A Wonderful Fortuitous Love

62. My Hero

He doubted there were ever going to be answers to those questions, or that he would ever get the chance to say everything he’d wanted to tell her. Like that he’d always secretly liked her bushy hair and that while he thought nobility was frequently tiresome he also could not help but admire her for it.

Draco found Hermione in the last spot he thought to look. She was out on the balcony, sitting with her back to him at the metal table. In the distance as he moved to sit with her, he could hear sirens and cars and people and horns and other sounds that only came from a city. The lights in the distance were beautiful, as always, and for ten minutes they did not speak and only gazed out at the world below.

“Do you remember,” she began slowly, “the first time you and I came out here? You were sitting on the railings after Harry had left, not a care in the world whether or not you fell.”  

Draco could not help but smirk a little. “You cared though.”

“Only because if you fell I’d have a hard time convincing your parents it was by your doing.”

“I’m touched, Granger. Really.”

She looked towards the sliding door, at the empty living room within. Not literally empty, but empty because the furniture was normally used to drape Draco’s clothing over, or the coffee table that lacked the useless crap he was responsible for. It looked like it had at the start of the year, and the expression that passed over Hermione’s face as she realised this too was one he couldn’t understand, but knew that it filled him with a great sadness.  

“I’m going to miss you, Draco Malfoy,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

There was another pause, and in that pause he came to realise that no matter what he said to her tonight, he would always look back on this moment wishing he had said something different. There was no way to go about it, in all honesty. So he pushed himself from his seat, and started to head back inside. Granger’s voice stopped him before he reached the door.

“Did you mean it?” she asked standing from her chair, voice rising slightly to be heard over all the noise below them.

“Mean what?”

“That – that you loved me?”

He walked closer to her, saying as he did, “The only people I have ever said those words to are my mother and Blaise. And I was very drunk when I said them to Blaise.”

She smiled gently, her brown eyes moist. The smiled vanished as she spoke again. “Blaise said, in the hospital, that I should tell you. That it’d be crueller not to, to let you leave thinking I didn’t – didn’t –”

“Tell me what?” he asked.

“That I – I – I don’t know what those words mean; ‘I love you.’ But neither does anybody else.” Her was tone nervous and shaky. “But sometimes… sometimes I’ll look over at you, and you’ll be doing the most ordinary thing. Smirking at something you read in one of those Quidditch magazines, picking out mushrooms from my scrambled eggs, seeing you get lost in thought at something on the television. Things completely unremarkable, but I get this softening in my chest, and it feels like it’s swelling with something, expanding almost. And I guess what I’m trying to say is… is I think I love you too.” He stared at her, face completely blank, and Hermione rushed on to say, seemingly before she could back out, “And about what you said, when we were fighting, about how you’ve never been the hero, well…” Pause. “You’ll always be my hero, Draco. And I really wanted you to know that.”

Draco continued to stare for one, two, three more seconds. And then he was closing the distance between them, cupping her soft face in his hands before his lips claimed hers in a rough kiss. A kiss that was full of desperation and sadness and longing and pain. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him to her securely, and as he kissed her he tasted her tears, and this made his own chest ache with such raw emotion that both their moves became fiercer, urgent.