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jomiddlemarch · 5 months

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Sunt Leones

The first time Draco saw her, he didn’t recognize her.

Hermione Granger, whose face had haunted him for over thirty-five years.

The first time, he only saw a middle-aged brunette woman with her hair in a tidy bun, a plain smock with a badge over a jersey, a nameless volunteer at St. Mungo’s.

On the Janus Thickey ward.

The second time, he wasn’t sure.

It was her again, the same woman, but was it Hermione? It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her properly since the Battle of Hogwarts, he had, quite often in fact, since she’d risen in the Ministry to become a senior-level civil servant and he’d managed to rehabilitate himself with the help of ample donations to good causes, Astoria’s refusal to live at the Manor, Scorpius’s Sorting into Ravenclaw. His platinum blond hair fading to a non-descript pale grey hadn’t hurt, nor the rumpled, academic air he’d picked up during the year he spent teaching at Ilvermorny.

He was familiar with Hermione Granger, senior liaison to the Wizengamot, her neatly braided coronet a far cry from the riotous curls of her girlhood, the Golden Girl Maenad of his youth now entirely discreet, circumspect, so well-respected her divorce from Ron Weasley hadn’t made a scarlet woman of her, the author of a dozen consequential bills, the mother of two highly competent adults, both pursuing advanced studies, her son doing something like a Potions Mastery at Oxbridge without requiring any Muggles to be Confunded.

She wore opal earrings and tailored robes in navy or charcoal. She held your gaze without flinching. She carried her wand in her ringless left hand and cast wandless with her right. She smelled of bergamot, orris root, vetiver. She was resolute, poised, the epitome of competence.

He’d never seen her at St. Mungo’s. He’d never seen her crouching beside a patient to offer a plate of ginger biscuits. He’d never seen her pause and look across the room, her eyes unfocused, one hand balled into a fist.

He’d never seen her begin to cast a spell, the darkness collecting near the ceiling, and then pull it back.

He’d never seen the bright streak of silver in her hair like a Goblin-wrought filet.

Astoria would have told him to approach her and simply ask.

Astoria would have said he was being a bit silly, that she wouldn’t bite and if he were wrong, the woman would likely take it as a compliment.

Astoria would have smiled at him, but she’d been dead for over three years and he couldn’t bear to talk to her portrait, even if it hadn’t been hanging in their son’s suite.

He asked Mizzy for lemon biscuits and ate a plateful, brooding.

He considered Owling Neville, but it was end-of-term and the latest batch of venomous tenaculas were especially fractious.

He waited. He knew how these things went. He’d find out, if there were a third time.

There’d be a third time.

“Madam Granger?” he said, using the workplace honorific because it seemed far too presumptuous to use her first name, even though at arm’s length he was sure he was right. It was her.

“Not here,” she said. He thought she meant outside the day room on the Thickey ward, from whence the tinkling of the enchanted piano drifted, the spell too heavy on the bass clef, though he supposed that might make it easier to dance to, if one struggled to dance to a waltz in the first place. The witches and wizards he could see were all settled on sofas and armchairs, engrossed with dust motes or discussions, sometimes with others. Their conventional robes were cleverly modified to keep from tangling or tripping, easily secured by shaking hands, in the soft pastels one associated with the very elderly though half the people in the room were obviously under forty and half of those had scars no Healer could remove.

“The canteen?” he offered. St. Mungo’s wasn’t known for their cuisine, but the tea was passable as long as you didn’t rely on the cart, and he didn’t imagine either of them was hungry.

“I’m Jean here,” she said, tapping the badge above her heart with her finger. “No surname, no title.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s easier,” she explained. “To be no one of consequence. For those who’d remember. For those who wouldn’t, one name is simpler.”

He wanted to say she could call herself Nobody and she’d still be someone of consequence, that it was in her bearing and her expression, but he wouldn’t argue, because she might expect that and because it would be rude, even if he meant it to be praise.

“I see,” he replied.

“You want to talk, I gather,” she said. “The canteen will do for me, though I warn you the cakes are almost horrid.”

“Almost horrid?” he asked.

“They’re too bland to merit actual revulsion,” she said. “You probably aren’t familiar with something like that.”

“On the contrary,” Draco said. “I’ve been striving to achieve that status for the past thirty-odd years. But if you’re willing to sit down and talk with me, I would appreciate it.”

“Why are you here?” he said once two cups of tea sat between them, charmed to stay warm however long they sat. He didn’t expect it to be necessary.

“You asked me, if you recall,” she said. Her eyes were darker than he remembered, perhaps because of the shadows that lay beneath them. The drab volunteer smock she still wore did her no favors, while only inciting more questions.

“I meant, why are you here at St. Mungo’s? Why are you spending your precious free time volunteering on the Janus Thickey ward?”

Draco heard himself as she must have, his confusion masked by his drawl. She would assume he meant to be snide, had asked her to tea only to sneer at her.

“You don’t really want to know,” she said, gently enough given his provocation. “You think you do know, you think I’ve got some sort of martyr or savior complex. Or you think I’ve nothing better to do with my time, since my marriage ended, a pathetic divorcée filling the empty hours—”

“You think I am still a cruel boy who cannot bear your success,” he retorted, keeping his voice even, but the damage was done and hadn’t he done enough to this witch? She pressed her lips together and he took a breath. This wasn’t what he’d wanted, for her to withdraw from him, to expect him to try and hurt her. He began again. “I was curious, seeing you here. Healthcare hasn’t been one of your areas of reform, I didn’t know it was an interest of yours. It never occurred to me you would be here. Virtually incognito.”

“I’m not incognito. I’m Jean, I volunteer on Tuesday and Friday evenings, a dab hand at knitting charms, terribly fond of Kneazles. That’s true, even if it isn’t all I am. It’s enough here,” she said. “I’m not here because I’m lonely. Alone. Because I’ve no better offers—”

“I didn’t mean to suggest that,” he said. He’d wondered though, whether she wanted anyone in her life. Whether he might ever be someone she considered in that way. Draco could hear Astoria’s voice, amused, fond, repeating in that way and then reminding him she hadn’t wanted him to mourn for her for the rest of his life and oughtn’t he get back on the broom as it were. Astoria had only been clumsy when it came to Quidditch metaphors. “I saw you, from the hallway and I couldn’t believe my eyes—"

“I belong here,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” he replied.

“I spent three months here, right after the War ended, with my parents. Here, the Janus Thickey ward. I’d Obliviated them, to keep them safe,” she said.

“You did what?” he said, the realization dawning even as he spoke. She’d undertaken something he would never have dared, to keep her family safe.

“I Obliviated them. I removed every trace of myself from their memories, from their lives. Riddle would have had them killed, tortured first, to get to me. To get to Harry. I broke them first,” she said. “I always meant to bring them back. Casting the spell was difficult. Undoing it was harder. I couldn’t do it alone without killing them. It wasn’t clear anyone could.”

“Did they survive?” he asked.

She looked down at her hands, the ones that had done the work. Draco had often wished to cut off the arm with the Dark Mark emblazoned on it. He suddenly knew she felt the same about her right hand but it didn’t seem like Harry or her husband had ever talked to her about it the way Astoria had spoken to him. Quietly, patiently, without any determination towards success. There would have been nothing for Hermione’s parents to say to her, once they had been resurrected. She had to live with what she’d done; his brand had faded, but the weight of the casting could not be washed from her palm.

“Yes. They did. And they forgave me. But they still left Britain and won’t come back,” she said. “I thought, when they left here, St. Mungo’s, I’d never come back.”

“But you did,” Draco said.

“I was wrong. I thought I’d survived the War,” she said. “I didn’t understand right away I was another casualty. That I could leave this ward but I really wouldn’t.”

“Trauma, the Muggle Healers call it I think,” Draco said, very carefully, seeing now how vulnerable Hermione was.

“I mean the girl I was died in the War. The woman, the witch I could become, was murdered,” she said. “I’m what’s left, worse than a ghost or maybe less than one—”

“Hermione—”

“Jean,” she corrected. “It was already too late the first day I came to Hogwarts. When I thought everything was possible. When I thought there was a whole new world for me. That I was welcome.”

She shrugged. The boxy cut of the canvas smock emphasized how slender she was. She’d always been slight, likely hadn’t grown as she was meant to, the War stunting them all in myriad ways. She’d spent a year on the run in the woods with Harry and Ron, returning pale, a belt cinched tight around her waist, too slim, drawn too fine. He’d never seen anything as delicate as her wrist when Bellatrix tortured her. A parent now, he could see how she’d starved, how she’d held a burden too great, Ron supported by his clan, Harry by his two best friends and Dumbledore’s confidence. What had she had besides her own will?

“You might have been,” Draco said. “If you’d been Sorted otherwise, maybe along with Neville, if bloody Dumbledore had listened to McGonagall as much as Trelawney, if I—"

If I—what? If he’d had a spine? If he’d asked questions, listened to the portraits stuck in the far corners of the Slytherin common room, sought out his Aunt Andromeda, his cousin Tonks? He’d only been a boy as she’d only been a girl. Both of them had been set firmly on their paths by the adults around them, whether or not they were seen as pawns.

“I was going to die, the girl who had such infinite hopes, so many wishes, for the fact of my birth. She couldn’t survive if we were going to have a chance,” she said. She spoke as if the words carried a bitterness she was used to tasting. “Harry doesn’t understand. He says we won and look at what a wonderful life I have, such bright, beautiful, accomplished children, my career, all the good work I do—”

“It’s not what you wanted,” Draco said and that, of all things, made her lips curve, ever so slightly, into something like a smile. That, of all things, made him want her, ever so much. That she would admit it and to him, an intimacy he hadn’t anticipated. Couldn’t have let himself long for and yet, once again, had found himself given his heart’s desire.

“I can’t have regrets like that, can I? I can’t regret my children, nor my marriage. But I married the wrong man for all that I loved him. I can’t regret my children, but I regret I had them when I was barely older than a child. If I weren’t a witch, I wouldn’t have had a baby when I was at university. I would’ve gone to university and then to work, maybe an advanced degree, I would have chosen—”

“What?” Draco said. It had taken him the past thirty years to comprehend that the Muggleborn witches and wizards lost something when they crossed over. Over thirty years, he’d learned a little about what it was. But Hermione would have known something about it when she was eighteen. It had taken her until now to feel the full impact of that life she hadn’t lived in either England.

“I don’t know what I would have done. Studied, worked at, where I would have wanted to travel to. Discover. Here or there,” Hermione said. “I can’t say I ever had a chance to really figure out what I was most interested in, only what was most necessary for Harry’s survival. For my own. I don’t have a secret passion. It was all taken from me and I can’t ever get it back. Too late.”

Too late, she’d said, a witch who could live for another hundred years. Had anyone told her, reminded her? Had any of her friends noticed how she was suffering? Had she let them? She had not had to agree to talk to him, to sit with enchanted tea between them, she had not had to tell him about Jean and her parents, had not had to let him hear how angry she was and how despairing. Like calls to like, the Astoria of his memory said, and you’ve liked her for so long.

“D’you know, the divorce was Ron’s idea. He thought, if I wasn’t bound to him, it would be a gift. I could become myself. He loved me enough to give me that.”

“He’s more astute than I’d given him credit for,” Draco remarked.

Hermione laughed.

“You’d never given him a knut’s credit. Nor a ha’penny,” she said. “I don’t know why you thought I’d marry someone stupid. He’s very bright, it’s only that we’ve no interests in common beyond our children and he decided that wasn’t enough for me.”

“Why do you come here?” Draco asked again, after there’d been a long silence between them, long enough for the tea to grow cold if that had been possible. Hermione was looking down into her cup as if she’d divine something in the leaves. As if she’d ever given Divination the least credence.

“Because I need to see how much worse it could have been to bear how it is,” she said. “Who is cruel now, Draco?”

He looked at her, Hermione and also Jean, the grey in her hair evident, the grey she must glamour when she was not here, and he wondered about the other scars she carried. He knew about what his aunt had done, he’d heard rumors about how Dolohov had cursed her, and he knew what had been expected of her: an endless competence, an infinite hope, a gratitude for it all, the wand she’d killed with, the world that required her to mend it. What could he give her, not as a debt repaid, but as an alternative, the choice that had always been denied her?

They were old enough for him to get it right. He was not as brilliant a strategist as her husband had been, but he could play one final gambit.

“I haven’t heard you use my first name in over thirty years,” he said. “It’s a kindness I don’t deserve.”

“Haven’t you learned yet kindness isn’t deserved. Or earned?” she said.

“Haven’t you, Jean?” he said softly and reached out a hand to cover hers, except that she turned it over and grasped his, palm to palm. It was the old way of handfasting, but she wouldn’t know it.

(Though she’d been married to a Pureblood for twenty years and Draco had heard what store Molly Weasley put on the old ceremonies.)

“Hermione,” she said. “If we are beginning again, I’d like to be Hermione, I think.”

She kept going to St. Mungo’s every Tuesday night. After three months, she’d stopped going on Fridays and let him give her dinner at his flat, usually takeaway curry. After six months, she left the Ministry.

She dropped the glamour, learned Bactrian and Saka, bloodied her hands on thorns grafting roses for Neville. She wrote letters. So many letters. She only sent half of them and none by owl. She started writing a novel. Draco wasn’t supposed to be able to tell, but it was about Snape and somehow, also the Silk Road.

She invited their children to dinner. Rose shook Draco’s hand, Hugo hugged him, Scorpius brought Hermione an enormous bouquet of camellias. After the meal, they played Exploding Snap and Draco learned Rose was short for Rosemary.

She fell in love. Draco had been willing to wait but she caught up.

A year and a day later, after their friends and family witnessed the handfasting, Draco made the first toast.

To Jean.

#dramione fic #draco malfoy #hermione granger #take a lot of unresolved trauma and add one midlife crisis #middle-aged wizards #angst #fluff #rose weasley #hugo weasley #scorpius malfoy #astoria malfoy #canon au #no ron or astoria bashing #happy ending #artielu #st mungo's #in no way is this an endorsement of TERF JK

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