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Assistant: Title: Wait and Hope
        Author: mightbewriting mightbewriting 
        Chapter: 9/12 
        Summary: “Harry,” Hermione began, voice very controlled, but she could feel the blade of panic slicing at her vocal cords. “Why was Draco Malfoy just screaming bl@@dy murder about his,” and the word almost strangled her as she said it, “wife?”Harry's green eyes blew wide. Healer Lucas pinched the bridge of her nose, clearly displeased with the recent series of events.“He was referring to you, my dear,” she said. “That was the other question you got wrong. Your name is Hermione Jean Granger-Malfoy.”Hermione had to be sedated again.
  [In which Hermione loses the last six year's worth of her memories, including the entirety of her relationship and marriage to Draco.]
        Contents: Chapter 9: Blaise Zabini
    

    


      
        
          
          (See the end of the chapter for  notes.)
          
      
  

  
  
    
    
   “Woman is sacred; the woman one loves is holy.”  
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo—September  Hermione’s entire world dropped out from beneath her: a pit, a crevasse, a tunnel bore straight to the center of the earth where she might meet her end in molten rock. Caverns of absolute nothingness yawned wide inside her, swallowing her tender hidden pockets of hope, tasting like apple candies. Can you repeat that? She tried to ask, but those blank spaces in her brain took control, and perhaps for the first time out of benevolence, to shield her from the bomb that just went off in that awful, terrible excuse for an examination room at St. Mungo’s. Swallow the hope or be swallowed by it?Draco spoke instead, a visceral bite lacing his tone that she’d not heard in years.“For a moment,  Jenkins, it sounded like you said you’re done researching a cure for my wife.” Draco meant it as a question, Hermione knew he did. But the way he’d said it, with such barely contained fury, it sounded more like a last rite read at a time of execution.Which wasn’t dissimilar from how Hermione felt. A stern look crossed Healer Lucas’s face, looking unimpressed with Draco’s hard tone. Even Jenkins seemed like he might be in the process of growing a backbone, refusing to wilt under Draco’s anger. Hermione crawled out of the pit inside her mind, shoving aside her agony. “Mr. Malfoy, Mrs. Granger-Malfoy,” Healer Lucas began, removing the glasses from her face and clasping her hands calmly across her lap. Jenkins’s short-lived resolve wavered as he sank into his chair, a cross between acceptance and exhaustion. “Jenkins has many responsibilities as my apprentice in addition to his full caseload in long-term trauma care. St. Mungo’s does not have indefinite resources to dedicate to a single case.” She’d said it factually, without malice or spite, but the reality still stung. “The fact of the matter is that Hermione’s case has plateaued and without any viable ideas about the nature of her type of memory loss, it simply isn’t affordable for the hospital to continue spending money on experimental research.”“And if the money was no object?” Draco demanded just as Healer Lucas had finished her thought.“Is it no object?” she asked.Hermione saw him flinch, just barely, as his brain caught up with his words. Of course the money mattered:  now. She wondered how often that happened. How regularly did he slip into the skin of a wealthy man, raised with the ability to bend wills with Galleons?Draco didn’t answer. The muscles in his face had all tightened, lips pressed flat, nostrils flared, breathing unnervingly even and controlled. A flush of redness crept up the side of his pale neck, splotching and irritated. Hermione couldn’t see his eyes from his profile, but she suspected he hadn’t resorted to Occlumency, despite his anger. She couldn’t decide if it was better or worse that he was trying to manage without it. Healer Lucas took the silence in the room as an opportunity to continue.“We’d like to shift the frequency of your visits to once every three months,” she told Hermione. “We’d still like to monitor any changes in the physical structure of your brain, but at this point, we suspect that if your memories do eventually return, it will simply take time. Your diagnosis and your care plan will not change. We’re simply reducing the appointment frequency to better suit the present nature of your condition.” They were empty words, useless things: vacuous in a way  irreparable  was not. At least  irreparable had direction to it, certainty towards the unfavorable. These words though, they were nothing. If numbness had a feeling, this was it. Both hot and cold, painful yet serene, something adrift and on fire, barbs and quills biting at every nerve beneath her skin: a monster of unfeeling scratching its way to the surface from the dark, haunted hollows that took up so much of her internal space. “Thank you, Healer Lucas, for your time today,” Hermione said in a determined, distant version of her own voice. She nodded briefly at both healers before tugging at Draco’s hand, forcing him to stand.He did so reluctantly, slowly. A muscle along his jaw had started to twitch. He focused his attention on Jenkins, a glare demanding more from the healer who looked very much like he wished to become invisible. But Draco’s outrage would get them nowhere. Hermione was but a small component in the enormous contraption that was St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries and she’d just been rendered irrelevant in what was probably the nicest way they could have done so. They let her down gently, over months. She still ended up on the ground, barren of her memories and her hope. Hermione steered them out of the examination room, hand still clasped firmly in Draco’s, and brought them to a pair of chairs in the waiting area. Draco didn’t sit. Instead, he paced. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He heaved huge breaths and didn’t seem capable of calming his furious movements. Occasionally, Hermione caught the sound of muttered  f@cks beneath his breath.“Draco—" Hermione started. He lifted a hand, agitation stretching him taut.“Just— give me a minute,” he forced through a tense jaw.Hermione crossed her hands in her lap and watched as he began pacing again.“F@ck,” he muttered after several more turns around the waiting room.“Draco, just—"He sucked in a sharp breath, fists at his side practically vibrating through his exhale.“Not yet,” he snapped.Hermione drew in a frustrated breath of her own, and allowed him a few more paces before deciding that if anyone deserved to have a meltdown in a public space after that news, it was her.“If you’re thinking what I think you are,” she said with a finality that conveyed she would not be quieted again. “We don’t need your parents’ money to extend the research into my case. I don’t—I don’t deserve any special treatment. No more than anyone else would receive. It wouldn’t be fair.”Draco stopped pacing but he did not turn to her. “I know that,” he said, terse. “The money part, not what you deserve. Because you deserve f@ck@ng all of it.” His shoulders fell and he finally turned to her, allowing himself to sit in the chair beside her. “But I know you’d never want special treatment. I just—I needed a minute to be angry. My pride took a beating in there.”“Just your pride?” she asked, trying to tease, trying to find something to latch onto that wasn’t numbness.For a moment, she thought she saw some of her own vacancies in his face: a creeping threat of nothingness.“The pride is the easiest thing to handle. The rest of it, I can’t even—"Hermione wouldn’t have been surprised if he cracked a tooth with the way he ground his jaw together. “If you had the money,” Hermione began, momentary curiosity distracting her from the finality of what felt very much like defeat. “You’d use it anyway, wouldn’t you? Even if I didn’t want special treatment?”He had his hand in a fist again, bouncing up and down on the arm of his chair. Even through his anger, she saw a brow arch.“You really want me to answer that?” he asked.“I suppose not,” she admitted. “I know the answer.”He unfurled his fist and reached for her hand. “No point arguing about my theoretical betrayal of your wishes. We’re certainly not in a position to fund a research department at St. Mungo’s as it stands right now. Moot point.”“They’re giving up,” Hermione said with a quiet voice, anchored to his hand in her grip.“That doesn’t mean we are.” She clung to his forced confidence with everything she had as her hope withered and rotted and died one last time.Maybe they should. — In the days after that appointment at St. Mungo’s, where her healers admitted defeat and left her to wander the landmines in her life with no hope to disarm them, Hermione didn’t read a single book about memory loss.She’d been voracious, utterly insatiable for months as she devoured every last ounce of information on the topic available to the muggle and wizarding worlds alike. And now suddenly, the taste of it left her feeling sick and she couldn’t bring herself to choke it down.Instead, she watched Draco, studying him in the same way she’d studied her own predicament. She’d been waiting, she realized, more than she’d even admitted to herself, clinging to a hope that memory would make the hard decisions for her. Because the hardest of those decisions was the one to allow herself to love him, independent of a past they did not share and based solely on the strange new version of reality that tragedy had dropped her into. And perhaps that was the last barrier between them, the one he saw that she couldn’t. The one that kept him on a sofa and her in a bed.If she couldn’t have the old, she wanted the new. She wanted the chance to fall in love again. She wanted to give herself permission to experience and not expect, tired of everything she did hinging on the hope that it would bring her memory. That last barrier presented in the form of a ledge; she finally felt ready to jump.“Any special requests for your birthday?” Draco asked as he set a plate of toast on the table next to their pot of morning tea.She blinked, gathering her courage, and spoke plainly.“I’d like for you to be able to sleep in your own bed,” she said. He straightened against the back of his chair, eyes narrowing at her in suspicion. “That sounds more like a gift for me. It’s going to be  your birthday,” he began, still looking at her with a blank expression. He brought a piece of toast to his mouth, taking a bite. “Besides, I still think we have some other things to work through before—"“On that topic,” Hermione interrupted. “I think I’d like to have s@x with my husband again.”Draco choked on his toast mid-swallow. He cleared his throat, blinked, and ran a hand from his brows, down the side of his face, and to his jaw.“F@ck@ng Gryffindor,” he finally said. “You can’t just spring something like that on a man.”Hermione had spent the past few months making a sport out of getting him to smile. She hadn't realized how much fun catching him off guard could be, too. She smiled.“You’re serious?” he asked with a look of incredulity. Then it shifted to something more awed. “You’re serious,” he repeated.“I’m serious.”“This doesn’t have anything to do with your appointment, does it?”She tried not to balk. Sometimes he could be far too smart for his own good. And the irony of that observation was not lost on her. “It does and it doesn’t,” she admitted. She found comfort in her tea, distracting herself and incapable of meeting his eye. “I’m tired of waiting for the past to catch up with me. I just—I’d like to move forward.”“Is it time for big romantic gestures, then?” he asked. When she looked up at him she couldn’t quite believe the wild, crooked smile on his face or the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “I told you I had them. If we’re going there, I plan to woo you first.”“Woo me?” she laughed. “Will there be a courtship period as well?”He snorted indelicately and then broke out into a true burst of laughter. Hermione reconsidered. Earning his smile was still her favorite. When his laughter subsided, he schooled his feature into something serious, leveling her with a no-nonsense sort of expression.“Of course there won’t be a courtship; you’ve already married me.”“Fair point,” Hermione conceded.Draco looked thoughtful for a moment. The rapid thoughts vying for his attention flicked and flittered beneath his mask of seriousness faster than Hermione could make sense of them. Only when a smirk started to form did she know that he’d sorted through whatever thought process had enveloped him.“I’m no longer accepting requests for your birthday,” he announced.“Oh no?” Hermione lifted her brows, more amused than anything.“No. I have a plan. It’s going to be perfect, and you get no say in it.”“Perfect you say? So there will be books and Crookshanks and a Gryffindor theme?”He glared at her.“It’s going to be a surprise. But I can safely confess that those things will not be involved, fond of them as you may be.” He stood suddenly, his breakfast and tea clearly on the precipice of abandon. “I need to speak to Blaise, I’ll be back later this afternoon.” Hermione found his excited energy both endearing and contagious. “And don’t—" he started, looking at her with a hint of mischievousness. “Don’t let Pansy pick your lingerie for your birthday. I’d like for this date to just be the two of us, regardless of how good her taste is.”Hermione laughed, already imagining Pansy’s disappointment as Draco disapparated with a  pop. Tea and toast completely forgotten.  — Just over a week later, a day before Hermione’s birthday, Blaise Zabini apparated into her flat mere moments after Draco left for work. He didn’t greet her. He didn’t say anything at all as he approached the kitchen table where Hermione nursed the remains of her morning tea. She glanced at the clock; these Slytherins boys clearly had her and Draco’s work schedules memorized. The precision of planning involved was honestly a touch troubling.“I have no plans to kidnap you,” Blaise finally said, leaning back in the chair he’d chosen for himself beside her. “That’s more Theo’s style. I just wanted to drop this off.” From the pocket of his extremely expensive looking robes, Blaise pulled a velvet jewelry box, the perfect size for a ring.Hermione’s brows lifted, concern and confusion etching their way across her face.“No cigarette today?” Hermione asked in an effort to conjure a diversion from the conversation threatening to happen without her permission in her own kitchen.“You don’t like when I smoke in your home,” Blaise answered as if the simplest answer was the most obvious.Hermione rolled her eyes. “Neither does Theo. But that certainly hasn’t stopped you.”“Well, I’m not interested in sleeping with you.”“Not interested in sleeping—Theo?" Hermione cycled through a number of ways to respond to that news, but eventually settled on, “and you think ruining his textiles with cigarette smoke is helping you, what—flirt?”“He’ll figure it out eventually,” Blaise explained away with a small shrug. “He’s not quite as oblivious as you are.” A pause. “Close though.”Hermione opened her mouth, cycled through a few more potential but ultimately unsatisfactory responses, and then closed it again when Blaise redirected their conversation back to his original purpose. Her attempts at diversion had not lasted nearly as long as she might have hoped. “Your portkey,” Blaise explained with a blasé flick to his wrist gesturing to the small box. “Activates at six o’clock tomorrow.”Hermione swallowed, her breath and her words and the majority of her thought processes stuck in a lump in her throat as her focus narrowed to the small box on her table.“Is that—" she started to ask, but not needing to, not really.“It is.” Blaise tipped further back in his chair, hand dangling towards the floor. To Hermione’s surprise, Crookshanks skulked from beneath the table and rubbed his head into Blaise’s hand. Blaise, for his part, didn’t acknowledge the cat’s arrival apart from the gentle scratching behind Crookshanks’s ears.Hermione didn’t have the energy, or the time, to unpack that additional revelation.“And you’re bringing me the portkey instead of Draco? I’m sure you’re aware you’ve just missed him.”“Yes, intentionally so.”Frustratingly, Blaise did not elaborate. He just kept balancing on his chair, hand dangling in reach of Crookshanks, and watching her with an uncomfortable look of fascination.With a sigh, Hermione prompted him. “Why?” she asked with annoyance. “I’ve already given Draco his portkey.”Another pause, more lack of clarification. “So then what’s this?” Hermione asked, huffing as she gestured to the box she most certainly did not want to open for the first time with Blaise Zabini as her only witness.“This one is special, an alternative. Theo set it up just for you. In case you wanted to do something nice for Draco.”Hermione’s eyes bulged. “So this is an unauthorized portkey?”“That’s an interesting way to say illegal.”She scowled at him.“How did you even get this, anyway?” Hermione asked.“Pansy stole it.”Hermione shouldn’t have been surprised. But her eyebrows shot up regardless, recent conversations about the value of boundaries feeling like little more than recitations of a monologue to a disinterested audience. She sputtered, trying to form coherent words, but instead smashed her lips together, twisted into a frown as she fought off her frustration.“Everyone is getting their wards access revoked. No boundaries, any of you. You’re all meddlesome annoyances.”“And that’s an interesting way to say Slytherin,” Blaise deadpanned. He lifted a calm brow, surveying her. “I should also like to point out that I am, in fact, returning your purloined possessions.”“After facilitating the creation of an illegal portkey.”“Technicalities.”“Unbelievable,” Hermione huffed as she glanced at the clock. “Gods, and now I’m going to be late for work.” She stood rapidly, casting a forlorn look at the remainder of her tea before shooting Blaise a deadly stare. “Out,” she ordered.Blaise didn’t argue. He simply returned his chair to all four legs and rose with an eery sort of elegance. “Before I go,” he began. “If you did feel so inclined as to put this to use, it will take you to the same destination as Draco’s portkey.” Blaise gestured to the box sitting on the table and taking up such a disproportionate amount of space. “And just know that Draco will almost certainly have this on him tomorrow, if you did want to ask to use it instead.”“And how exactly do you know he’ll have it on him?” Hermione asked, hands finding her hips as she glanced again at the clock. If not for the fact that she arrived at work before her boss every day she would have been more concerned about the creeping passage of time as Blaise continued his interruption of her morning.Blaise replied with a small tilt of his head. “I know where he’s taking you.”Hermione barely registered the end of his sentence before Blaise disapparated with a  pop, leaving her annoyed and confused in her own kitchen. She could be a little late for work if it meant rekeying her wards.  — On the morning of her birthday, Hermione still had yet to decide if she wanted to use the ring. Using it, she knew, came with the heavy implication of wearing it, which came with the obvious fact that she’d have to actually see it, which she still hadn’t done.Because after Blaise left, and she’d rekeyed all the wards on the flat, she couldn’t bring herself to look. Just as she’d resisted when Pansy pointed out where Draco kept it, Hermione didn’t have it in her to cross that line without him present.And when she had her opportunities to bring it up, she found herself uncharacteristically lacking the courage. It had felt like an impossible topic to broach back in March when Theo pointed it out in that booth at the Leaky. But now, March bled all the way into September, gushing from the severed artery of her avoidance.So she waffled, painfully, between telling Draco that it had been made into a portkey and trying to ignore the issue altogether.Because on top of all that, when she wasn’t twisting herself into knots over the ring she knew she should have asked about months ago, Hermione was busy trying to find a way to tell Draco that it was time to give up researching her memory loss. He said he wouldn’t give up until she told him to.She needed to tell him to.All things considered, Hermione had very little mental energy on the morning of her birthday to do anything other than stare at the empty bowl of sweets sitting atop the kitchen counter.Draco finished them off the month before and hadn't moved the bowl in the absence of the apple-flavored candies. And Hermione didn’t touch it either. She knew what they were waiting for. And apparently, her birthday would be the day.She jumped when Draco’s hands found her shoulders and he dropped a kiss on the top of her hair.“You’re awfully tense for someone who’s celebrating a birthday tonight.”She leaned into his touch as he rolled the muscles on either side of her neck, his breath coasted along the side of her face as he dipped to place another small kiss beneath her ear. “I have to survive a day of paperwork first,” she reminded him.“And I, a full day of brewing,” he added. His hands dropped from her shoulders, wrapping instead around her middle as he hugged her from behind, mouth still dangerously close to her ear. “I’m not going to scare you off, am I?” he asked. “I just want to do something special.”Hermione was grateful she couldn’t see his face. Because if she could see anything akin to the vulnerability she heard, it might break her in two and convince her to never tell him it was time to give up their research on her memory.“I think you’ve suppressed your instincts towards the ostentatious long enough.” Her hands found his arms where wrapped around her. “Woo me.” A request, and order, a wish.He chuckled against the side of her face as they stood there, a quiet moment before they each had to report to their respective places of work. An impulse grabbed hold of Hermione’s heart before she could think her way out of it. Her opportunities had almost entirely slipped away, leaving her with this last chance to request use of the ring for their evening. Strangely, it was exactly the impetus she needed; the threat of no longer having the choice forced her to make one.“Draco,” she started, turning in his arms and looking up at him. “Do you think I could wear my ring?” She spoke the words so simply, so easily, after months of anticipation. Reflex took control; it hadn’t been a difficult thing at all. He didn’t react, not for a full, wildly uncomfortable thirty seconds while his stare darted between her eyes, evidently unsure where to land his focus. When his gaze settled, he almost looked dazed, as if she’d spoken her request in an unfamiliar tongue or accompanied her words with a  confundus.  Then the smile grew. Small at first, only the tiniest twitch at the edges of his mouth that brought out the dangerous crinkles at the corners of his eyes. Then came the flash of teeth, growing more and more visible in tandem with the dimple on his left cheek. And finally, a single laugh by way of a disbelieving breath, puffing out from a place deeper than his lungs, connected directly to his heart.“Of course,” he breathed rather than spoke, disentangling himself from her and pulling the same velvet box Blaise had delivered the day before from his trouser pocket.“I don’t carry it with me all the time,” he muttered. A hint of shyness drew her in with its sincerity. “But today is—well, I suppose I could tell you now.”He tore his eyes from the small jewelry box and looked at her. “Tell me what?” Hermione asked, finding her voice surprisingly difficult to control, a watery wavering taking hold unbeknownst to her conscious mind.“We got engaged two years ago today,” he said quietly, finally cracking open the pandora’s box of commitment and history and pain and withered hope.She hadn’t expected what she saw. She’d seen it briefly when Pansy wore it, but certainly didn’t have a good opportunity to evaluate it then. And it wasn’t so much how it looked that wasn’t what she expected, but more how it felt. Because every time Hermione thought she’d located and watched her last bits of hope fall apart, she kept finding new shards, tucked away in hidden places or, in this case, jewelry boxes.It sent a part of her heart crashing, finally seeing the ring presented by a beautifully hopeful Draco Malfoy, and finding no magic in its reveal. It brought no onslaught of memory, it triggered no landmines, it changed nothing at all. But when Hermione tore her eyes from the ruby ring, flanked by its orbit of tiny diamonds, she found the missing magic behind Draco’s eyes, independent of whatever hope she’d unknowingly assigned to a piece of metal and expensive stones. Because Draco looked at her like the memories didn’t matter. Or rather, like he might love her, could love her, would love her, with or without them. And regardless of whether he’d said it before, or done everything to show her as much was true; this was the moment Hermione believed it completely.Draco cleared his throat, plucking the jewelry from the box. He held it up between them. When Hermione had seen it on Pansy’s hand it looked more grandiose, and perhaps that just came as a side effect of Pansy’s tendencies towards the exaggerated. But between her and Draco, without the Pansy interference, Hermione could see herself wearing it, loving it. Between the gold band and the ruby stone, a thought occurred to her.“You gave me a Gryffindor colored ring?” she asked, a hint of amusement corralling some of her tension. She watched as his face twitched, a fight at the corners of his mouth not to react.“Felt appropriate at the time,” he answered carefully. His words sidestepped a different meaning. Hermione offered him her hand, brows lifted as she waited for him to elaborate: an affected snark to hide her nerves. His hands were warm against hers as he slid the ring on her finger, a long lost ship finally returning to port. Draco sighed, gripping her hand. “It’s actually an heirloom. From the Nott family vaults. I didn’t have access to the Malfoy ones, obviously, and Theo—well, he was more than happy to help me tell them to f@ck off.”Hermione groaned, fighting off the sudden tears that felt more frustrated than anything. “Gods he gave us one of his family heirlooms and I’ve just barred him from the wards?”“You barred him from the wards?” Draco asked, tilting his head and reaching out to wipe away one of her tears. “Blaise and Pansy, too,” Hermione added. She lifted her hand to show off the ring between them. “They stole this and turned it into a portkey for tonight, activates at six.” Defeated, Hermione let her hand fall. “I’m sure they just wanted to get me to finally ask you about it.”And instead of being upset as Hermione had been, as she would have expected him to be, Draco laughed, pulling her into a tight embrace. The vibrations from his laughing rocked through her. “Gods, I love my friends,” she heard him say against the side of her head. “I had a much different reaction,” Hermione muttered, clutching him regardless and enjoying her moment of touch. “I’m sure you did,” he said, pulling away, holding her hand with its newly adorned jewelry. “I can’t say I much mind their methods if this is the result,” he continued, as he lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. The ring might not have been magic itself, but there was still something magical in the promises it represented, in the friendships it testified for, and in the time she still had left. For a moment, Hermione allowed herself to believe in that kind of magic above all others.She kissed him. She kissed him without the weight of expecting to remember something she couldn’t. She kissed him without the fear that her mind minus six years wouldn’t be enough. She kissed him with a new and different hope blooming, one of the future, forgetting the past.  — When Hermione returned home from the most agonizingly long day of proofreading reports in the small dungeon the ministry called her temporary office, the first thing she noticed was the bowl of candies on the kitchen counter: full again.Draco must have heard her apparition because he walked into the living room while wrangling his cufflinks into place almost as soon as she’d appeared. He followed her gaze.“They arrived just as I got home from work,” he explained. “No note. But it’s the family owl so—"Hermione couldn’t tear her eyes from the bowl. She was glad for him, she realized in an unselfish way utterly divorced from her own losses, that he could still have his hope. And even as that feeling sank like a stone inside her, she smiled. “So if they arrive on my birthday, that makes them mine, right?” she asked, forcing lightness to become her. She wouldn’t wallow in her dark caverns any longer.Draco barked a short laugh and advanced on her. He dropped a familiar, casual kiss at her temple.“Not a chance,” he breathed into her skin. “Now, if you don’t mind, I was hoping you’d wear your navy dress tonight.”“The one I wore to that disastrous dinner with Ron?” Draco made a thoughtful noise, throat humming so close to her ear she could practically feel it. “One admittedly miserable night can’t ruin how beautiful you look in that dress.” With fingers of fire, his hand made contact with her lower back, gently steering her away from the living room. “And since you’re currently wearing our portkey"—a rapid glance at her left hand and an undeniable smirk—"you should probably get changed so it doesn’t steal you away from me.”Hermione rolled her eyes; she had more than enough time, though she changed quickly regardless. She remembered the first time she'd put this dress on, feeling unfamiliar in her own skin but not altogether uncomfortable. Draco had told her it was his favorite and she’d be hard-pressed to disagree. She realized, for perhaps the first time since her accident that the reflection staring back at her in the mirror actually looked like her. Not her in a few years. Just her as she saw herself now.It was a liberating, lovely kind of feeling. She looked like herself and she liked what she saw: a bit of a plunging neckline, a fitted bodice, and a subtle flair of the navy fabric that came to rest just above her knees. She felt beautiful, desirable, and like she might get exactly what she wanted out of her birthday.She emerged from the bedroom with a few minutes to spare. Just enough time for Draco to gape, then grin, then grip at the flesh between her hips and waist, pulling her close as he kissed her through their departure. — “Are we—is this a vineyard?” Hermione asked as she shook off her dizziness from their landing. While portkeys were certainly one of her least favorite ways to travel, she wouldn’t mind getting used to them if it meant having Draco’s arms around her and his lips pressed to hers, smelling of spice and citrus and home. “This is one of Blaise’s family properties,” Draco said as he threaded their fingers together: his left hand, her right. “We’re in Italy.”“Theo made an illegal  international portkey?” Hermione couldn’t help herself as she glanced at the now inactive ring on her left hand. Draco just chuckled, pulling her to walk beside him through the rows of trellised vines around them. “Your capacity to be surprised by his disregard for rules is truly impressive considering the number of laws you’ve broken in your lifetime,” Draco commented dryly, bait if she’d ever heard it. And even though she knew it was meant as such, she could feel herself stiffening, rising to it, wanting to challenge it.“Care to test how much you’ve told me?” Draco smirked, turning to her. His free hand cupped her jaw and he leaned in to whisk a kiss from her before she could answer. He hovered close. “Because to be completely honest,” he continued. “I find my law-breaking, reckless, war heroine of a wife to be wildly attractive. I’m always open to discussing the finer points of my attraction.”There was something about the air. Perhaps it was the proximity to the Mediterranean, or the dip south of the fiftieth parallel, or simply the exchange of breath between her lungs and his, but the vineyard winds around them had her feeling like kindling stepping far too close to his open flame.Hermione smiled against his lips, losing herself in a moment not haunted by her past. “The wooing is going well so far,” she told him, already knowing she’d regret the look of self-satisfaction such a statement would inspire. But instead, when she observed him, he looked deadly serious.“Good,” he said. “Now come on, we have a table set up just ahead.”At the end of the row of wine in its ripening, a simple table stood, set for two.“Private dining this evening?” Hermione asked, already feeling herself melt under the beauty and intimacy of such a setting.“Two years ago we came here for your birthday, and as you now know, I also proposed.” He pulled out a chair for her in a display of his deeply ingrained gentlemanly habits. “I may not have my own wealth to spoil you with any more,” he said as he took his own seat across from her. “But I do have several wealthy friends and a strong recollection of favors I’m owed.”“But you know I don’t  need any of this, gorgeous as it is,” Hermione insisted as a late summer breeze tickled her curls against the back of her neck.Draco smiled the sort of way he did when she repeated herself, when she parroted back to him a conversation they’d had once before, one that he was too polite to point out, but that she recognized all the same.“I know. But if ever there is an occasion to splurge…” he trailed off.“You’ll do well to remember that next June.” Hermione lobbed the threat with her most innocent smile.Draco stilled, perhaps assessing her seriousness. He narrowed his eyes at her, and then finally smirked. “So we got engaged and then married by the end of the year,” she carried on, spoken like a question, but meant more as a catalogue, memorizing and placing the information in her mind, now that she had such a beautiful visual to accompany it. “And you were disinherited,” she concluded. That part couldn’t be forgotten.“And it was absolutely worth it, before you try to ask,” he said.She smiled. “I wasn’t going to.” A stream of curiosities ran through her head. “I do wonder, though. I asked you how it happened, but I didn’t exactly ask why—I realize it’s mostly obvious, and I can make educated guesses. It’s just, the more I think about it—it’s so much to give up, I can’t—"He silenced the rapid train of thoughts she’d been verbalizing by reaching for her hand, a now familiar gesture between them. “Barring the fact that I’m painfully, irrationally in love with you—there’s no other version of my life where I could ever do better than what I have with you, wealthy man or not.” He squeezed her fingers, thumb running along the top of the ring she’d now worn for a single day, but felt parallel to a lifetime. “You make everything in my life better,” he continued. “This is a hopelessly one-sided relationship where I get everything and I don’t understand why you’re still here.”She swallowed, struggling to meet his eye.“Is that what you’re so afraid of? That I’ll decide I don’t get anything out of this?”“Every day.” The pressure of his hand in hers was unnervingly steady. A beat passed before he admitted the rest. “Especially since it happened.” There was no need to clarify the  it  he spoke of.  It had consumed nearly every aspect of her life since she’d woken up in St. Mungo’s in January. She carried it with her every day, and he did too.  The next second, a bottle of wine appeared at the table, gratefully pulling them from the seriousness of their conversation.“Does that bottle say that it's the ‘Malfoy Vintage?’” Hermione asked, squinting at the elaborate script as Draco picked it up to pour.He flashed her a knowing grin, his vulnerability shoved back into whatever sequestered corners he kept it in.“Blaise can be convinced to be sentimental on occasion. This was the harvest from the year we got engaged.”“How very Hufflepuff of him,” Hermione commented, watching with contentedness spreading warm within her as Draco poured her a glass.He laughed. “Don’t tell him that.”Their food appeared on the plates in front of them, a menu clearly determined ahead of time with every Italian indulgence Hermione could think of. She couldn’t deny the noise of anticipation that spilled from her as she eyed the assortment in front of her. Glancing up at Draco, he had that smug expression again: pleased with himself.“This looks delicious,” she conceded, not even interested in denying him his satisfaction.“Just a few of your favorites.” He shrugged. False humility looked ridiculous on him. The gloating was preferable.“Speaking of Blaise,” Hermione started, taking a sip of what was allegedly her own bespoke vintage of Italian wine. “Are you aware that he thinks he’s been flirting with Theo?”Draco burst into laughter, true humor on his face. “Everyone is aware of that,” he paused, taking a sip of his wine and watching her. He smiled. “Except Theo, of course.”“So Theo’s got me helping him hunt for a boyfriend a few times a month and he has no idea Blaise is—I don’t know, interested?”“Well, Blaise thinks he’s being obvious and Theo is oblivious,” Draco commented.Hermione considered that rather doomed combination as she sipped her wine and enjoyed her meal. In the crossfire of the cascading rays of light from the setting sun, it occurred to her just how utterly lovely an evening Draco had orchestrated. And despite being such a grand gesture, she felt no discomfort, no overwhelmed unease telling her it was too much. Because it was still so intimate, so simple: just a man and his wife. “I can imagine,” she began. “That we weren’t much different, in the beginning—if I had to guess.”“Different from what?” Draco asked as their plates cleared themselves, leaving only wine and conversation and a steadily fading light. “Blaise and Theo,” she said. “I imagine I probably thought I was being quite obvious and you were oblivious.”Draco laughed, so hard he had to set his glass of wine back down on the table. The shadows cast by the setting sun caught on the laugh lines spreading across his face, bathing him in both light and dark.“If anyone was oblivious, it was you,” he finally said as his laughter settled into something fond. “I was the obvious one.”Buoyed by wine and an affection bleeding from her bones, Hermione arched a brow at him.“Slytherins are rarely obvious,” she insisted. “Gryffindors, however…” she let the end of her sentence trail off as she gathered nearly nine months of growing desire for the man in front of her and armed herself with the courage to act on it.She placed her cloth serviette on the table, a deliberate motion that stalled whatever retort Draco had planned in his throat. She stood, a rush of adrenaline flooding her. Bravery, she knew. Anticipation, she welcomed. But the stuttering of her heartbeat behind the cage of bones inside her chest, she fought against. Because that was the part that made her feel wild, just a little out of control, uncertain of herself.She took two careful steps to Draco’s side of the small table and paused in front of him. She put her hands on her hips, a motion meant to hide the stuttering and stammering inside her chest under a pose that placed her in control.Draco’s expression hadn’t changed from the moment she stood: the mixing of a smirk with anticipation, a darkening in his eyes in the ever fading late summer light. Hermione was pleased to find her voice sounding solid and confident, despite how quiet she spoke. “Make room.”A flash of confusion, faster than a lightning strike, was the only indication of Draco's surprise. With a quiet scrape of his chair against the compacted vineyard ground, he put space between himself and the table.It was just enough room for Hermione to step forward, accepting the offering of his hands as he realized her intent, and sink into his lap. Her face hovered a decision away from the ledge she’d been approaching all evening. She ran her hands up his chest and to the back of his neck, tangling them in his hair: her favorite tether. His grip around her waist pulled her as close to him as possible as one of his hands traveled up her spine, pausing in the middle of her back. His face turned the fraction required to make eye contact. A low noise emanated from his throat before he found his words.“You’re not wearing a bra,” he said. It wasn’t a question.“Who did you say was the obvious one?” Hermione asked in response. She leaned her face into his neck, needing to bolster her courage with the taste of his skin and a break from the silver in his stare. “And the oblivious one?” she continued, breathing the question against his neck. Despite the growing darkness, her entire body felt alight, thrumming with the heat of a star all her own. Together, they could make a constellation. She placed one of her hands on his, the one perched at her waist. She guided him lower, over the curve of her hip and muscles in her thigh she couldn’t help but flex at the contact. Lower still, she brought his hand to the hem of her dress before beginning their ascent again. This time, with his fingers trailing along her bare flesh, Hermione had to distract herself by kissing his neck to prevent her breath from wavering wildly against him. From her vantage point, she could see that he’d stopped breathing altogether.She guided his hand along the skin beneath her dress, along the outside of her thigh until it came to rest at her hip. She saw the moment the recognition hit him. He swallowed, fingers immediately flexing, digging into her skin like a man dangling from the edge, his grip and nothing else keeping him from falling.“You told me not to let Pansy pick my lingerie,” she said into his ear, feeling a thrill of power replacing the nervous stutters behind her heart. “So I opted not to wear any at all.” She had no idea where he’d been keeping the return portkey. But in the next instant she was spinning across continents with him, tangled in his touch, and desperate for more.  — Their landing was less than graceful. Rapid portkey activation from a seated position, wrapped in each other's arms, and with a few mental faculties otherwise occupied, couldn’t possibly be advisable. It was honestly miraculous that Hermione didn’t hit her head on the kitchen table as their impressively precise portkey dropped them straight into their foyer.Gods dammit Theo was good. Hermione wobbled, grateful to have landed on her feet and feeling shaky after her stumble towards the very sturdy table and chairs. She turned, Draco looked less rattled as he smoothed wrinkles that simply didn’t exist from the fabric of his trousers.When he looked up at her, evidently satisfied with the state of his clothes she had no intention of allowing him to wear much longer, she felt the tension pull taut between them. Unraveling fibers caught fire, tighter and tighter, fraying in every direction until the tension snapped. In much the same way, Hermione felt like her very bones might snap under the weight of Draco’s stare. She realized he was waiting for the last barrier between them to crumble, waiting for her to confirm that he could have her, all of her. Confirmation that it wasn’t just the wine or the wooing, but something driven by intent. Even standing on the ledge of the unknown, wanting,  needing to jump, the vacantness below suddenly looked like one of the familiar caverns inside her own head. She stalled, stuck in her momentum. It was time to give up, she knew that. Her caverns would remain empty of the things that once lived in them, she accepted it. She wanted to fill them with something new.She’d been focusing on those errant thoughts, stare lost in the foreground between them and when she refocused, Draco stood directly in front of her. He didn’t touch her but for a single curl wound around a knuckle. She recognized the look in his eyes, one he’d had before, in this place, in this way. It was that of a starving man, seeking satiation, and losing the fight not to reach for her flesh.“Say the word, Granger,” he breathed. This time, she kissed him. And it wasn’t a fleeting ghost of contact like the first time he’d done it; it was pressure and passion and permission.“Take me to bed,” she murmured against his lips. That last barrier, as big as the Berlin Wall, came crashing down.He laughed against her mouth, joy mixed with his desire, as he hoisted her into his arms. His hands had already slipped beneath the hem of her dress, gripping her bare skin as he carried her to the bedroom, to their bed. — S@x was its own kind of magic. Not dissimilar from the kind she’d sought inside a jewelry box. The kind she’d found in Draco’s face instead.S@x with him was an exercise in the occult. The incantations he breathed into her pores as he slipped her dress from her shoulders settled into her skin with the greed of an accidental flame, consuming her flesh.She wrote runes with her lips, trailing across every unexplored inch of him as her unsteady hands undid the buttons of his shirt, revealing a sea of skin to quench her thirst.The spells cast by his touch, insistent in its exploration of the places that made her sway, circled her mind and body in a whirlwind of want.And the enchantments she conjured with heavy pants between parted lips were the only things keeping her rooted to the earth, grounded in some semblance of reality, as Draco sank into her, echoes careening through her head.For a moment, all was still. Then, Hermione’s breath rattled on the intake. The slight expansion of her chest pressed her skin even closer to his as tiny eruptions of urgency forced an almost involuntary grinding from her hips.Draco groaned against her neck. His teeth scraped at the vertical tendons along her throat before he lifted his head to meet her eyes. She rocked again, encouraging him to move, nearly split apart by the growing blaze ricocheting along her nerves.He pressed a kiss to her lips, surprisingly chaste as he dragged his hips away from hers with an agonizing slowness. Hermione gasped against his mouth, threading her fingers through his hair, dragging her nails against his scalp, down his neck, and to his shoulders. When he broke the kiss and looked at her again, she saw the glint in his eyes, the crinkle at the corners, and she knew she was done for. A Draco Malfoy smirk delivered by nothing more than a look told her everything she needed to know about how he planned to have her. Her eyes rolled back just as his hips snapped forward, a jolt of electricity by way of magic—or was it the other way around?—crackling between them, indifferent to where one ended and the other began. Draco pushed up, seated against his heels and still inside her as his confident, practiced hands held her by the hips to meet his every movement. She was a canvas, pulled too tightly across her frame, unraveling at the edges and coming utterly undone as she let her reflexes take control, instinct orchestrating how to be with him. She had no control over her voice, over her breathing, over her impending ruin under his touch. Heat flushed in rapid waves across her skin and through her sinew, rushes of need she barely knew what to do with. But she knew she needed more contact, more closeness. The cool bite of room temperature air against the firestorm beneath her skin drove her to seek more touch. She reached out and, without the need for words or requests, he simply pulled her to a seated position with him, chest pressed to chest, face pressed to face, and the vacancies in her mind pressed to the memories in his, so close they might as well be one. He slowed his pace as he held her against him: the savoring of a new position that dragged even more pleasure out of her. She moved with him, whimpering at the grit of friction as he thrust up into her, all at once entirely familiar and deliciously unknown. She clawed at his back, gripping for support as each and every fiber inside her threatened to quake and quiver and dissolve beneath sweat-slicked skin and the trail of his tongue along her breast. She remained steady only by the grace of the arm Draco had anchored around her waist, keeping her upright and perfectly positioned to meet his hips with hers.She released a tiny, broken breath as his left hand briefly cradled her head before dipping lower, past barriers and long gone buttons and bullshite excuses to withhold such beautiful delirium from her life any longer. His hand cupped her breast in its descent, rolling a nipple between his fingers and eliciting a strangled hiss from between her teeth before continuing downward.His hand slipped past her ribs, ghosted across her stomach, and inched closer to the nerves that would be targets to his arson. She pressed her nails harder into his back, rolling her head forward enough to force him to meet his eyes. She had little control left, already on the precipice of a new ledge and ready, desperately so, to fall. She only had one request as his fingers finally found their destination, wrenching pleasure from her: a thief of sighs, and gasps, and screams.       Don’t be gentle with me, she’d wanted to say. She hadn’t been with him, all those months ago. And she wanted the treatment repaid with interest, sweet, delicious interest delivered by quick, hard thrusts and bruising hands against her skin. But the words died in her throat, along with every coherent thought she might have had as she came undone on the crest of a pleasure peaking and crashing again and again. And for a moment, her mind was nothing but vacancies, enormous caverns of unknowing as her world blinked out of existence before reforming and beginning anew. A new reality at a different angle, shifted parameters granting her new perspectives as she reveled in the distinct pleasure of watching every ounce of Draco Malfoy’s careful control shattering around him as he tumbled through his release mere moments after her own. He collapsed on the bed next to her, the rapid labor of his breathing pulling her out of her own head, still empty of old memories, but filling with something else. He clung to her, and she to him, as he pressed tiny, winded kisses against her neck, her shoulder, her wrist: every inch of her that his lips could travel, they did. And her hands did the same, relearning and cataloguing every patch of his pale skin.“I’m never leaving this bed again,” Draco announced, barely a whisper between kisses.“No?” was all Hermione could manage as she traced the long lines of his arm, over the faded Dark Mark he didn’t know how to forgive himself for.“Between you and—well, the fact that it’s not that bl@@dy sofa, I can’t imagine any more perfect set of circumstances.”Perfect, indeed.“Is it always like this?” she asked quietly, hoping to communicate the feeling of possession, of being possessed, that burned like hot coals inside her chest.“The s@x?” he asked, diverting his trail of kisses so he could level his face with hers. “Yes and no,” he answered. “It’s always—fantastic, but this was…” “Magic,” she supplied, flushing with embarrassment over such sentimentality. She’d never pictured herself as that kind of person, one so consumed in another that the edges between them ran and blurred.He hummed a noise of agreement as he dropped his mouth to her ear, the barest hint of teeth toying with the lobe. Reflexes arched her body against his, reacting to his touch.She smiled into the feeling, eyes closing. In that perfect moment, indicative of all the time ahead of them, Hermione decided to finally put the time behind them to bed.“Draco,” she said. He made another throaty noise against her ear, rocketing sparks through her veins. “It’s time to give up,” she said simply.He didn’t react at first, still spoiling her with soft nips and nuzzles. Then he slowed, pulling away from his work behind her ear.“Give what up?” he asked. The serenity on his face, present from the moment his control shattered as he came, vanished.“The research,” she told him. “Searching for answers, hoping that my memory is just going to come back. It’s time to give up and move on.”It was a clinical, simple, truth. They had so much more they could look forward to, if only they could move on from the past she’d already forgotten. She didn’t need her actual memories, not anymore, in order to build something new with him. He was still, quiet, and he didn’t look at her until finally, he spoke. “No.”Hermione blinked. “What—what do you mean, ‘no?’”“I mean no,” he repeated, his words solidifying in a new way, armed with conviction.“You said you wouldn’t give up  until I told you to. It’s time, Draco.”“I—" he faltered. And then, as if he just realized it himself, he finished his thought. “I lied.”He rolled away from her, staring at the ceiling, as Hermione tried to sort through what had just happened.“You said it was my mind, my decision,” she said, voice so quiet she could barely hear it herself.“I know I did,” he replied, volume equally as absent. “But I can’t.”“Can’t or won’t?”“Does the difference matter?”That burning coals inside her flared, no longer a comfortable kind of heat, but something aching and close to anger. She didn’t want that, she didn’t want to ruin the wonderful thing they’d just shared. But if he didn’t know the difference, she needed him to learn.“One is a matter of your skill. The other of your will.”And one was certainly worse than the other.He didn’t say anything and Hermione imagined she could hear the churning of thoughts inside his head.“Draco?” she asked to the heavy air around them. She had her own eyes fixed on the ceiling as she tried not to let tears overtake her on the heels of what had been such a spectacular thing. Despite the new wedge between them, rendered into reality in a few short words, Hermione forced herself to be brave. Worse things had failed to break her. This would not define their evening. “Tell me about our wedding,” she said.She heard him release a breath, neither sad nor frustrated, just held past the threshold of his normal breathing cadence. He turned towards her again, wrapping an arm around her waist as he pulled her close. With lips pressed to her skin and a silent understanding that now was not the time to argue, he told her.
  
  

    
      
        
        
          i love and appreciate kudos and comments if you feel so inclined to let me know what you think!! also, come hang out with me on tumblr, its a good time!art inspired by this chapter:Vineyard Kiss by aiivytx'
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