Archive of Our Own

Her mouth is raw bubbly pop.

She hobbles into the infirmary.

Pomfrey’s at the far end, spinning gauze into existence. She glances up at Hermione and sends it rattling into a cupboard.

“Miss Granger—”

Hermione's lips purse as the tip of her tongue presses the wad of gum in her mouth—now rubbery in texture—against the back of her teeth then coaxes it forward.

Her lips a lazy pucker, she blows a bubble nearly half the size of her head.

The faintest whisper of air pressure, then POP.

She pulls the sticky stretch of pink back into her mouth, then sighs. “Weasley.”

She chews rather impolitely in the dim quiet, jaw aching, teeth squeaking against a long-worn-out piece of chewing gum.

“Masticamundus,” Pomfrey says, lips pursing.

“Yes, that’s what she calls it. And my counter-charm isn’t working.”

Hermione slides onto a bed, exhausted from the day and being, once again, a casualty of one of Ginny’s pranks.

Still in uniform, she lays back against the sorry pillow and toes off her loafers. They fall to the stone floor with a muted clunk. Her socks rub against the cotton sheets indulgently as she closes her eyes.

Just outside the doors there’s a bang, a clatter, push and pull, and thump, thump, thump.

Muffled voices, frustrated voices, and then a long, drawn out scream. Shrill and magnificent, overmuch, as if from a player on stage.

“Your lungs, Draco! It’s your lungs now!”

“Because you’ve worn them out! Worse than toe jam, you are. Inserting yourself where you don’t belong—”

“I’ll lick your toe jam if—” Theo—yes, she’s sure it’s Theo—grunts, exasperated, “if you don’t get in there.”

“How about—” definitely Draco pants, “I let you lick it, and you leave me the hell alone!”

Draco topples beyond the doors, pushed in by Theo, shirt buttons undone, hair mussed, cheeks and bridge of his nose watercolor-pink, silver scars of yore exposed, chest rising and falling, shimmering scars rising and falling—

His hands pull his shirt shut, eyes already on her.

She raises a brow.

His responding sniff is absurd.

Absurd because she already knows the count of those scars, the seams of them, where they rutted and grooved and where they’re most sensitive.

“Not this time, lover,” Theo sings—their held stare is broken—the words Hermione and Draco aren’t saying scatter with the force of his vibrato.

Draco’s eyes cut through Theo, sharp, sharp, sharp. A genuine look of resentment, a look she’s only received when she pokes and prods.

Her bubble-wrapped boy.

She's asked, do you visit your father?

Pop.

Why the piles of unopened letters from your mother?

Pop.

Do you ever think about that day? Dream about it? Shout about it?

POP POP POP POP

So goes a bubble.

And she’s fine with that. She only ever asks when she’s well fucked, when her brain goes soft and staticky—sweat-marked, teeth-bitten and jelly-limbed.

Pity on her. Good for her. Too bad for her.

Draco is sitting on the bed across, arse so far on the edge it would only take a nudge and he’d eat stone.

She’d since sat up in all the commotion, her ankles crossed, legs pendulating. Legs he’s watching—jaw clenched and unbuttoned shirt still wrapped tightly around him.

“What’s wrong with you?” they blurt at each other.

Her next bubble is due. A very real tangential, blown-from-her-mouth bubblegum bubble. After the pop, Theo sniggers, always well amused by Ginny’s antics. “Look at his chest.”

“Mister Malfoy,” Pomfrey encourages, but Hermione is already rising from where she sits.

He recoils, eyes like a moon, wide and bright and unanchored in the vast darkness.

They do rule her tides.

Her hand swats at his—veiny and lean, knuckles pink as strawberry milk.

“Let me see,” she demands mid-chew.

And then a gasp, a most horrid, dramatic, she-could-be-Theo's-understudy gasp.

The skin on his chest is just a tinge translucent. Milk-like translucence. Soap-bubble iridescent.

Pop.

Just beneath his skin, on either side of his chest, the slow pull of his breathing, two barely visible shapes caged within ribs.

Lungs.

And her lungs went—

oh.

“Like I told Theo,” Draco gritted out, “it’s fine.”

Madame Pomfrey leans over Hermione’s shoulder. “It’s not declared fine, young man, until we have the cause, the treatment, and my signature.”

“Potions accident,” he grunts.

“A jest,” Hermione hisses. No— no Draco of hers would be so careless about potions.

She tells him as much and his lip curls just so, the way it does when she scolds him, when he leans in and licks the words clean.

“Potion?” Pomfrey asked.

“Exfmtnl.”

“Again, young man.”

“Experimental. Creation of my own.”

Another gasp from the Troubadour Twins.

“Whatever for?” Hermione demands.

Hermione Jealous Jean. Jelly bean.

He told her, he said he wanted to be alone. Who was she to push? Who was she to wonder why she couldn’t know?

“It’s for diagnostics,” Draco mumbles next to her. “Meant to make tissue temporarily visible, with the intention of assessing internal injuries...” The washed-out pink of his cheeks is deepening, as if berry-stained.

“Why would you take it yourself?! Anything could have happened, Draco. Look at your lungs, what if you’ve caused permanent damage?! The first rule—”

“Miss Granger—”

“I didn’t. I didn’t take it, Granger.”

A pair of eyes meet and in that shared gaze exists a dreamland. Soft and cream, sharp and mean.

Why couldn’t I know?

Why was it yours alone?

“Transdermal contact?” Pomfrey asks.

An answering nod from Draco, shared gaze still, always and always.

They were sent off with a mouth relaxing tincture for Hermione and an Opacifying Salve for Draco, a temporary fix, as the potion simply had to work its way out of his system on its own.

Outside the infirmary doors, she grabs his hand without thought and leads him to his dungeons.

⚆⚆⚆⚆

“Granger, what are you doing?”

“Releasing your tension.”

“I thought we were–” He licks his lips.

He’s lying on his stomach, undressed except for his pants. She’s straddling his lower back. And yes, he must have thought they were going to have sex, until she demanded he turn over.

And now she’s kneading into the bunched muscles of his back and tapping rhythmically here and there with the sides of her hands.

“Soon enough,” she murmurs.

His head, half turned to question her, laxes, laying cheek-flat against the mattress.

Yes, lover, sink into the cotton abyss.

He groans, rough and breathy. Yes.

She finds herself grinding absentmindedly against him. Oops. Not the intention.

Then again… life’s but a released groan, goosebump-inducing and gone in a blink. So, she’s randy? She can do something about it.

She presses her hands deeper into his muscles, the glide of her movements lingering. Her lips find the back of his neck. The taste of his skin, remnants of his cologne. She licks, teeth catching lightly at his flesh. A bruising suck.

His pelvis rocks against the bed, a small movement almost unnoticed. She keeps licking and sucking until he’s raw with it, his body drawn taut.

He turns over swiftly, flipping her onto her back. He catches her oomph with his mouth. A taking—teeth at her lip, tongue after the sting, like something long-starved.

I used to want to destroy my birthday cakes, he’d told her once, voice gone small and far away. Just—face first. Devour them. Mother never allowed.

Hermione allows.

This is what ruin looks like.

His fingers slip inside her, the corner of his lips upturning in that very handsome way, feeling the mess he’s made of her there.

Inside already, she pleads.

He takes her then. Slow and deep and slow and faster, faster, faster. Hips rolling until she feels it in her throat. And that throat will be scraped tender by morning—all the sounds she can’t keep in.

His chest is alight, buried deep behind bone and skin gone briefly transparent, is the faint shape of his heart pulsing between his ribs.

Her hand lifts, trembles, touches him there. He gasps, taking it and removing it from his skin, locking their fingers together above her head.

Nothing will ever hurt you, he whispers against her jaw, eyes squeezed shut, breath gone wild and ragged.

He’s on the precipice.

She believes him. Decided to, aeons ago. At the beginning of the fall term, Draco followed her, for some reason, like a lost dog. He was such a pretty and sad thing. And his apology was even lovelier.

Pretty, sad, and sorry.

And it turned out they agreed on most things, what they loved and who they hated—they hated many people. It was very bonding.

He’s her best friend.

She squeezes, intentional. Unintentional. She cries out, unbound.

He spills into her with a curse on his lips, her core softening with it.

He captures her mouth again, their stung flesh meeting, lazy and soothing.

The cold is too much to bear when he rolls away.

A blanket, then.

She tucks it over them, scootching under his arm. He cards fingers through his damp hair. She makes swirls on his pinkened, dewy chest—the spot that showed her his heart only moments ago.

“Harry says I can go to Grimmauld. To stay… permanently. Or semi-permanently.”

Now he’s meant to say: I’ll hear none of that, Granger. We’ll find a place of our own. Fill it with things that are ours, do this every night and sleep in our shared bed.

He says nothing of the sort.

Her throat aches. Sour sting.

A deep inhale from him. “That’s good.”

But then a glow. She pushes the cover down. His stomach. The faint outline of his intestines, not enough to see everything, mercy.

A soft gasp from her. She lifts slightly.

Her finger traces over it.

Then he’s rising, mumbling something about fuck, not again.

He grabs the salve, and she takes it from him.

“Sit down.”

He sighs, climbing back on the bed. She admires his naked form, lean planes and firm muscles, even his softened member. Cute.

The salve is sticky cool on her fingers. She rubs it along his torso, wishing she’d kissed it beforehand, it glistens so nicely. His stomach goes concave, her fingers trace over his belly button, all the way down to the trail of hair at his pelvis.

Slowly, the translucence subsides, leaving only a faint glimmer of what was there before.

She pecks his cheek softly. When she pulls away he’s watching her. That same look that she can never quite place. It looks pained.

Why?

“Listen, Granger” —she almost tells him to speak louder— “maybe you shouldn’t sleep here… for all we know, the bloody potion’s transmissible.”

But she always sleeps here. Not the dorm itself, but beside him.

“You just fucked me into your mattress. If it was going to pass to me, it’s too late to prevent it.”

He looks at her aghast. As if he hadn’t expected those words to come from her lips, and then his face settles in that familiar position—that oh-yes-of-course-she-would position. She likes surprising him like that, likes watching his expectations adjust afterwards.

“Lie down, Granger.”

She does, burrowing as close to him as possible.

Ignoring how stiff he feels against her. Telling herself that he really does want her there. Willing the sting in her throat to subside.

Nothing will ever hurt you, he says, right before hurting her.

⚆⚆⚆⚆

She’s in his dreams again.

She doesn’t mean to do this.

She really doesn’t.

It happens sometimes: her consciousness slipping sideways in her sleep and finding him there, his dreamland spread out soft and luminous and hers somehow.

Soapy bright. Colors that don’t exist in waking life bleeding into each other, pink into violet into a blue she has no name for.

The sky is like light cutting through a honeycomb, and beneath it, everything glows. The river runs iridescent, rosy and a shivering silver blue, colors lazily chasing each other over stones. Poppies, red as a held breath, nod along on the banks.

The air smells green and just rained on and oh so faintly of him.

He’s slumped by the river, cupping water in his palms and slapping it against his face. Dramatic, even here. The water catches the light as it falls from his hands, scattering in tiny prisms, light refracted.

He spots her and says: Granger? His voice is the same as his voice in waking. Drawling, so so drawling—aggrieved and privately delighted. Granger, why?

I can’t help it, she replies.

And then, because it’s a dream and it costs less here, she says: I’m a stone lodged in a river, and you are the current. And you’re steady and you’re cool and then you’re raging, and then you dislodge me and wash me to unknown shores.

He looks at her for a long, long moment. Water drips from his jaw.

A stone, he says slowly, you could never be.

He straightens. Holds out his hand.

Come with me, he tells her.

She takes it. Of course she does.

He leads her along the bank where a curved bridge arches over the river. Blushing stone, warm light, moss illuminating. Wisteria spilling over the sides in lavender curtains, trailing fingers on the water below.

They cross it, and she feels that maybe, just maybe, it’ll land them somewhere that has always been waiting.

Where are you taking me, she asks.

He sighs. Long and suffering and just very theatrical.

Home, he says. Ours.

The words lands soft as a soap bubble.

She waits for the pop.

⚆⚆⚆⚆

When she wakes, he’s already awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling. She prefers when they sleep in her bed, the dungeons offering no light to ease you into consciousness. The eerie green glow of the lake makes everything feel suspended, almost unreal—sharper than the morning ought to feel.

She shouldn’t mention it. But they didn’t make it to their so-called home before the dream ended. And she wants to know.

“What does our home look like?” she whispers against his chest.

The glow starts: at the tip of his shoulders, his chest, then his stomach again.

He tries to rise, but she holds him back.

“Granger. Stop.” It’s biting, a wound to her chest.

She tells herself she’s wrong. She must be wrong. That he really does want her.

She’s the first and only person he ever seeks out, crossing rooms and corridors like she’s a fixed point.

He’s told her things. So many things. Bits and pieces he drops on the ground like a trail of crumbs that might lead to the center of him.

Of his childhood, how it really wasn't all that bad. Of the war, the parts that still live in him (except that day). Of his latent fears, the ones that only surface in the dark with her.

It’s why she always prods for more.

And he holds her like she’ll be yanked from his grasp at any moment.

But moments like these contort what she knows until it’s all unrecognizable.

He reaches for his tin of salve, hastily unscrewing the top.

He closes his eyes, inhales deeply, licks his lips.

“I’m leaving the country,” he rasps. “As soon as we graduate. I shouldn’t be here.”

She’s sleep-rumpled and mildly deranged. She must have heard him wrong.

But she rises anyway.

She dresses quietly. Ignores his figure in her periphery.

She puts her shoes on, grabs her bag and walks to the door.

“Where are you—”

Her anger feels corrosive, coursing through her from head to toe, but she doesn’t slam the door on her way out. Because her sadness floods in, like something dousing. So she lets it snick softly, hastily wiping a tear away.

⚆⚆⚆⚆

She’s late to class and doesn’t look at him as she walks in. She doesn’t sit next to him, as she usually would.

She takes a seat three desks over and opens her book to a page she won’t read.

And then the ignoring part becomes hard, because the glow starts.

Soft at first, warmth at his collar, luminescence creeping up his throat. Then his chest, his torso, light visible from beneath his shirt.

She can see how his windpipe squeezes, in and in and in.

He rushes out.

She nearly follows.

⚆⚆⚆⚆

She skips lunch, making her way to the library instead. And there he is: hunched over their preferred table, hair pushed behind his ears, falling forward because it’s not long enough to stay put. Filtered sunlight gathers at the crest of his cheekbone, cascading toward his jaw in softened waves.

How easy would it be to plop her bag down in front of him, whoosh his wayward hair with her incoming air and smile that smile that she knows does something to him.

His head rises slowly. In their shared stare, she can see how that might go. She can knead all his knotted sinew loose, she can warm his blood, she can make that sharp mouth of his forget itself entirely.

But she can’t—

She can’t pop this one.

He’s wrapped himself in it so tightly, this boy, this stupid, brilliant, self-destructive boy—how she loves him in all his wrapped-up fragile entirety.

His mouth parts. And then the glow starts.

His hands, his throat, light pressing through the seams of him. And whatever words he was reaching for are abandoned for a tin of salve.

She walks away before he’s finished applying.

It’s like this all day, every day, whenever she’s in his orbit, crossing him in the corridor, existing in the same airspace—the glow blooms.

This continues for weeks, and she hasn’t talked to him since leaving his room that morning.

Hermione can barely concentrate during NEWTs. Hermione Granger, who has never, not once in her life, allowed anything—not war, not trauma, not the noise of other people’s feelings—to come between her and an exam.

And yet, she’d sat in The Great Hall that afternoon with her quill and parchment and her cleverness, and thought only about the glow of his throat.

Transdermal—the only word she had written in the blank space meant for her potions essay.

Hermione, the little idiot.

There’s a bonfire to celebrate the last day of testing.

She arrives after it’s started, the sun crawling away, leaving them in a greyish blue haze.

Her friends laze and flutter about unfettered. Laughing too loud, sprawling in the grass, passing things between them. Neville has his shirt off for some reason. Luna is painting on Theo’s palm. Ginny is doing something inadvisable to the fire.

Hermione sits a little apart, her mood a blue hue, and watches sparks climb, wishes well upon them, cheers to the stratosphere they’ll never reach.

She thinks of her mum. Of her childhood birthdays, how mum always made a ceremony of the confetti. Great fistfuls of it. How it got everywhere, and weeks later she’d find a single bright curl of it in a book, or a coat pocket, or in a crease of the sofa, and she’d feel the warmth of it all over again.

She swallows at the thought of her friends scattering like that. Out in the wide world, dispersing. But that feeling is manageable.

She hasn’t thought of him leaving since—

She bites her lip. The fire and falling sun blur.

She decides a drink will do. One and two and three.

She’s swaying to some acoustic rendition of Friday, I’m in love. She asks for a fourth drink and one too many people tut at her—wankers.

A cherry fizzy drink is deposited in her hand instead. It’s sweet but she could go for something sweeter. The sweetness of tracing her tongue along his inner thigh until the peaks of his cheekbones go that fetching shade of rose-red.

She could go to his bed—where he’s most assuredly lying grim and lonely—and climb over him. Demand he tell her why he’s running away.

He’s stupid and he wants her. And he makes her feel like the coming of spring. And they could have a future that’s all their own.

She uses both hands to clutch her drink against her chest as she moves. Her eyes have been closed for some time, the music carrying her where it pleases, and when she opens them, he’s there.

Not there there. But there.

Across the fire, arms draped over his knees, watching her. Flames gild his sharp lines: cheekbones, the bridge of his nose, the jut of his wrists, knuckles and knees.

Her hands slide down, her drink dangling forgotten at her side.

He straightens as she slumps, as if gathering every stray atom of her and holding them himself.

His eyes are on her, daring her to cross the flames, to not cross them. Leave it exactly as it is.

Their held moment severs when she walks away. She’s not sure where she’s going, only that it must be somewhere he can’t find her. Because despite her thoughts of confronting him, of demanding answers, of shaking sense into that lovely, infuriating head of his, seeing him in the flesh makes it too much.

Tears are falling and she despises herself for it. Too exposing. She’s already given enough of herself.

It’s not until the bark of a tree meets her spine and she’s sliding down that she realises she’s wandered into the Forbidden Forest.

She plucks at the grass, holds it in her hand, and blows it away. Her malformed confetti.

She looks up, hearing his footsteps before she sees him. He’s frowning; no longer glowing, the potion must have finally run its course. But his body has always been terribly bad at keeping secrets. The story is still being told. She can see it in the purple crescents beneath his eyes, the strain around his mouth, misery gathered in his corners like rainwater.

His jumper looks soft, the sort she’d usually steal for herself. She looks away.

He comes closer, lowering himself beside her.

She tries her best to keep her stare straight ahead. The forest breathes around them, something rustles in the shadows, leaves whispering as they sway.

She’s doing great. Not looking at him. She knows he’s looking at her.

This was the start of her troubles. How his stare did all sorts of things to her.

Eventually, curiosity, or weakness, wins.

His head rests against the trunk, his face turned her way, watching her. As though she’d hung the moon and then taken it away and hid it from him.

“Why were you brewing on your own?” she blurts. Because she’s not sure how to say, why are you hurting me?

His tongue drags over his bottom lip. It’s only when he looks away that he begins speaking.

“I don't know. I guess I was embarrassed or—” He sighs. “I know how you’d react to hearing what I’d like to pursue. And I—”

“What is it you want to pursue?” she breathes, a little too eager. She’s asked him this from the start; it’s one of those bubble-popping questions, moribund as soon as it leaves her lips. Death to a conversation. Mood killer.

He lets out a breath. “Healing.”

Oh.

He’s told her of the toll. The toll the world is due. He is a problem solver, experimental, restless. She imagines him as a healer and that image arrives effortlessly.

Yes, of course.

Then she thinks of a world shaped by his capable hands, the people he might mend, the lives he might touch. A future that does not contain her—how could he ever want that?

“I think that’s wonderful,” she chokes out, turning away, tears falling.

A moment later he’s there, kneeling before her. His hands have captured her face. He’s wearing that pained expression. She must have one to match.

“You’re so fragile,” he whispers.

She laughs brokenly. “I bruise easily, it’s true.”

“Yes, you do.” His thumbs stroke the hollows beneath her eyes, her tears pool in the seams between his hands and her cheeks. “And you should be allowed that. You should be allowed to bruise easily. And you shouldn’t be with someone who’ll make it happen so often that you harden.”

“But you’re a healer,” she says weakly.

He blinks, then huffs, his breath brushing warm against her—she shivers. “Not yet.”

“It’s done,” she says, voice scraped hoarse. “You will be. So you are. A healer. And Draco,” —she bites her lip, trying to keep her emotions from spilling over— “you don’t hurt me… not really. I don’t mind popping your bubbles.”

His brow tightens the way it does when he’s parsing equations.

He looks down, gaze going distant. “I hurt you that day,” he tells her, strained. She almost thinks he means the morning she left him. But his eyes—it’s that day. “And I know, Granger. I know I couldn’t have done anything else, or I would’ve likely gotten both of us killed. But see, I don’t know how to reconcile these two versions of myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“The version of me that felt so awful about what happened that I got sick all over my bedroom carpet that same night… and the version of me that exists today, that would have gotten both of us killed.” His eyes go glossy. “That girl, back then, that was you. The very alive you. The same you that I love very much.” He swallows. “And that hurts—very badly.”

Her tears come in earnest now. She’s known that he loves her. Probably knew it before he did.

Draco has a habit of turning himself into the offering.

He loves her, and he’s looking at her as though loving her and leaving her are somehow the same act. He also tends to turn glass-like when frightened, as though the slightest pressure might splinter him clean through.

She lifts her hands and wraps them around his wrists, his hands still cupping her face. Her thumbs sweep back and forth over his skin.

“You don’t need to reconcile them,” she says. “And you don’t have to leave your past behind. You’re living with it, and it’s part of you, but it’s still a different you. Maybe some hurts just need to be felt before they can be put to rest.”

“Salt in the wound,” he whispers. “Healers once used salt on wounds.”

She nods. 

Medicine has since advanced. But they’re still something primitive, soft creatures curling away from the hurt.

“You bruise easily too, you know,” Hermione tells him. “And when I’m done unwrapping you, I’ll take care of you.”

His eyes go round as an unpopped tomorrow, stretched taut over their unwrapped future.

She thinks of his dreams, every one she’s stumbled into, every one she’s borrowed and every one with fingerprints of her influence. There’s a bridge, a home, and beyond, a world built for two.

She leans in then, brushing her nose softly against his. A peck to his lips. Another one, lingering until it grows teeth and a gnawing belly.

Salt lips, warm tongues, shaky breaths.

She breaks away on a soft gasp. His lips drag from her cheek to her jaw, then up to her temple.

She buries her face in his neck. There, where she knows the flutter of his pulse lives, where his windpipe rests beneath skin she’d once seen turn glass-pale and translucent. Where the inner workings of him became briefly visible, secret no more.

There, she presses her lips and whispers, “I love you.”

He kisses her again. A little bruising. Licks it better. A little balming.

Her healer.

“Come to bed,” he says, rising. His hands close around hers and pull her with him. His eyes are soft on her, moonlit. He kisses the crown of her head, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and leading her back toward the castle.

“There’ll be a garden,” he murmurs. “East-facing windows, for your morning light. It’ll be messy—your fault.” She wraps her arms around his torso as they walk, hiding her smile against his soft-spun cashmere. His mouth tugs upward at one corner. “A special place to hide my jumpers.”

“Which room will be your favorite?”

“All of them. You’re in all of them.”