Work Text:
THE PODFIC
It was hard not to feel resentful in the moment following recognition. Hadn’t he resolutely insisted that he was not hiding, not running, not experiencing a congestion of nerves for which his mother’s healer might have prescribed fresh air and quiet walks?
And yet as Draco sat with his lunch spread beside him on the bench, on the footbridge overlooking the verdant shores of the Lima River, in the little hamlet he’d come to think of as his own, his body’s response was to freeze: a hunted thing, caught while he rested, unaware and unprepared, eating an apple.
But Hermione Granger wasn’t there for him.
Quick strides carried her past, her knuckles white on the strap of her bag, her mouth flattened into an unhappy line. The wind tossed up a screen of curls through which he was as much a part of the scenery as the stone buildings dotting the riverbank, and she seemed unaware of anything, let alone him. Draco was too stunned to feel relief that she hadn’t seen him; he only stared, heart thundering, as his mind scrambled for a foothold on how, why, here?
Halfway across the bridge, she halted. Only her grey coat kicked out in the occasional gust as she stood looking down into the trudging water, blind to everything but the river’s soft churn.
He wondered if he might sneak away.
Then, quite sharply, she bent at the waist, and her head and shoulders vanished over the edge.
Draco’s heart, already in his throat, convulsed—but no, she was only leaning, her torso flattened against the stone railing. She was doing something, scrambling in her pocket for a small item, perhaps a rock; was she going to throw it over? He imagined that Hermione Granger had travelled to this remote Spanish village to toss a pebble off a bridge and felt momentarily crazed.
Task finished, she straightened, and as she slipped her hand back into her pocket, he saw a smooth handle jutting against her palm, not quite hidden by her sleeve.
She’d been doing magic, he understood.
Understood, too, what would happen next, because what he’d learned in his eight months of Muggle solitude was that however alone you are, however careful and silent your spell, you will always look around yourself afterwards, just in case.
He held himself still. Hermione looked around.
Her eyes were red.
“Oh,” she said.
They were too far apart, and the wind stole the word. Draco was grateful; surely this meant this strange discordance of events could go unacknowledged. Certainly if either of them wanted conversation, they would not be here, a hundred kilometres from the nearest Floo connection. Certainly if they wanted each other’s company, they wouldn’t have spent their entire brief adulthood avoiding social situations where such a thing might be possible.
Shock was filtering out of her expression. He waited for her to reach the same conclusion, to turn around and—
She’d spotted something beside him. Her head tilted like a bird catching a strange tune. One of her wrists lifted unselfconsciously to wipe beneath her eyes—so she had been crying, he thought, unaccountably startled—and her focus grew intent, sharp, almost wolfish.
There was nothing to be done. She was moving, and then she was there.
“Can I have that?” she asked, standing before his bench. Her voice was urgent—he might have said desperate, had he any capacity for analysis.
But he could only stare. “What?”
“That.”
He followed her finger to his forgotten lunch: half a sandwich on roughly cut bread, a handful of almonds from his landlady’s tree, and—
“You want my apple?”
“Apple,” she repeated silently. He recognised the vacant, reflexive rounding of the syllables, the same as her oh from a moment earlier: as though she’d stepped briefly away from herself to file some new information in the tidy back rooms of her mind.
Unease pricked his neck. “What are you doing here?”
“Can I?” she repeated. As an afterthought, “Please.”
He lifted it—what else could he do?—and like a child before a bowl of sweets, like she thought he might dash it to the ground rather than give it over, she snatched it from his hand.
In an instant, Draco was wholly forgotten. Strangest of all, he forgot himself, too—everything seemed to have fallen out of existence save for Hermione Granger, her eyes damp and large, cupping his apple in both her hands; turning it carefully this way and that in total astonishment; tracing the ridges left by his teeth with one spellbound finger. When finally she brought it to her lips and bit down, it was not on the green unbroken section like he expected, but directly over the exposed white flesh.
Silently, and with the fruit still pressed to her mouth, she began to weep.
This was too much. He had been intruded upon, accosted, made party to something he could not understand. His lunch had been stolen, his anonymity ruined, his peace shattered. Aggrieved, he gathered his scraps into their paper sack, thinking he could leave under the guise of giving her privacy—or space, or something.
But as he glanced back into her upturned face to make his excuses, what he saw was so foreign, so rare and unexpected, that he said, instead:
“Would you like to sit?”
She sat. Beside him on the bench, her face a mess of tears, she gazed at his half-eaten Reinette as though she beheld the miracle of life. Joy, savage and unfiltered, rose from her like the winter mist from the river, and Draco, caught in the spray, felt it settle on his skin.
She closed her eyes. Breathed in deep. Started to laugh.
“I’m very sorry,” she said through an assault of tears—through the laughter that folded her over, shook her by the shoulders, shook her so hard it must hurt. She took another bite. “This is excellent.”
Draco offered his napkin—paper, and thin, but better than her sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, and laughed again, though it was closer now to a sob. “I know I ought to be embarrassed. But at least I’ll forget this, too.”
***
In a café wedged into the foot of the hillside, he watched her palms trace the grooves of the touch-darkened bar as she considered the menu in its plastic dressing.
“Are you hungry? I interrupted your lunch.”
Draco pressed, “You said it was a laboratory accident.”
“Not my accident,” she clarified. “How's their tea?”
“Dreadful. You want herbal, if you must. Wine’s a better choice, or—cider.” Brusquely, he added, “I hope they sacked whoever did this to you.”
Her smile was thin and tired. “Risk is inherent to the Brain Room. Besides, remedial safety training is its own punishment.”
Something itched between his ribs—discomfort wedged in like a splinter. An impulse, he realised, against injustice.
He didn’t allow it to surface.
On the bridge, she'd faded like a banked fire, and Draco, blinded by the blaze, blinded like he’d witnessed something never meant for his eyes, had accepted too quickly when she’d turned, weakly, and offered an explanation as recompense.
Now they were themselves again, caution-wrapped, toeing uncertainly around the outskirts of conversation.
The owner appeared between them with a luminous bottle of house sagardoa. “Ben feito,” he muttered to Draco, eyebrows lifted towards Hermione, and poured the cider in a sparkling waterfall into squat waiting glasses.
Draco thanked him in his stiff but serviceable dialect, and as the man shuffled off across the vinyl floor, Hermione shook her head in frank amazement.
“You really do live here.”
He’d cultivated privacy the way his ancestors had done with power. His life was a box sealed tight, and he bristled to find her fingers on the lid.
“Yes.”
“For quite a while, I gather.”
He leaned his weight atop the box and pressed down. “Your amnesia—what else did you forget?”
It was brutally phrased, and Draco found time to regret the question while she made a long study of the bubbles scaling the walls of her glass.
Finally, she said, “That’s the difficulty. It’s like—like I’ve got a tear in my pocket, and things are tumbling through. I don’t know my keys are missing until I go to look for them, only now I’ve never heard of keys before, and I don’t know what they’re for, only that I should know—that everybody else does, and I’ve just been walking around with a key-shaped hole and no idea that anything was missing.”
He’d watched her fill an apple-shaped hole, and seen the relief steaming from her skin. Draco knew if his own memories were scattered on the floor like galleons fallen through a ripped seam, he would not even bend to pick them up.
Lamely, he offered, “I can see how that would be distressing.”
She drew a bracing breath. “Earlier, that was … an unfortunately timed moment. I’m actually quite lucky. The curse seems to be limited to minor facets of my long-term memory. Sensations. Fine details. It’s all trivial.”
Nothing about the moment on the bridge had felt trivial.
“It’s not as though I’ve lost huge swaths of time,” she insisted. “Nothing crucial, as far as anybody can tell. But—I do need to ask you …”
In the pause, his body braced as though for a slap.
“Have we seen each other since Hogwarts?”
Mutely, he shook his head.
“Only I wondered if I’d lost a memory that could explain your behaviour.”
“My behaviour?” A laugh slipped past his guard, but then he understood, and amusement turned acrid in his gut. “You mean because I didn’t curse at you. Because I didn’t run you off the bridge, and send a tip to Rita Skeeter.”
She was silent.
“Would you have preferred that I had, in the interest of normalcy?”
“No.”
He felt older than his age, heavy and dull. His bones sagged under their own weight against the seat.
“No,” he agreed. “Me neither.”
Hermione lifted her glass to her lips; separately, but in unison, he raised his, and together they drank an unacknowledged toast to strange behaviour.
He said, “What were you doing back there? I saw you leaning over the water.”
She reached to collect the bag she’d draped on a nearby stool, and produced a vial.
“Gathering the ingredient of my salvation,” she said with only a trace of irony, and offered it to him. Flecks of algae and silt swirled behind the glass. “Water from the Lima. They’re going to brew it into something that will—plug the leak, as it were. Bring back my missing keys.”
This surprised him as much as anything that day. “Water from my local river will restore your memories? How?”
“It’s—it’s the River Lethe, of antiquity. We’re right at its source.” A furrow bisected her brow. “You really didn’t know?”
Mythology leaned Muggle. How astonishing, thought Draco, that he was still finding new facets of inherited ignorance to resent.
She must have read his silence as prejudicial, because a new distance lunged between them.
“No, I don’t suppose you would have.”
“Granger,” he began, but she pushed forward, mouth tense: “I’ve reviewed the methodology myself a dozen times, and it’s sound. Sites like this are underrepresented in magical research, but a lack of interest doesn’t equate to—”
“It will work,” he said firmly. “Of course it will work, if you had a hand in it.”
The distance lessened by a fraction.
“The potions mistress figures a month to brew. I suppose we’ll find out then.”
“You’re not brewing it yourself?”
“I’m not …” She contemplated honesty with narrowed eyes as the vial of river water rotated in agitated circles between her fingertips. “I’m not going back,” she finished. “Not until the potion’s ready. I’m not helpful there. I forget too much. I distract. And everyone’s so—”
Draco had never seen her search for a word and fail to find it. Her distress echoed faintly in the dark space behind his ribs.
“They’re under enough pressure without me waving a fork in their faces and asking them what it is,” she concluded.
“I should think you have at least one person in your life who’d be willing to label all the silverware.”
In answer, she pulled a red leather journal from her bag and laid it open along the ribbon page marker.
“Do you know the little stone church across from the train station?” she asked. “When I got to town this morning, I sat on the steps for an hour combing through every detail I could remember of a Christmas party I attended last year, looking for holes.”
She offered the page. He read:
- Alicia Spinnet’s boyfriend—did the Quidditch commentary at Hogwarts
- Snow (Sound, smell? What does it feel like?)
He pushed the journal back with a finger. “Lee Jordan. That’s his name.”
This time, the knowledge went home peacefully. Her eyes closed briefly, and she nodded.
“Thank you. I know it shouldn't matter. Whether I can remember a boy I grew up alongside doesn’t matter to anyone but me, and then only until the counter-curse is ready. I won’t even exist after that, this incomplete version of myself, and everyone says I ought to just ride out the time until I’m—fixed.” She shook her head. “There’s a bad joke in there about needing to have all the answers all the time, but it’s true. I just can’t seem to remember that the priority is here”—she touched the vial still on the table—“and not here.”
She flipped through the pages, and Draco saw lists, dozens of them: hundreds of her missing pieces flickering by as the cover fell shut.
“I know tracking these down is an exercise in futility,” she said. “But I can’t stand it.”
Draco knew with absolute certainty that he would never again sit on the bench overlooking the river without remembering it: the sudden, sharp clarity as a fog burned away; her hand on the matches, her spark in the tinder; and a voice in his soul telling him, look.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think it sounds futile at all.”
She took her time packing her things neatly away. “I passed a post office earlier—Muggle post, but the vial will make it to my flat, and I’ll let someone know to collect it.”
“Where will you go?”
“Portugal, maybe.” She smiled wryly. “Don’t worry. There are enough hiding places in this part of the world without intruding upon yours.”
Draco had an over-practised denial ready for this moment. He only had to peel up his tongue to recite it.
He said instead: “The post office closes soon.”
“Do you send a lot of Muggle mail, then?”
“Everything closes early here. I’ve become quite the layabout.”
Outside, November’s best effort was a comfortable chill, and Hermione hugged her coat to her chest as he held the door. Their paths diverged from this point: right to the post office, left to a quiet back garden, book in hand.
They lingered at the point of separation, the wind tugging at their ankles.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not cursing at me on the bridge. Or laughing.”
“I considered fleeing,” he admitted.
“I would have too.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“No. But I’d have wanted to, certainly.”
A gust danced through her hair, coiling it over her eyes, shrouding her in a tangle of threads. She slipped her coat on to tuck it under the collar.
“Goodbye, Granger. I hope you find your keys just where you left them.”
Earlier tears had left her eyelids heavy and soft. They fluttered twice before opening onto his face.
She said, “Will you tell me why you’ve been living in this tiny Spanish village? You can count on me never to share.”
His lungs filled with earth-scented air. “Chasing fairer weather.”
He wondered what she saw that made her smile like that.
“It suits you.”
The wind flowed between them, and pulled them apart.
***
A package arrived two days later.
His landlady brought it, along with a tea-towel draped plate that turned out to convey a sugar-dotted larpeira, and she bustled around his kitchen—slicing through the crosshatched custard to serve them each a wedge of the sweet flat bread, shovelling ground coffee into his stovetop percolator, peppering him with questions in rapid Galician that he pretended not to understand—all while casting obvious inquiring glances at the box at the centre of his kitchen table.
Alone, he opened it over his bed, and caught the apple in his hand as it tumbled out.
Beneath that was a folded paper. Not a letter, but a page sliced neatly from a book.
In the margin, she’d written:
You’re easier to find than you think—one need only ask any woman in town.
And below that—
For several minutes, he stood without moving to read the story of his river; about Lethe, daughter of Strife, who offered oblivion as her blessing. About her waters, which cleansed the dead of their memories, and delivered peace through forgetfulness.
He read of the land’s first settlers, the ancient Celts who forgot their war as they stood in the stream, and seeing no more use for them, traded swords for pickaxes. He read of the pilgrims, supplicating nothingness, and in him stirred a strange familiarity, as though the page was an account of his own life, newly remembered, the lost pieces slotted into place.
When he was finished, he tucked the page beneath the apple on his bedside table, and turned over the empty package to look for a return address.
***
The portkey arrived by owl post. Hermione arrived by train.
He met her at the station across from the little stone church, anxiety gathering like fallen leaves while the regional stopper ticked into sight. Draco had never waited for someone before. He had always been the one to leave.
“You could’ve apparated,” he told her, when she’d found him easily on the empty platform.
“It was a little too far, and the geography a little too unfamiliar. I don’t mind.”
“Are you enjoying Porto?”
“Very much.” She looked dubiously at the gloves and scarf tucked under his arm, then down at her dark jeans and pale blue jumper. “Are you certain I’m dressed all right?”
He looked, too. There was new colour on her cheeks from a week of winter sun.
He said, “The chalet has extras of everything.”
“I can’t believe you casually have access to a chalet and aren’t living there instead.”
“I can.” He grimaced. “Signora Zabini is often in residence. She wears sheer robes and doesn’t knock.”
They tucked into a shadow at the end of the platform where the floodlights didn’t cut through the gathering dusk. Draco took out his wand—they glanced around, but they were alone—and tapped it to his ear, then to hers.
“For the altitude change,” he explained, and untied a knotted handkerchief.
She took his elbow. Anticipation hummed through her fingers; it vibrated up his arm and over his chest, and his stomach tightened and flipped even before the portkey snatched them away.
In the Aosta Valley, the house was sheltered by the Graian Alps on one side and a thicket of pines on the other, like a sanctuary for endangered plutocrats and untouched snow. Zabini magic kept the odd skier off its slopes, house-elf magic kept the pantry stocked and the fire roaring, but it was the land’s own beauty that struck like a spell more wild and powerful than anything else, every time he saw it.
He stood in the great room, hands tucked in his pockets, while Hermione turned out the contents of a cedar chest.
“I know snow is cold,” she said, passing over a mink stole in favour of an ice-grey scarf of thick cashmere. “It’s essentially frozen sky water. But how cold? I remember walking to Hagrid’s in the middle of a snowstorm, but nothing of the actual experience. Is it soft? Does it melt when you catch it? Am I wearing enough now?”
Draco couldn’t help it. He laughed.
“You won’t catch anything but heat exhaustion under all that fur.”
“But—”
“Your answers are outside, Granger.”
Still, she hesitated at the threshold, wobbling slightly in her over-large parka and borrowed boots. “I’d promise not to cry again,” she said, looking at him doubtfully, “but I don’t know myself these days.”
The door opened. They entered a new world.
There were no tears, only a hard bright focus as she cut through the valley, silent as a knife. In the centre of the clearing, she turned in a slow, searching circle, as though she could burn this moment into her mind for safekeeping.
And Draco, who remembered it all, looked with a stranger’s eyes upon the cold-air hush, the sacred stillness, the white flat blanket glittering under a black sky. He followed in her wondrous, spinning wake, trailing down her trodden path to leave her the soft crush of new snow, and everywhere her feet fell were the maiden steps across an untouched planet.
She bent to cup a handful of dry powder, and brought it loose and crumbling to her nose.
“Before you start eating it,” Draco warned, “I ought to tell you that isn’t something most people do.”
A laugh framed her in a wreath of white fog. She unfastened her parka to let it drop from her shoulders, then sank down, arms spread, into a bank.
Alarmed, he began, “Granger—”
“I just want to feel it.”
“Stop romanticising frostbite. At least do a warming charm.”
“You’re terribly fussy.” She patted the neighbouring snowdrift. “Come try it.”
He kept his coat but joined her, and when they were lying side by side in twin cradles of snow, the first stars of the evening flickered shyly overhead.
Into the hush, she said, “Do you ever think magic keeps us from feeling things the way humans are meant to?” She saw his look, and explained, “Pain is a useful warning: fire burns us, and we learn not to touch it. Yet entire disciplines of spellwork centre around the dulling of sensation for convenience’s sake.”
“I’m surprised you’d ask me that. You’re not worried I’ll trot out the old party line, insist magic is might?”
“I saw your face when we stepped outside. This is the magic.”
Draco held the reflexive correction in his chest, where it warmed him: You are.
He said, “It’s a fundamentally human instinct to shelter ourselves from pain. We just have more tools at our disposal.” And that might have been all, had he not understood with sudden clarity that he had left his shelter for the first time in months, and had felt no pain but the pleasant sting of ice beneath his collar. Fumblingly, he added, “I didn’t—drink of the River Lethe and forget who I was. I didn’t go there hoping it could all be washed away.”
“I know. That wasn’t why I sent it.”
He said, “Why, then?”
Her face was open to the sky. “I just thought you’d find it interesting.”
They breathed together.
“I did.”
An hour later, lush with warmth and the comfort of spell-dried clothes, Draco contemplated the boiling point of milk over a copper pot of melting cocoa, while Hermione, expressing a wish to lounge before the fire, sat with her journal in her lap and her hair falling in a curtain all around.
On approach with two steaming mugs, he said, “You’ve written a novel.”
The pages were black with fresh ink. At the end of a final line, she capped her pen with a satisfied click. “I’m not letting myself lose a single detail this time.”
Scalded milk sloshed over his thumb, and he hissed. “Could that happen? Would you forget again?”
She hesitated.
“It hasn’t yet.”
“Let us trust in the healing properties of river muck.” He nudged the journal aside and replaced it with a mug. “Did the vial make it safely? I don’t know how long it takes a package to travel to England via Muggle post. Months, one assumes.”
Hermione smiled faintly. “Harry wrote. Everything’s already underway—the potion will be ready on the solstice.”
“I imagine he’s not pleased to learn you’ve absconded.”
“Probably not.” Her chin lifted fondly. “But he understands me.”
“And—Weasley? The—the male one?”
“Happily preoccupied with his new fiancée.” Steam scattered across her mug as she raised it. “It’s remarkable how that hurts less every time I say it. There really is no magic like time for healing heartache.”
Draco privately disagreed. Time was no magic, just a thief, and too soon it stole them from their snow globe sanctuary, because it was late, and they were a long way from home.
With his hand over the portkey that would return them to the train platform, she stopped him.
“Thank you,” she said. “For bringing me here.”
He’d been happy to, but knew if he said as much, it would come out like a private confession, so he nodded.
“Can I ask why you did?”
“I saw snow on your list, and you weren’t likely to see it in Porto unless you conjured it.”
This seemed to perplex her. Her thumb toyed restlessly with her notebook’s crimson cover.
“Well …” Some mental scale tipped. “I shouldn’t ask, but I have a few weeks until I go home. This is probably an imposition, but if you’d like to—”
“Yes.”
***
Back on their bench overlooking the Lima River, Draco held her journal open on his knee.
Wand core—unicorn? Most of fifth year arithmancy.
“You said these were trivial.”
He turned the page.
Summer at the Burrow, 2003. First kiss.
With growing suspicion, he flipped backwards in time to the first pages, an agitated account of the days following the accident, and read:
What time is that blasted departmental meeting?
They’d found a fossil on the bank, a knut-sized arthropod trapped eternally in a wedge of rock, and Hermione had carried it to the balustrade to examine under direct sun. She glanced at him and abandoned her study.
“Oh, no. What’s that look?”
“You didn’t tell me it’s been getting worse,” he said.
She sighed. “If you’re going to say I shouldn’t be travelling alone with a severe memory impairment, I must inform you I was subjected to that speech at least half a dozen times before I left.”
“Hm. I’d have snuck away, too.” He tucked his thumb between the pages and rose to join her. “How much more will you lose?”
“I don’t know. Maybe by the time the potion is ready, I won’t even know what it’s for. Maybe everyone’s right, and I ought to be sitting in St Mungo’s, waiting for my cure to brew.”
He watched her trace the tight curl of the fossil’s back, some hardened creature guarding its belly for millennia.
“You’re not travelling alone. You’re with me.”
Casting a sidelong glance, she said, “That’s quite a burden to put on somebody who’s gone to extreme lengths to avoid other people.”
“It’s only for a few more weeks,” he said lightly. “My suffering will be brief.”
The river pulled her gaze downstream, away from him.
“Do you think …” She took a breath. “With so much of me missing, am I still myself?”
Draco wondered how long that had been working itself to the surface.
“Definitely not,” he said.
Her chin snapped up. “It’s the strangest thing. For a moment there, I nearly expected sympathetic reassurance.”
“Truly, how could anybody be themselves after forgetting”—Draco flicked open the page and squinted—“what was surely a life-altering performance of the Australian Pops Orchestra?”
Hermione reached for the journal, but he pressed his height advantage.
“You don’t stop being you when you change, Granger. Come on. I know where we’ll start.”
That evening, as the closing crescendo of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto orbited the Palau de la Música Catalana’s stained glass sun, Hermione brought her mouth to his ear to whisper, “I don’t want it to end.”
An hourglass overturned in his chest.
The solstice had seemed ages away. Now he counted their remaining time in seconds, and each fell heavily and irretrievably downward.
“It doesn’t have to,” he said. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
***
Draco approached her memories like a challenge he could win.
In Paris, a guidebook tucked in his pocket, they trailed a group of Muggle tourists across the city in an exhausting recreation of the family holiday she couldn’t remember.
“I’m sure I never did this with my parents,” she objected, when he ushered her to the Louvre’s private entrance for an after-hours tour.
“No rule against new memories,” he said, pulling her inside.
They stayed for hours. Hermione wandered, pen in hand, and Draco teased her for copying down placards like she expected to be quizzed later, and listened to her monologue on ethical procurement, and debated vigorously over opinions he didn’t care about—while inside his chest, the sands of the hourglass fell, and fell.
Half their time was gone, then most.
On a cloudless night in Finland, days before she was due to leave, they stood awash in neon luminescence as the aurora borealis blazed overhead. The pinks and blues stretched between horizons in a dizzying gradient, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from her to look.
Hermione spread her arms like she could gather it all up to keep. “I wonder if I’ve seen anything like this before.”
His heart thudded painfully.
“Maybe you have. You’ll know soon.”
For a long moment, there was no sound but the rustle of trees.
She said, “What are you doing for Christmas?”
Draco hadn’t made plans. It hadn’t seemed important. Christmas came after, in that unconsidered wasteland of time after she returned to London.
“My landlady extended a rather threatening invitation,” he said. “Apparently there’s an unwed daughter she wants me to meet.”
“I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”
“Probably. She’s forty, and thrice divorced.”
Her laugh was short and empty.
Draco forced himself to say, “You’ll be home by then.”
The silence this time lasted minutes, and when she finally gave her answer to the shimmering lights, he thought he had misheard.
“There was a problem with the potion,” she said.
“What?” Alarmed, he took her shoulders, and squeezed her attention down from the sky. “What does that mean—a problem?”
“They need another week. Maybe two.”
Her eyes seemed too wet in the cast-off glow.
“Granger,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Anyway, I’ve hardly forgotten anything new, so a short delay won’t matter. And—we can make use of the extra time. There are still a few on the list that seem doable.”
Another week, maybe two. His fingers twitched in shock at the unexpected riches.
“No,” he agreed. “We won’t waste the time.”
In tangled Venetian alleyways, they picked cicchetti from glass cases and ate their crostini and potato croquettes overlooking misted canals. They weaved through the red-tented merchants of the Striezelmarkt, sipping mulled wine from paper cups. Scaled the belfry in Bruges to hear carols played on tower bells.
On Christmas day, she joined him at his landlady’s home, and took his arm whenever the eligible daughter turned curious eyes in his direction.
Back on their bench, they traded gifts—souvenirs purchased on their trips, trinkets bought behind each other’s back—and she didn’t mention the potion again.
Draco closed his hand over the hourglass and didn’t ask.
***
On New Year’s Eve, he took a portkey to London, unaccompanied.
Hermione was surprised to learn he had plans, but not displeased, and happily announced her intention to ring in the new year with a book and a long bath in her hotel room.
Alone in his discontentment, he arrived outside Pansy’s flat with a bottle of blanc de blancs and no intention of staying past midnight. Resentful of the lost time, resentful of the coercion employed to bring him there, he knocked hard and was over the threshold before he remembered to be nervous.
There was a brief hush as he entered.
Theo broke it first, in a stage-whisper audible from the other room: “Don’t stare at him—he’ll leave!”
And Draco felt warmer than he had in some time.
They’d grown happier in his absence—individually, collectively—but not in a way that made him itch for the exit. Their circle opened easily for him, and he was back in the middle, buoyed by it—as if no time had passed, but everything had changed. He couldn’t stop himself from cataloguing the differences: the shadows gone from Theo’s eyes; the moony, love-drunk look that kept creeping over Pansy’s face when she spoke about the pilates instructor she’d recently met; the deep contentment pouring from Blaise that wasn’t explained until Ginny Weasley, having arrived late, tucked herself on his lap like she belonged there.
Blaise found him loitering by the bar with ten minutes left in the old year.
He accepted a refill in silence and frowned severely at a bowl of olives before finally muttering, “I’m surprised you showed up.”
Draco blinked. “I didn’t think it was optional. Your terms were very clear.”
“Then I’m surprised you agreed to them. You must have really wanted the use of my chalet.” His brows lifted. “You’ve also called in quite a few favours for portkeys lately, from what I’ve heard.”
“You notice too much,” Draco said, and tipped his glass towards Ginny, leading the group through the steps of a country jig. “But I’ve missed a lot. Never thought I’d ascribe the words disgustingly happy to you.”
Blaise didn’t return the offered smile.
“That happens,” he said frostily, “when you disappear for nearly a year.”
Pansy’s shriek interrupted—Theo had drunkenly spun her too near the wall.
Draco began, “I need to apologise,” but was dismissed with a sharp wave.
“Save it for when you come back. You haven’t yet, have you?”
Draco hesitated too long and felt Blaise’s attention drift back to the whirling, laughing crew and the woman at the centre, her red hair floating out behind her like a matador’s cape as she twirled.
“I should have written sooner,” he said.
“Yes,” Blaise said. “You should have.”
But the ice in his voice had thawed, and he turned back to give Draco an appraising look.
“You seem happier, too. I wonder if that has anything to do with the long, curly hair the elves found when they tidied the scarves. Not yours, I presume.”
Feeling absurdly like a child caught sneaking extra biscuits, Draco said, “You didn’t ask.”
“I still won’t. I don’t care. I only care about that woman right there.”
Draco didn’t know what to say, so said nothing, and was glad that his mouth was firmly shut when Blaise continued, conversationally:
“Hermione Granger’s gone missing.”
“Oh,” he said stupidly, after a beat.
“Ginny tries not to let on, but I can tell she’s worried. Granger apparently caught a very nasty bit of experimental magic at the hands of some junior Unspeakable. It’s reversible, though. The ministry had experts from all over working on the cure.” He glanced sidelong at Draco. “Only, when they finished it, Granger refused to show up. Cited some objection to the treatment, said she wanted more time. Now she won’t answer her letters, and no one knows where she is.”
Draco’s skull felt thick with confusion and wine.
“Oh,” he repeated. Then, “No, sorry, what?”
Flat on his back on the sofa, Theo bellowed, “Three minutes to midnight!”
“When you took off,” Blaise said, “Pansy wanted to track you down. Your mother threatened to send the Aurors after you. But I knew you’d be back when you were ready.”
Ginny had spotted them from across the room, and held her hand open for Blaise’s with a sure, steady look that made Draco’s heart ache with something he could not name.
Blaise flashed a smile, rare and true. To Draco, he said—
“Nothing’s solved by running from it. That goes for Granger, too. Maybe tell her that, if you happen to see her.”
***
Her patronus woke him from champagne-tinged dreams.
It scaled his bed and kneaded his pillow with tiny paws until his eyes focused on the small, anxious face. It spoke in her voice, but it was not her voice—he had never known her to sound so frightened.
“Can you come?” the otter said. “I—I need help.”
Barely a minute later, Draco was in the park she’d described, half a kilometre from her hotel. He’d barely paused to dress; hadn’t paused to think, or worry, or even consider what he’d find when he arrived, his wand gripped tighter than he had in years.
But it was only Hermione, alone on the steps of a stone gazebo, head cradled in her hands.
His heart wouldn’t calm.
“Are you— Did someone—”
She looked up, and he knew she’d been crying.
“Will you take me home?”
The question turned him inside out. Did she mean England? In a burst of panic he realised the manor had been his first thought, and he knew no matter how hard he flung himself into the river, no matter how long he stood on its shores and drank from cupped hands, it would always, always carry him back there.
Draco stooped to pull her into his arms, and apparated them back to the room he’d left just minutes before.
The bedsheets were a disaster. Hermione sat, unnoticing, on his still-warm mattress.
“Will you tell me what happened?” His throat sounded raw. “Please. I can’t take it.”
Hollowly, she said, “Every morning I walk to a cafe in Ribeira. Today I couldn’t remember how to get back.”
Dread coated his tongue like acid.
“What else did you forget while the cure waited for you back in London?”
Her misery was consummate. Wordlessly, she reached for him.
“Why did you lie?” On the bed beside her, he took her hand between his, and felt the slow softening of her body as pretence drained away.
“Is it so wrong that I wanted more time?”
“Yes,” he said severely. “When it means neglecting your well-being, yes. When it means worrying the people who care about you, yes. Granger, why are you hiding from your friends?”
“They’d only tell me to go home. Drink the potion. Get better.”
“Go home,” he said. “Drink the potion. Get better.”
She reached up and brushed his cheek, softer than a wish.
“Sometimes I think the cure is worse than the disease.”
Draco shook his head, not understanding, and she said, “What will happen to you when I go? You’ll be alone again.”
Her fingers trailed down over his chin, into the dip of his throat. He felt them move as he swallowed.
He said, “This was my choice.”
And he told her.
It had been a bad few years for them all. On house arrest for most of it, Draco had felt half-feral by the time the Wizengamot had seen fit to release him back into the world. Blaise hardly spoke, Pansy was rarely sober, and Theo—
“Theo kept getting himself arrested. Mostly break-ins and petty theft, but eventually he was offered a choice between court-mandated mind healing or Azkaban.”
“How brutally effective,” said Hermione.
He nodded. “I think it saved his life. And I’m ashamed to say I begrudged him for it, because he refused to leave any of us alone in our misery. He even got Blaise of all people joining his sessions. I started staying home again just to avoid them, but then Pansy wanted to get sloshed on expensive wine for her birthday, so we went to Bordeaux …”
It was easier when he didn’t have to face her. He stretched back and looked up at the ceiling.
“Suddenly it was all anybody wanted to talk about. What had been done to us. What we had done. Theo acted as if it was a poison you could suck out. But it was bad enough that I had lived it—was still living it, all the time—and I knew it would hurt worse coming out … I just stood up and started walking. Took a Muggle train when I couldn’t think of anywhere to apparate to. At the end of the line, I took another, then another, and then I ended up here, and there were no more trains to take, so I walked to the river …”
“And you never left,” she guessed.
“The next day, I wrote to tell them I was staying. And that was it.”
The bed shifted. Nestled by his side, she asked, “Has it helped?”
Behind his closed eyelids, he saw her reclaiming memories like fallen diamonds, rejecting the terms of a curse that said she had to go even a month without knowing the fullness of her existence.
“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know how to believe there’s anything in this world that’s worth the pain of losing it. But I know you’re the exception.”
Deliberately, slowly—like they still had forever; like time hadn’t caught them while they slept—Draco turned his head. Her nearness thrummed in his chest like a second heart.
“Hermione.”
She was a warm breath ghosting along his skin, and he shuddered.
“This will only make it harder when I leave," she whispered, but her hands curled into his shirt.
“Let me—”
Let me go with you.
He didn’t know how to say it.
“Let me have you, just for today.” Their bodies found each other on the bed, pressing hard in a race to be closer. He drew his lips along her jaw, to the corner of her mouth, and murmured, “And I’ll personally deliver you to St Mungo’s in the morning.”
Their time was already fleeing, but Draco would not be rushed. He peeled away her clothing, marking every new inch for further exploration, until she gasped, and said, “Will you say my name again, just like you did?”
He obliged, pulling back to watch her face, and saw her eyes dim with a focus he knew well.
“Are you going to write that down later?” he teased.
“No rule against new memories,” she said, and kissed him.
That day in his bed, he prayed earnestly that he would never forget. Between her thighs, undone by his own want, he gave himself up in offering to Lethe—so that she wouldn’t wash the memory from his body, but let it live in his bones long after his death: of hands at his waistband, shaky with want; her knees on his ribs, his name on her tongue; the salt on her spine and the rhythmic sway of her hair; of the way her lips parted when he moved inside her—like he was new snow—like he was a bright tart apple, or a dazzling breach of colour across her black and empty sky.
Wrapped in her arms, Draco sank like a stone.
By morning, she was gone.
***
Draco trusted in solitude to catch and hold him, as it had all those months ago.
It didn’t.
He tumbled through the empty hours, paralysed with sorrow. A dozen portkeys sat on his bedside table, dull as pebbles, their magic spent—there was nowhere to go that she hadn’t been. Nowhere to hide where her ghost wouldn’t find him.
A knock at his door broke the silence, and he found Ginny Weasley on his step, looking startled.
“Shit,” she said.
“It’s not a good time.”
She eyed his dishevelled hair, yesterday’s rumpled clothes.
“No, yeah, I can see that. Here.”
A book hit his chest, and his fingers closed around the red leather spine before he knew what it was.
“She could’ve sent this by post if she didn’t want it anymore.”
“She wanted to,” said Ginny brightly. “But I’m faster. She wrote you a letter, too, which I threw away. That’s an awfully impersonal way to deliver bad news—try to appreciate that, when I tell you.”
He was too raw for puzzles. “Whatever it is, just say it.”
With the brusqueness of a healer, she sliced through the wound. “The counter-curse unwinds her mind to just before the accident. It was the only way they worked out how to bring her memories back—her brain can’t know what happened to it.” She nodded at the journal. “She won’t remember any of that.”
Draco’s fingernails bit into the leather. His mind was cold with shock.
“She—won’t remember—”
“You,” Ginny confirmed. “At least, not any of the parts you’d want.”
For a long time, he could only stare.
“She knew all along?” he finally managed, in a voice so strange and distant he didn’t know it.
Sympathy tempered Ginny’s expression. “That’s why she left. She said it felt like knowing her death in advance—that when she took the potion, the version of herself that existed now would die. And she didn’t want to waste her last weeks at home with everyone fussing over her.”
His anguish redoubled.
Dead.
The Hermione who had taken his hand through crowded streets—had kissed him senseless, dressed only in his blankets—was dead. Gone. She didn’t exist, and the person inhabiting her body now was worse than a stranger.
“Try not to blame her,” Ginny was saying. “She never accounted for finding something she didn’t want to lose.”
Brokenly, he nearly shouted, “She—she hasn’t lost anything. I’ve lost her!”
“If you want. Personally, I think she’s worth the effort, recent actions excluded.”
Draco didn’t understand. He could not staunch the endless bleeding of his heart.
She said, “You have the map right there. It’s your choice whether you use it. That’s why she didn’t want to tell you until after, so you can take your time. Figure out what you want, and whether that might be her.”
Ginny paused. Shrugged.
“I think that’s horseshit, so I came early. Do you think you can figure it out in the next two minutes?”
***
Her face was red and streaked, familiar and dear. She looked up, and an uncorked vial slipped from her fingers to the bed.
The hospital room emptied around them, marshalled by Ginny, and they stared at one another as the door closed.
“You idiot,” he said.
Hermione crumpled inward. “I know.”
“No you don’t, you selfish arse! The memory of us won’t die when you drink that potion. It’s living”—he clutched a hand to the centre of his chest, digging in—“right here. Burning and burning in me.”
“I know,” she repeated miserably. “But you get to choose. You could let this end, if you wanted. Go back to your life, and—put it out, so to speak.”
He was incredulous. “Hermione, you’re the sun. Who could ever put out the sun?”
His body ached to hold her again, and he was so tired of not doing what he wanted. He crossed the room and pulled her into his arms.
“Your notes had better be thorough,” he grumbled against her curls. “And you had better not chuck them at me when I try to convince you to read them.”
She sobbed, or laughed, and shook against him. “What if I’m horrible to you? What if I don’t listen?”
“I’m offended you don’t think I’m capable of winning you over.”
“I was afraid you’d decide not to try. I thought I’d lose you, and I wouldn’t even know.”
On a bench overlooking the river, she’d reminded him how it felt to live. He’d seen beauty, strange and inexplicable, and it had hurt—but it had been the pain of moving after a long time at rest, or of cold hands warmed by the fire.
He wanted that pain. He opened his arms and welcomed it back.
“You can’t lose what lives in you. And I am coming back home.”
***
At dusk, they donned gloves and boots and thick woollen coats, and left their shelter for the cold stone path. The Saint Lucia bonfires lit the night for miles, and they tucked into a coppice away from the spinning crowd, where the air was still warm and smelled of char.
He spread a blanket over the frozen heath, cushioned by a burst of warming charms, and their bodies grew flushed where they pressed together.
Hermione watched the blaze roar up to consume the sky.
“This feels familiar,” she said. “Are you sure I haven’t done this before?”
He stiffened, indignant. “Not with me. Is there some other solstice you don’t know about? Been lighting bonfires with somebody else?”
In the dark, beneath the crackle of flames, no one but Draco heard her laugh, or saw her turn into his touch.
“You have exclusive access to all my lost memories,” she promised.
“Mm.” His hand sought entrance at the hem of her sweater. “I’m not sure. Does this feel familiar?”
“If I say no, will you promise to remind me again?”
He found her warm skin, the thundering beat of her heart.
“Always.”