a golden egg, and Seamus began a chant of “DRINK IT DRINK IT DRINK IT.”
And Hermione, because she was drunk and happy and sad and loved these people so much and also because she really was just an idiot incapable of seeing what an astronomically bad idea this was, did so.
Then, somehow, suddenly, like a dissolve in a film, she was standing alone in a dim, cold corridor in a body that wasn’t hers with a tie that was the wrong color, the astronomical proportions of the stupidity beginning to dawn. The word “hippomanes” rolled around on her tongue, mixed up with Millicent’s parting command to have fun!, and her mouth slicked over in bile.
She contemplated going back, empty-handed, and trying to blag her way through the inevitable interrogation. But she’d doubtless crumble (she knew that, even through the firewhisky fug) and then there’d be general laughter about goody-two-shoes Granger and rules and ‘or worse expelled’ and in her addled state all of this seemed intolerable.
It was the last night. She was not herself. She need not be herself.
So she took a deep breath, spoke the word, and stepped off the cliff.
—
The Slytherin common room looked exactly as Hermione had always imagined it would: dim, damp, and dismal. A fire crackled in the enormous grate, but it might as well not have bothered, for all the heat and cheer it gave the atmosphere. The place was quiet, deserted. Less cause for celebration down here, she supposed, stomach twisting. Or — just as much, but the feeling still lingered that it was bad form to show it.
Another step or two brought an enormous, black picture window into view. Her sodden brain needed several long moments to comprehend that it was not a portal to some dark abyss, but the lake, impenetrable and inky. She wasn’t sure how she ended up in front of it, struggling to make out the shapes of strange-barnacle-like creatures that clung to the edges of the algae-scummed glass, but it was chill beneath her hand and she leaned her forehead against it, the cold a relief to the ache that had set up behind her whisky-pickled eyes. She turned her head, massaging her temple against the glass, and locked eyes with Draco Malfoy.
She was not surprised to see him; in fact, his appearance felt inevitable. He was the last, looming constant of her Hogwarts years: a boulder among the stones around which her roots had been forced to grow.
For a moment, they stared at one another. Her gaze, unburdened by sobriety, swept over him, taking in the loose-falling hair, the knifelike cheekbones, the narrow chest and sharp-angled nose. He looked impossibly long — lying draped across most of a velvet sofa, a book open on his chest — and impossibly strange. Perhaps it was that all year she had not been able to look at him without remembering that day in the courtroom — the broken exchange in a dark Ministry corridor that had followed it — the disturbing contrast between the care with which his clothes had been assembled and the ease with which his face looked as if it might fall apart.
All that was absent now.
And she had looked — there was no use denying it. She wasn’t sure how it had begun, her fascination. Perhaps in that Ministry corridor, among half-sentences and shattered glances. Perhaps with a letter she had never expected and to which she had never responded, but which she kept tucked away in her nightstand. Perhaps with the silent offer of a quill knife across a gulf of library quiet, when her nib had splintered. It had crept upon her, slowly and gradually as the coming of the dawn, and she had long ago ceased to deny its existence. The mingling had been happening all around — house tables practically forgotten, alliances forged during the Carrows’ reign of terror reshaping the geography of the school friendship by friendship and corridor by corridor; why should she stand against it?
There had been a soaring sense of freedom in the admission — in the small action of dropping her bag one desk over and launching into an unsolicited discussion of Rostoft’s translation of the Runestone of Arthmael. The feeling seemed to make it plain that this had been the right thing to do: an expression of her status as an adult with a will, no longer a pawn in any war.
Now, soft and sleepy, Hermione had the distinctly odd urge to touch him. To see if she could push his smirk into the full smile it evidently wanted to be. She peeled her forehead and cheek from the chilly window and tottered over, looking down upon the knife-like face which even the wee hours and loose, mussy hair couldn’t soften. His eyebrow twitched.
“Budge up.”
He didn’t move. She sat down anyway, forcing him to choose between crushed feet and introducing another angle to his frame. He plumped for the latter, sharp knees rising, so that his trouser legs rode up, exposing bony ankles in thin green socks. Her gaze fixated on the jut of an ankle bone.
“Your Gryffindor kick you out?”
The book on his chest was Malory, its covers loose and worn, a gilded dragon twining beneath his fingers as though looking for a scratch.
She shook her head slowly, still thinking about his cheek.
“Only you looked about ready to shag the window. Thought you might have been blue-ballsed.”
The firewhisky was in her — or, Millicent’s — pocket. Liquid courage, Harry had said, as he’d slipped it there. It felt like something else, now, as she pulled it out. The stopper yielded to Millicent’s strong fingers easily. She held it out to him.
He propped himself up on an elbow to take it. To tip his head back and swallow directly from the bottle’s mouth, the workings of his throat bare beneath thin, white skin.
“Cheers.”
“Why aren’t you in bed?”
Something in his expression shuttered.
“Reading,” he said shortly. “No one’s stopping you from heading that way yourself.”
She fingered the neck of the bottle. Contemplated another mouthful but decided that the world was too muzzy already.
“It’s our last night in the castle.”
“Hm.”
“We should go somewhere.”
“We?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“What’s made you so mawkish?”
“Gryffindors.”
The corner of his mouth spasmed.
“They have a point. We’ll never be able to do this again.”
“And if Merlin had made it come even a day sooner, I’d’ve sent him a fucking fruit basket.” He settled further into the sofa, watching her with hooded eyes.
“Sleep would make it come sooner and yet here you are.” She patted his leg, fastidious in her effort to keep her hand north of the strip of pale skin between trouser and sock. “Come along.”
—
He followed. She wasn’t sure how or why or what for, but he did, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his trousers, robes loose and open, tie forgotten. Perhaps, whatever he said, he too was feeling the magnitude of the Last Night — the desire to delay sleep and cling to the shreds of childhood, even a tattered childhood, stolen and warped as it had been. It was as if there was something at work in the air — surrounding and enveloping them: the acceleration of invisible things. She felt it in her face, in her blood, tearing at the edges of her being and drawing her onward, upward, an onslaught of speeding time and inescapable futurity.
“Where are your grand plans taking us?”
“Library.”
It was the natural place. The place that had never occurred to Harry or Ron. The place she had spent the majority of her sentient youth. That had nurtured and challenged her. To which she’d gone for the succor and solace of the specific. Where she’d had her first kiss, deep in the theoretical charms section with Frelinghuysen’s regrettable treatise on atmospheric charms digging into her shoulder blade. The place she’d architected rebellions and Outstandings, reconciliation and revenge. And, of course, the place she’d watched Draco Malfoy work quietly, carefully, and unobtrusively for the last year.
“Are you sure the Gryffindors didn’t slip you something? You’re sounding more like Granger by the minute.”
Even through her alcoholic haze, Hermione stiffened. The right words — Millicenty words — wouldn’t come.
“Want to… salute the place,” she settled on finally.
He raised an eyebrow and the bottle, mocking. She gave him a salute of another kind, which seemed to allay any suspicions.
“This stuff is terrible,” he said, though he didn’t so much as wince as he threw it back.
“You’re welcome to procure your own.”
She reached for the bottle. He held it up over his head, but, in Millicent’s body, that was hardly a problem. Dragging his stick of an arm back down was the work of a moment.
“Excuse you—”
“My kindness is the preserve of the grateful.”
He froze, looking at her oddly. She hardly noticed, sipping delicately from the bottle, wincing as the amber liquid burned down her throat.
“I — thank you.”
She cocked a bleary eye, checking for mockery. But he looked deadly — beautifully — serious.
“You’re welcome.”
Their fingers connected on the body of the bottle. Hermione looked down at them, feeling as though she viewed them from a great height.
“Library?”
“Lead on.”
—
The stacks welcomed them like prodigal chicks returning to the nest, shadows soft and swaddling. If Malfoy thought it odd that Millicent Bulstrode might run her fingers along the age-worn edges of shelves or the finger-burnished spines of monographs on druidic rites, he didn’t say so. They crept along in darkness, skirting stripes of moonlight filtering in from the high eastern windows, acolytes of a reverence neither could articulate.
Past theoretical charms and History of Magic. Past the reference texts and atlases and teetering drawers of star charts. Past the endless shelves of bound Prophets and the pitiful selection of wizarding fiction. Hermione paused at the entrance to the Restricted Section, thinking hungrily of all the books she hadn’t read, hadn’t touched. Of ancient papyrus and runes etched in wafer-thin jade and grimoires that leaked hallucinogenic alkaloids over unwary readers’ fingers. Of knowledge forgotten and lost and found and lost again. Of texts muggle historians would sell organs and chop off limbs for a glance at. Of all the questions that still needed answering.
“C’mere.”
His voice, its crystal consonants sanded by alcohol, pulled her away from the rope. He was crouching by the end of a shelf, ducked under the long desk that protruded from it at hip height, one with the inky blackness save for a few strands of bright hair.
She came, the gentle sloshing of the bottle in her hand and her quiet footfalls the only sounds in the universe, as he reached forward, touching something she couldn’t see.
She crouched beside him, folding Millicent’s body to peer under the desk.
“Lumos minima.”
Hermione’s heart caught in her throat. Decades — centuries — of carved names and initials littered the wood. In block capitals and curling script, from the size of her thumbnail to an Osric Ukridge who’d thought a lot of himself and taken up two feet with letters six inches high. Some were dated, some enclosed in hearts or surrounded by stars. A few had been enchanted, swirling between other names, spelling themselves out over and over for eternity.
She reached forward to run her finger along Eleanor Crowland 1727 and her shoulder bumped his.
“Always thought I’d make my mark here before leaving.” His hand dropped from the wood.
Hermione couldn’t stop her fingers from following name after name. The oldest were nearly invisible, erased by wear and time and the marks of more recent lives jostling to fit. It struck her what a palimpsest Hogwarts was: its skin deep and accreted with a jumbled cascade of diverging meanings and lives — its walls a testament to a millennia of aspiration, swollen with history. She swiped at her eyes, wandlight swinging wildly.
“You haven’t then?”
“Father told me about it, first year. Said it was a rite of passage for those… in the know.”
It wasn’t quite an answer and she didn’t push.
“Gwenog Jones is over there,” he said, voice flat. “Figured you’d want to see.”
“Oh. Yes… of course.” But her eyes were fixed on another set of letters, just to the right of where he gestured. A wonky heart. Inside it: JP + LE 1978. A sob choked her, her heart seizing with the precarity of life, the monumental eternity of Hogwarts, the impending loss of its embrace.
“We should add ours.”
Malfoy let out a little sound, most of the way to a scoff, and sat back. “Go right ahead.”
“You won’t?”
“I’ve left enough of a mark on this place.”
“Now who sounds like a Gryffindor?”
“‘They have a point.’” He reached for the bottle at her side, but didn’t drink. His fingernail pried at the corner of the label. “Well, go on then.”
Hermione watched his long fingers. Stared at the hunch of his shoulders and thought again of that Ministry-darkened corridor.
“Maybe you’re right.”
He wasn’t, but Millicent Bulstrode couldn’t very well sign Hermione Granger as Draco Malfoy watched on. She knew that, even as the pleasurable languor of intoxication gnawed at the edges of her reason. It was so silly, she thought, watching him, borrowing a body when all she wanted was for him to see her. But it was easier this way.
A strip of the label tore free. He tossed it into the dark beneath the desk and stood, disappearing into the library’s shadows without a word. After a moment, Hermione followed, the dark heavy around her, warm and inviting. She could give into it, she thought, curling the little strip of discarded paper round her fingers. Lower her walls and let it flood her. What comfort there would be in the collapse.
She closed her eyes, moving blindly, hand half-heartedly outstretched, fancying herself one with the illimitable, formless nothing.
“Mill.” The name bumped against her, definite and wrong. “Pssst, Mill.”
She opened her eyes. Hermione Granger rushed back into being. And off in a dark a little less dark than the rest, Draco Malfoy beckoned.
—
Under the northern windows, in pools of fading moonlight, she lay upon a window seat, head hanging into rough space, thoughts wheeling like kites. The bottle had come with them, of course.
“Have you read The Once and Future King?”
“Come again?”
He sat with his knees drawn up, back to masonry that had stood a thousand years and would stand a thousand yet.
“It understands the tragedy in Malory — and his absurdity.”
“Merlin, you’re sozzled.”
“Have you?”
“Never heard of it. Sounds a poor bit of translation.”
“Pity. It’s —” she yawned “— full of the tragedy of heroism.”
“Right. Because heroism is tragic.”
Stars shimmered at the edges of her vision. “You think Lancelot wasn’t lonely? You think the pressure of Logres didn’t weigh on Arthur?”
He was silent.
“Perhaps everything is tragic, really, in the end.”
“If I’d known you were such a melancholy drunk, I’d’ve stayed in the common room. You should really warn people, you know.”
“You aren’t great company yourself.” Lie.
“Says the witch who dragged me out here in the middle of the night.”
He didn’t look annoyed, though, his tipped-back head half-held in a silvery moonlight that leant his pale features the smooth tranquility of stone. Hermione had a brief vision of the tomb of a Norman knight. Of Lancelot: White’s noble, ill-made knight, plagued by guilt, made good by fear of his own cruelty and cowardice.
Her head hung heavy, wadded round with cotton wool. Malfoy was right. Now was the time for melancholy. She watched his fingertips dragging along the ancient, pockmarked stone, thoughts flickering between the present and the past, Malory and White, feelings she daren’t give shape and those whose shapes were as worn as deep ruts in an old road.
It is so fatally easy to make up one’s mind at eleven.
—
“Want to fly?”
They were out in the crisp air, in the middle of the quidditch pitch, the first fingers of northern summer dawn stretching eagerly up from the horizon. The stars looked distant in the lightening sky: more distant than usual. Remote and cold.
Hermione shook her head, glad to have an excuse. “Drunk.”
He flashed a wicked smirk. “Open up.”
“What?”
“Your mouth. Open your mouth.”
He said it with such conviction that for some reason she did.
“Aguamenti.”
“What did you do that for?” she spluttered, wiping water from her eyes.
“You said you were drunk.”
He shot a jet of glistening water into his own mouth, tilting his head back to swallow it elegantly.
The sight of him, limned by rising dawn, face a kaleidoscope of shadows, mesmerized her. The water had forced a degree of alertness upon her — she could not ascribe what she felt wholly to the Ogden’s. She plopped down on the close-cropped grass of the quidditch pitch and lay back, fixing her eyes on the blanket of paling stars above. Best to have her center of gravity as low to the ground as possible.
“Twat.”
He folded himself up on the grass beside her, arms wrapping around those knife-angled knees.
“Merlin, cheerful and pleasant. Can’t imagine why you were drinking alone.”
(He had suggested it, in the infinitesimally graying light of the library: something about dew and dawn and the middle of the quidditch pitch. Too late to sleep now, the increasing detail in one another’s faces had seemed to say. And so here they were, slow and sleepy under a clear and distant sky.)
“If you wanted to stargaze, we’re a bit late,” she said flatly, determined to regain something like the upper hand.
He made a noise which, in Ron or Harry she would have labeled a grunt, but in his throat she felt merited something more. It was the sort of thing books might call contemplative. She waited.
“D’you remember, that morning — last year — end of the year — how red the sun was?”
Hermione did remember. She didn’t think she could ever forget. She nodded, but he didn’t seem to be looking for an answer, gaze fixed on the horizon.
“When it rose and the light broke over the ceiling of the Great Hall and everything turned orange… I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d known the color of the sky. The last time I’d looked up. The last time I’d thought about anything other than what was directly in front of me. My memories… there’s no color in them. And then… I thought — Azkaban…”
She fought the urge to curl into herself, into her own colorless memories, and looked instead at his profile, soft-edged, blending into the dusky violet of the pre-dawn grounds.
“It’s like terror has its own landscape,” he said, voice a murmur in the vast purple. “Barren and dark, sunless and moonless and starless. Like the arctic in winter.”
Their eyes met. His pupils were huge and full.
“But today the sky is pink.”
“Yes,” he said on an exhale, “it is.”
It was fortunate, she thought as she looked at him, that the world had been designed in such a way as to allow the truths of the heart to remain locked away. Wizards had done all they could to change that, of course. Invented veritaserum and legilimency and the imperius curse and confunduses and half a dozen other attempts at obviating the miracle of interiority. But none of that could change the fact her heart was her own and all the bizarre, aching, rose-tinged thoughts that swirled and popped within her were not visible to the general public.
Which was why it was unfortunate that in that moment her brain betrayed her and decided to blurt:
“I don’t want this to be the last time we see each other.”
“Pardon?”
“You know — after all this —” a sweeping gesture to encompass the lightening sky, the rapidly fleeing last shreds of night “— is over. Tomorrow. Today. It would be… a waste.”
He snorted. “Merlin, Mill, there’s drama and then there’s pure twaddle. I hardly think our mothers would —”
Hermione sat up abruptly. The sudden headrush turned the waning stars into wobbly comets in he peripherals. “Oh. My god.”
“What —”
“Oh. Oh no.” She ran her fingers over her face, poking and prodding, feeling the wrongness of the shapes. It hadn’t occurred to her since — since when exactly? the darkness of the library? — that she was in the wrong body. No — more than that — it had not occurred to her who she was.
“Mill?”
“I’m not Millicent.”
A moment of silence stretched between them. And then his wand was centered on her chest. He blinked rapidly.
“Who are you?”
“Er —”
“What is this? Did the Prophet put you up to this?”
“No — I — er —”
“Well? Who — the fuck — are you?” The muscles in his neck strained. He looked terrifying — and terrified.
“I — look — Draco —”
He was on his feet, wand tip wavering as he pointed it between her eyes. “If you think I won’t report you just because —”
“I’m Hermione,” she said and the name sounded strange between them. “Granger.”
His face spasmed, like it wasn’t sure what it was trying to express and had attempted several things at once. And then he laughed: a sharp, humorless bark that reminded her of Sirius.
“And I’m the Lady of the Lake. Who are you really? Blaise? Pans? This is a sick joke, even for you lot —”
“I’m me.” Confusion boiled to adamancy in her blood. The drunken ease of the last near-hour felt very far away. “I’m Hermione Granger and you can put that wand down, now, Draco Malfoy. I’m not a joke or a threat.”
The wand wavered.
“You’re Granger?” His eyes darted over her face — down to the bottle between them. Out across the pitch like he was looking for an ambush. Guilt roiled in her stomach, mixing with the Ogden’s. She forced a nod, lips pursed.
“Priggish, swotty, goody two-shoes Granger.”
“Sod off.”
He still looked wary. “Tell me something only she would know.”
Guilt, irritation, and thwarted yearning were a potent cocktail. Hermione looked him dead in the eyes and said, “The floors at your house are charmed to resist bloodstains, but — and this is really poor planning — the upholstery isn’t. I know because every drop of my blood that hit the floor beaded and rolled away and the fringe on that flocked velvet settee drank it up like nectar.”
The words hung between them, sentient things, curling in the crisp air. She wanted to regret them, but couldn’t. Abruptly, he sat down, fumbling for the near-empty bottle.
“Fucking hell.”
She hummed. The sky had lightened. The stands around them were no longer hulking black masses. He took a swig.
“Remind me to introduce you to something that isn’t swill, sometime. A Corton-Charlemagne, maybe.”
Her gaze snapped away from the horizon. Found his. Sometime.
Another sip. Small, she could tell, his throat barely working.
“You thought it would be a good idea to spring polyjuice on me? Are you mental?”
“The last time I used polyjuice I turned into your aunt and robbed a bank. Not sure this was the best choice for me either.”
He stared. And then, out of nowhere, he released another bark of laughter, sharp as the crack of a whip.
“We’re a bit fucked aren’t we?”
“Perhaps I’ll tell myself I’m rewriting the associations.” She tore at the turf absently, the smell of grass and loamy earth filling her nostrils, strong and definite.
“Might’ve liked my Ministry counselling more if you’d been running it… Fuck me, Granger.”
Birds sang from the edges of the Forbidden Forest. Mauve and lilac bands stretched across the eastern sky. Hermione told herself she’d imagined the fondness in his voice.
“Dare I ask why you polyjuiced as Millicent?”
There was no answer to that — at least, no answer that didn’t sound absurd in her own head, let alone aloud. So she told the barest version of the truth, which earned her more laughter.
“You idiot,” he said and the fondness was no longer imagined, she was sure of it. “If you’d ever asked to visit the Slytherin common room I might have died on the spot.”
She stole the bottle back from him and when their fingers connected on its body, this time she let them linger. “And where would that have gotten me?”
There was something hungry in his face. The relaxation of the library hadn’t returned to him, but the fear had evaporated, leaving aggression and something — else.
“When’s your time up?”
Hermione glanced at her watch. “Five — no, four minutes. Why did you think I was one of your friends when I said who I was?”
He grimaced. “Never mind that. We’re going to stay here, Granger, until I’m certain it’s you and then you’re going to pay me back.”
It was hard to focus on what he was saying when he looked at her like that. “Pay you — ?”
“Brooms. We’re going flying.”
—
They broke into the broom shed. Or — Hermione did, because guilt was a powerful motivator.
He laughed lowly when she wrenched the door open. “Hermione Granger, breaking and entering.”
“Did the kowtowing we had to do to the goblins somehow escape you?” she asked to cover the shiver she got at the way his lips curled around her name.
“Quite the contrary: I followed it avidly. Gave me a new appreciation for the little buggers, really. I admire anyone who can humble Harry Potter on principle.”
The shed was old and smelled of wood oil and damp-dispelling charms. The school brooms hung in racks along the walls, like the oars in the boathouse her dad had rowed out of. She eyed the Comets with their flyaway tail twigs and her stomach churned.
“This feels like a poor idea.”
“Flying is never a poor idea.”
“And flying drunk?”
His teeth flashed bright in the still colorless half-light of the shed. “I think you’ll find you owe me. Besides, you’re hardly drunk. Here, take this. No — forget the Comets. They’re flying battering rams.”
The broom he pressed into her hand was skinny and too light, but at least it had foot brackets.
“What, can’t you fly, Granger? All that heroing and you never learnt to fly beyond a first year’s level?”
“I’ll have you know I’ve ridden a hippogriff, a thestral, and a dragon. I can fly. I just don’t care to.”
“Then a Cleansweep’ll be nothing,” he said, turning back to the brooms. His fingers traced a handle here, a tail sweep there. The expression from the library, from the ancient shelves’ monument to the teeming life of Hogwarts, had returned.
“You didn’t come back to the team.”
His hand froze over an old Cirrus. “Yes, well. Best to know when one isn’t wanted.”
Had she not made plain her want out on the grass? Up in the library where she’d been ready to carve a name?
She plucked the Cirrus from its rack and thrust it at him.
His eyes caught on her hand, grayly lit by the shed’s lone window. Her skin rippled. Bubbled. The feeling spread up her arms, tugged at the roots of her hair, compressed, strained, squeezed her organs, pinched her nose, splintered her shins.
“You weren’t lying.” The voice was that of the old Draco Malfoy, but the tone was all new. There was something of reverence in it.
“Well, of course, I knew that.”
He seized the broom and surged out of the shed, tugging her along by the sleeve of Millicent Bulstrode’s far-too-big robes.
“C’mon, Granger. You said it yourself: it’s the last night. When will you ever do this again?”
He had mounted already. There was nothing for it — not Gryffindor for nothing — she swung a leg over. And kicked.
—
They sped.
Over a ridge, a moor she didn’t know, he always half a length ahead, outrunning the grasping fingers of the sunrise — acceleration made visible. His whoops and cackles came back to her through the crisp, clear air. The feeling in her fingers disappeared. She didn’t know how long they’d gone or where. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder.
At last he slowed, letting her come up abreast. Beneath them lay an endless wild of gorse and heather. Rivulets of cloud spilled between the crags and mountain tops. Mists clung to the hills and hollows like a fuzzy layer of mould over old bread.
Perhaps it was the lingering effects of the alcohol, or the long night, or this delicate, last thing, but somehow it was easy to forget the precarity, to feel the wind, the swoop, the juddering rawness of the morning.
“That’s a muggle book, isn’t it. The one I hadn’t heard of.”
She nodded, knuckles numb-tight around the shaft of the broom. There was something brightly alert in his eyes. Bright and terrified and happy.
“Can’t believe I didn’t realize. You’ve never been subtle, Granger.”
“What, and you think you have?”
He laughed. Sirius’s laugh and not Sirius’s laugh.
“I want to show you something.”
He led her back to the forest: a meandering, apian-lazy path downwards, until their shoes grazed the treetops and suddenly he dropped down among them. There was a clearing, a glade perhaps, lost in the dense, old-growth trees, preserved for millennia from the destruction brought by muggles. He landed softly in the rich, moss-blanketed loam and she followed, the springy earth a vast relief.
He lay in the moss and in this indefinite territory of half-shadows and ancient, twisted giants, it did not seem strange to lie beside him. Here, deep beneath the spreading boughs, it was still the gray-blue time. Shapes melted into one another, soft and boundless. Silence, save for the quickening of the wood, the soft language of breaking day, descended. Hermione drifted.
His voice, when at last he spoke, felt as much part of the place as she did.
“What you said earlier… I don’t want it to be the last time, either. All those days in the library… I wanted… Granger —” His voice broke on her name. She turned in that soft moss to look at him, to see the soft rise and fall of his chest, the desperate gesture with which he scraped his hair back from his brow. It sent a piercing ache through her breast. “I can’t. I’m the destructive type, Granger.” The mists clung to the earth, hanging so low that the trees wept. “Everything I touch… You don’t want any part of this.”
She did not want to think of the future. Of the seconds ticking away. Of an overdetermined past. Of anything beyond the sodden, swaddling mists. The leaves felt above them as high as the domes of vast cathedrals. The moss sank beneath them, ready to swallow their quivering selves.
“Come closer,” she said, unbreaking the quiet.
He came. His touch was gentle, soft and wanting.
She accepted.
The moment stretched.
—
That afternoon, when the Hogwarts Express was long-departed and the castle was silent once more, had Madam Pince had a sentimental bone in her body, she might have ventured into the dark corner of the library beyond the restricted section and bent her creaking bones to see which new names had been added to the age-old litany. But, as she had only been persuaded not to put a stop to the practice by a direct order from Dumbledore, only an enterprising house elf called Gilly saw the new names, rubbing her rag deep into their fresh-cut edges.
There weren’t many, this year. Fewer and fewer, really, every year — Gilly was torn between pride that the young vandals were learning to control themselves and melancholy at the slow death of a Hogwarts tradition.
She sat back on her heels and pulled nervously at an ear, big, lamplike eyes tracing the most recent of the neatly cut lines. They were at the extreme edge of the shelf, tucked in shadow against the wall, but whoever had made them had been clever with their charmwork and gilded the depressions of the letters, so they caught the low light. They were pretty. Gilly liked pretty things.
She reached out a gnarled, bony finger and traced the letters: the swooping curls of a D, r, a, c, and o and then, not quite next to them, but not quite not either, “H. GRANGER,” in sensible block capitals. And below them both:
JULY 1999
