Chapter Text
The van hummed and rumbled under Ginny and Millicent’s jabbering. Outside, a country road unwound in the dark—hedgerows brushing past, the stars so thick and clustered they looked painted. Hermione thumped the radio with the palm of her hand. It scrambled fuzz and a snatch of some punchy pop beat leapt out, then more fuzz. Buggering useless signal.
Ginny bopped along anyway, shoulders going, something off tune whistling between her teeth.
Well.
“Mills, remind Hermione about the governess bell. The one Flint had at Hogwarts,” Ginny said.
“Oh my giddy aunt.” Millcent droned. “How did it slip my mind?”
“It’s your sleep schedule,” Hermione muttered.
“Don’t start on me now, Granger.”
Hermione’s eyes cut to the rearview mirror. Millicent had a fat, round lolly bulging in her left cheek. She met Hermione’s glare with her own, the sweet leaving her mouth with a smacking pop, before sticking out her tongue. Hermione would never have admitted it back in school, but Millicent Bulstrode was, in her own scowling way, striking. Full lips, supple flushing cheeks, a nose that was misshapen and really had no business being as endearing as it was.
“How much sleep did you get last night, then?” Millicent asked accusingly.
Oh Hermione’s traitorous body: she yawned.
She blinked tears away, shaking herself more awake. God, but she was tired of always doing the driving.
“I can drive, you know.” Ginny offered.
“No!” shouted both Millie and Hermione.
“What’s this about a bell?” Hermione asked.
“Right. He said it was a bell his family gave to their governess. It’s charmed to make the Flint spawn docile, cooperative. Except Marcus, the raging cunt, used it for something else entirely. Brought it to school after winter hols seventh year.”
A familiar pressure gathered in her lower spine, like someone was using a chisel to pry it apart. A tremor crawled from her tailbone to her shoulders.
“So,” Ginny said, “make sure to keep an eye out for that one. I know it’s not priority compared to—”
“It can be,” Hermione interrupted quietly. “But that’s for another day. What about Malfoy? Anything other than the chart?”
MIllicent snorted, “Draco was such a braggart back in the day, If he wasn’t making everything up then those Malfoys probably have a dungeon full of nasty shit.”
“Well, the chart is a priority,” Hermoine said. “...but no reason not to take a thorough tour of the house, right?”
“Right.” Ginny grinned like a cat with a caught mouse. “That is the reason you insist we bring this contraption,” she sang, gesturing to the dashboard of the van.
Well… after they magically shrunk the Notts’ cursed pipe organ, causing it to disintegrate…
Hermione cleared her throat. “Anywho. The chart is priority though.”
“Right.” Ginny nodded with a faux seriousness that was all too reminiscent of Fred and George. “The Chart.”
The chart: map of made-up constellations that were not really constellations, but bloodlines—every pureblood family, every living member. Living being the operative word. Funny how many of them had stopped being that shortly after the war. Dropped like flies, they did. Funnier still, how many of the so-called dead had since been spotted scattered across the world.
Finally, they turned onto a gravel drive that spread as they drove, widening until a manor loomed before them. A dark and decrepit old thing straight out of the Stuart era, or Hermione’s nightmares, depending how maudlin one was feeling.
Millicent sighed like she’d rather be anywhere else, except they all knew very well she was just aching to flatten the place whole. “Tits up, Granger.” And then the back door was shuddering open with a slide and closing with force.
She could have sworn the gates were taller, the spears pointier.
She wondered if he was there. Maybe sleeping. Lips pouting and parted, the same way he looked when he’d curl into himself in some dark corner of the eighth year common room. Or maybe in his study. Did he have a study that he thought of as his? Spindly fingers threaded through his hair, clutching near his scalp when he just couldn’t quite figure it out, or palm of his hand tapping frustratingly against his forehead. Or maybe sitting before a fire. Cross-legged, yes, that’s how he’d always sit. Hands clasped, eyes gripped by whatever it was he saw in the flames.
Hermione startled at the feel of a hand on her leg. Ginny squeezed, then said, “Wait here?”
Hermione huffed. “Absolutely not.”
He told her he’d write back.
She shouldn’t resent him. He’s the one who got sent to Azkaban straight out of eighth year. He’s the one who had to suffer the wretched place. He’s the one that she ultimately failed. It’s not like they were really anything to each other. Not lovers. Not friends— Or were they? Maybe that’s where the root of the sting lived.
One whole year she sent letters to Azkaban. Six months of sending them to a free Malfoy. One year since giving up.
No, she didn’t resent him. But she’d like to tear something apart anyway.
Between Millicent and Ginny, there’s shared blood from every pureblood family in Britain coursing through their veins. With this knowledge at hand, Hermione spent three weeks reconstructing a counter-sequence from a footnote in 13th century grimoire. Really not much work compared to how often it paid off. She crouched at the iron gate, spilling a drop of their combined blood on Malfoy land, pressing two fingers against the ground and whispering the spell.
Millie was working her way down the row of iron hinges, massive oil can in hand.
Why not use magic, Millie?
How else will I grease their floors, Hermione?
Hermione supposed there was some poetic justice in giving it to them the muggle way.
The gate rolled open, smooth and soundless. They crept down the gravel in single file. She wasn’t sure why, it’s not like they ever kept quiet inside. But these nights always had their own gravity, and one simply submitted accordingly.
The front door was old oak, iron-banded. A quick spell would do.
And they were inside.
Now Hermione did remember this. The pale Wiltshire marble veined with grey, polished and bright, holding the ceiling like still waters. Those vaulted ceilings, the plasterwork climbing in acanthus leaves and serpentine borders, all of it the color of old teeth. The way the black iron chandelier with its hundreds of candles threw everything in amber and shadow.
“It’s very grey in here. Psychologically speaking,” came the ghost of a voice that belonged to Luna. Hermione jumped. How she often forgot that Luna tagged along, more like drifted here and there.
Hermione nodded absentmindedly, moving along in search of things… a boy… a man…
Usually she was drugged on the thrill of it all. Hopped up all electric and teeming with mischief. But here, in Malfoy Manor, she felt drugged with something else entirely. Something hallucinatory.
Around her, the feral little fairies rioted.
Millicent threatening the portraits with fire, yanking them down and stomping their gilded frames instead. Ginny on tables, kicking up glassware left overnight for a morning they wouldn’t see. Luna skipping from hallway to hallway, painting their walls in waves of color. Literal waves. Pastels, blues and pinks, yellows sighing into greens. Lapping up the walls of Malfoy Manor like the home was finally, slowly, being swallowed by the sea.
And Hermione swept in with the tide.
A new sense of I-don’t-fucking-care invigorated her. She’d not spend another moment fretting over the boy, the man. It was his turn to finally answer her call. If he so pleased.
Her fingers ran over Luna’s waves, paint still wet. She used it to write on the library doors: Thanks for using Pretty Girl Cleaning.
And then she went to work.
She didn’t open the library doors. Didn’t trust herself not to get lost entirely to it. Last, the library would be last.
The West Wing opened into a long corridor, and the long corridor led to the terrace, and the terrace led out—she couldn’t know from the floor plans drawn from some long dead hand, but one could imagine: stone steps, the dungeon entrance crouching dark at the bottom.
She was nearly past a door in the corridor when she noticed a tray. It sat on the floor like an offering. A full serving of dinner, untouched. She lifted the cloche, underneath was courgettes and… duck? Chicken…? Didn’t matter. She was drunk on all of it, the night and the manor and the possibility of attention, the knowledge that this dinner was most definitely meant for him. She picked up the meat with her bare hand and bit into it. Plum sauce escaping down the sides of her mouth—
Merlin.
She ate more than half of it, sucking her thumb, dribbled with sauce, clean to the tip.
She continued down the hall. It smelled of amber and mandarin, a little similar to…. to….
The next door was ajar, light from inside falling across the floor in a thin gold line, and well…
She nudged it open further with her foot.
Gauzy linens. Deep dark wood. A stain glass window cracked open, curtains lifting and settling, lifting and settling.
In the center of the room, a bed. On the bed, a head. A woman’s head. Her head. Attached to a body and everything. But no it really wasn’t that because—
She moved closer. Close enough to make sense of what she was seeing, which was—
On the bed was a woman but not quite. Herself, on the bed. Hermione on the bed but not quite Hermione.
The not-quite-Hermione looked… like… a doll.
That was it. That was the word for it.
Her— its eyes were closed, lashes brushing the tops of its cheekbones. Its hair fanned across the pillow in a riot of tendrils— accurate, annoyingly accurate. Its so-called skin was milky-bronze, freckled in all the right places. All the right places. Even the ones that clustered along her collar bone. Its head was laid to the side, as if truly sleeping. Its hands folded neatly on top of its stomach.
It looked angelic.
Hermione did not sleep like that. Hermione slept in fits and lurches. Hermione was plagued with the serrated edge of a blade that one might call nightmares. Hermione woke up knotted in a mess of dampened sheets with her limbs gone stiff and her heart going like a war drum.
Much the cadence as it was going now.
“I can explain,” croaked a man from behind her. The man, no longer a boy.
She whipped around. Gasped in air. He was shirtless, silver threads lit by candlelight running along his chest, eyes competing with the moon in their color and size, lips gaping… as if he was shocked. What’s shocking about a real life Hermione? She should be the one in shock.
She turned back around, ripped the covers off doll Hermione. She wore a set of pyjamas, some type of silk with lace trim, undeniably comfortable, showing plenty skin but still arguably modest.
How… funny.
It really did look like her. Nails trimmed a half inch above her nail bed. The indented scar on her thigh from the summer before fourth year. When she’d spent hours at the lake just in case, in case somehow little muggleborn Hermione Granger got picked to be Hogwarts Champion. It was a stupid thought. But one never knew. And settling on that possibility meant accepting the responsibility of it. She’d slipped on a moss covered rock and cut herself on the sharp point of another rock just waiting for stupid girls to do stupid things.
The curve of her hips. The swell of her breasts. The pout of her lips.
She really was… hot.
Fuckable. Quite fuckable. Her stomach walloped at the thought. Heat prickled her cheeks.
Draco approached the other side of the bed, slowly pulling the covers back up. Tucking them underneath her.
What an odd fellow. Surely, she already knew this, knew this very well, but even so…
He couldn’t answer her bleeding letters but he could play with some weird little silicone imitation of her?!
“Not one reply. Not one: Hi, hello, how are you, I’m fine, doing just fine. But a fuckdoll? Do you—”
Draco’s eyes widened comically, his breath coming sharp.
“A what?!”
“Fuckdoll, fuckhead!”
He sputtered, closed his mouth, opened it again, stepped back, stepped forward, arms raised as if in supplication.
“I don’t— I haven’t— I wouldn’t—”
Oh, he wouldn’t, would he.
How would he?
His pyjama pants were slipping low beneath his waist, so low she could see the faint trail of fine blond hair that led down…ward…
She yanked her eyes somewhere else, anywhere else. Not much higher, as it happened. To the twin hollows between hip and pelvis. The sharp jut of bone pressing against soft fabric as if it was the only thing keeping his waistband up. Up and up to the lean taper of his torso, creamy skin shifting in and out with his heavy breaths.
His panting breaths.
Was that how his breaths came when he… came, so to speak. Did he release into the doll— her.
In her.
On her.
Did he wish it was really her the whole time? A real Hermione whose breaths could pattern against his? One he could exchange real oxygen with. A giving and taking Hermione.
“It’s just that—” he rushed out. Her eyes shot to his, neither of them could hold contact for more than a second.
Hers drew back to her replica.
“God, but I do look good,” she breathed, admiring how squishable her breasts looked, the round line of her exposed shoulders, her eyes—even those. They’d since opened. How had they opened? “It’s charmed?”
“What?” he rasped.
“Its eyes are open,” she replied, almost dismissive, still examining her false self. They were scarily accurate. Hermione knew pretty when she saw it—she’d never deny her own prettiness. The generous arc of the upper lid, the upward curve of the lower, how it seemed to cradle the fullness beneath her iris, how the roundness made her eyes look like something fresh and unguarded—not like the truth of her.
“I— er, yes, the eyes are charmed to open to noise but that’s all. Nothing else.”
His fingers ran through his hair like she remembered, squeezing at the scalp.
“It’s pretty,” she said dumbly.
His mouth did that opening and closing thing again. She didn’t know if she’d ever seen him so crimson, from the tips of his ears to the tip of his nose. His adams apple jumped before he replied, “Yes. Well… you are… that. But, Granger— Granger, I don’t do anything untoward with it. I promise you.”
“And why not?” she barked. And why did she sound so offended?
Why in the world wouldn’t he? Unless he—
He was lying to her.
Lying to her like he lied on the train while he watched the passing moorlands and she watched him, heart swelling at the promise of it, then splintering at the unfairness all the same. Stupid girl.
“Why are you lying?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
And then he looked offended. Upper lip curling, that old habit she seemed especially skilled at bringing out. He caught himself, chest rising with a measured breath before replying, “I’m not. Let me— ah fucking balls— how will I—” he turned, pacing fire into the carpet, muttering to himself about never believe me and why should she and such is my life and am a fuckhead.
“Explain!”
He jolted, teeth finding his bottom lip and pressing hard. When he spoke his voice had gone scratchy, worn down to nothing.
“I can’t.”
Her nostrils flared, chest swelling with air ready to be violently expelled in the form of words.
“Wait.” He pushed forward, eyes meeting hers then to the doll, he didn’t seem much capable of staring at that Hermione either, flitting his gaze to the window instead. “Can I show you?”