Draco turned out of his apparation, away from the scene of the garden of his Aunt Andromeda's cottage and toward a dark side-street in west London. The pleasant country evening weather was replaced with a rainy city night. Hermione's arm was still hooked through his, and she stumbled into his front as she followed him, face to face on the pavement. The dampness was raising the scent of pomegranate from her hair, just below his face.
Hermione gasped as cold raindrops hit the warm, bare skin of her arms and legs in the little red cocktail dress she had been married in. She reached for her bag but Draco had already shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her. Her breath caught, her lips parted as she watched his hands smoothing the jacket over her shoulders and arms.
He was lovely as always, but nervous, turning Andromeda's wand in his hands now. "Upside down," he said, sniffing a laugh. Her hand darted out to help but he told her, "Keep still and stay dry while I get this wand to act like an umbrella. Won't take a minute."
Yes, it must be nerve-wracking, starting a family at age eighteen, mid-war, with a notorious undesirable. Nerve-wracking and so sweet that Hermione rose on her toes and kissed his cheek as he fumbled with the wand. "Thank you," she said, low and a little husky.
The umbrella spell unfurled from the wand. Beneath it, they stood close, and she wiped at a raindrop beading on the front of the well-pressed, re-tailored white shirt Andromeda had given him from Ted's wardrobe. At Hermione's touch, the water seeped through the shirt's fibres, cold and revealing the tone of his skin through the wet fabric.
Draco sucked in a breath and pinched the lapels of his jacket closed around her. "We'd better get inside."
She said nothing, but kept glancing at his profile outlined against the yellow streetlights as they hurried toward 12 Grimmauld Place. Approaching the house without the Fidelius spell in place felt wrong to her in every way. It was no longer a place of safety. That much was clear when Draco extended his arm, scarred by the Dark Mark, and twisted the handle to open the door.
He went through the first, sneaking up on his Great Aunt Walberga's portrait to be sure it was covered. Today of all days, he wouldn't have Hermione called slurs in the House of Black. Not to mention his not wanting to risk Walberga telling anyone that Potter's Mudblood companion had been back to Grimmauld.
Draco took her hand to lead her inside. But the glass from the smashed transom window was strewn all over the front step and across the floorboards of the vestibule. In her thin-soled, delicate wedding shoes, Hermione slipped on a shard as it cracked beneath her feet.
Draco hissed and lunged to steady her against himself. Both her arms were around his neck as she examined the floor beneath them, looking for better footing in the dimness.
"I'm alright," she said. "Trust me, I've had worse going than this."
Draco knew it must be true, and it raised an ache in his chest. This beautiful, astonishing creature – she was right when she told him months ago that he was easily seduced. She had yet to do anything especially provocative, but it didn't matter when he found everything between them provocative.
"Leave it," he said, heaving a sigh and sweeping her into his arms, carrying her over the glass. She bit back a squeal as he made a swift turn sideways to march them into the house. "There," he said. "You've managed to get yourself full-bridal carried over a threshold on your half-wedding day. Very clever."
She was laughing into his neck. "I promise you, I didn't plan it this way," she said. "But it is rather perfect of you."
He answered with another sigh, his breath shaky with the shiver she'd been raising speaking so close to his throat. Here he was, setting her back on her feet in front of the Black Family Tapestry when what he wanted was to whisk her up the stairs to the bedroom he'd tidied the last time he was here, as if something deep inside him knew then that coming back here with her was his destiny.
No, that was randy foolishness. But it was difficult to resist when he was newly married, unchaperoned, wearing a revealingly wet shirt, and had just untucked his hand from the bend of unthinkably soft skin at the back of his bride's knee. He was trying to remember how important it had been to him that they leave this marriage unconsummated for a while – a little while, maybe a very very little while.
He gave his head a hard shake and set about lighting a single flame in a sconce on the wall.
"Here we are," Hermione said, crouching to get a closer look at the section of the tapestry with the faces of people she knew. "Oh look, it's baby Teddy. There's even a bluish tint to his hair. And that's Ted Tonks. I saw him once but we didn't exactly meet. Poor Andromeda. I've only had a husband for three quarters of an hour, and I can't imagine how gutted..."
She trailed off as Draco crouched beside her, taking his jacket from her shoulders and replacing it with his hand, hot and open on her side. She had come here intent on seducing him, ending this ridiculous notion of half-marriage, but every time she moved toward him, he was already there. Maybe, she wondered, she had been the one being seduced all along...
She cleared her throat, refocusing on the tapestry. "Oh, and here we have Bellatrix. And that's her husband?"
Draco grumbled. "Husband in name, yes. Dear Uncle Rodolphus. Two years of living in the same house and I've hardly heard him speak a word."
Hermione extended a finger to track lower, toward the family of the youngest of the Black Sororal Triad, Narcissa Black Malfoy's family – now her family. "Here we are," Hermione sang, scratching at a blank spot below Lucius and Narcissa's images. "No trace of my face yet. But – oh, that's a rather strange likeness of you, isn't it? Something about the cheeks and eyebrows is rather..."
"Medieval," he finished, standing up. "I look like I'm sick almost to death – or terribly annoyed."
She snorted a laugh. "It must be based on your looks during sixth year. You were still a beauty, but not altogether..." She stood tall, laid her hands on either side of his face, and squashed his cheeks, trying to get him to look like the tapestry.
Above his contorted cheeks, Draco raised one eyebrow. "Can't wait to see how the tapestry makes you look."
"If it ever shows my face at all," she said, looking hopefully at the empty space in the Malfoy zone.
He held her chin, turning her eyes to his. "It will. Just you wait, Granger."
Her hands drifted away from his face, running over the lines of his neck and shoulders, tracing his chest from below the swell of his pectorals to his shoulders and down again. He inhaled deeply, his ribs expanding beneath her hands. She'd touched these parts of him before but never like this. Her hands were open, possessive, something demanding in their pressure raising heat between them.
"Granger?" she said, her slow, purring tone matching her touch. "That's not my name anymore."
Draco cleared the fog in his head with a click of his tongue. "Now, we talked about this," he said, trying to be stern with his voice while his body leaned into her. "Half-married. No shared names. Not yet."
"Not yet," she echoed as if she could hardly stand the words. She was standing so close her feet were between his, her hip pressing against his on one side. "There's no reason why, at least when we're alone, you can't call me by something a bit more intimate than my father's name."
He hummed, clasping his hands in the small of her back. "Hermione then?"
She shook her head. "No, it's not intimate when just about everyone calls me that."
"Ah," he said, turning his head to breathe into her ear. "Psyche."
She shivered openly now, the push and pull between them delightfully excruciating. He knew what she wanted. But what was he after himself? She would tease a little more. "Don't you 'Psyche' me," she said, wagging a finger. "I'm not Psyche. You are. We've been over this."
"Yes, you're right," he said, snatching her hand with the raised finger, spinning her around to face the tapestry again. "I will call you 'darling' for now, and we will watch this tapestry a little longer before I take you back to Shell Cottage for the night, so – Granger!"
As he'd spun her around she had used the momentum to fall back into him, pressing her spine against his chest, her head under his chin, nestling all of the curves on the back of her into every bend in the front of him.
Take her back to Shell Cottage indeed...
She kept hold of his hand and pulled him forward as she stepped back, holding him between herself and the wall, as if they were two spoons stood on end.
He might have tried to speak something more than her name, but the sound was barely a grunt.
She hummed as she moved against him. "This is nice. I could watch this big ratty curtain swaying in the breeze for quite a while if you'd keep holding me like this."
He let a rough breath out his nose to try to relieve some tension. It did not have the effect he intended, tickling her neck and setting her wriggling against him, pressing closer. A small moan escaped him as he bowed his face into her hair. His hands were on her hips, fingers clawing over the gathers of her skirt, settling her more firmly, more perfectly into his lap.
But she was spinning out of his arms, leaving him flushed and unbalanced on his feet.
"It's been an extremely eventful day, hasn't it darling? I'm going to set up someplace for us to get some rest for the night." With a swish of red satin and georgette, she set off toward the drawing room.
As usual, he took a moment to compose himself before following. Her confidence in who was seducing whom was restored and she called back into the hall as she felt her way through the drawing room lit by nothing but streetlight from the window. Even in the dimness, she could tell the room was a terrible mess.
"This is where I slept the last time I was in this house," she said. "There were two sofas here. One for Harry, one for me, and Ronald lying on the floor between us."
Draco was in the doorway, his hands hooked on the trim overhead as he leaned into the room. "This is where it happened?" he said. "This is where you held hands in your sleep with Weasley?"
She turned on her heel to face him. "Why the tone, darling? You laughed it off as if it was absolutely nothing when I first told you about it. Said it wasn't even as sensuous as cuddling that barn cat that took a fancy to you."
He crossed the floor, taking her elbow. "Never mind Weasley's gutless nonsense. You are not sleeping here tonight. This isn't a safehouse anymore, and you don't even have a working wand."
She pulled her elbow out of his grip, folding her arms across her middle. "Your half of the marriage can sleep wherever it wants tonight. My half is staying here with Bellatrix Lestrange's wand to monitor that tapestry until it works."
"There's no guarantee that wand will start to work in time to fend off any trouble you might get into during the night," he insisted, not flirting anymore, earnestly worried.
"Then take responsibility and stay with me," she said.
He clenched his eyes shut, and as he did, her push became a pull again. She stepped into him, crossing her wrists behind his neck. With a soft laugh, she said. "Draco, we don't have to ravish each other and un-half our marriage just because we're spending another night together. How many times have we spent entire nights alone under your cloak before now? Hm? It's always been sweet and modest – "
He gave a laugh like a cough. "Sweet and modest? Yeah, that was before your cuddling repertoire included straddling me, or putting your arse in my lap."
She tipped her forehead against his chin, her voice high and falsely innocent. "It seemed like you liked it well enough."
"Liked it?!"
"All I'm saying," she went on over his sputtering, "is that I'm staying here tonight. You can do as you like."
His hands rose to her hips, and she felt him pulling again, something unsettlingly mischievous in his expression as he looked down into her face. "Right. Fine. And as luck would have it, the last time I was here, I cleaned one of the bedrooms upstairs. It should be comfortable enough for us for one night."
She tipped away from him. "How did you find time to do that if you were occupied with restoring the tapestry?"
He shrugged.
"You had time to clean a bedroom but not to restore Sirius's image to the tapestry, even though you knew how much it would mean to Harry, let alone to Remus and the rest of his family?" Her voice was rising, more with suspicion than with anything else.
Draco pawed her in a sloppy hug. "Oh, I didn't do the restoration myself. When did I say that? No, I wouldn't know the first thing about magical antique textile restoration. I brought Pansy for that, of course."
Hermione pushed at his arms but they seemed to be everywhere, inescapable. "You were alone here with Pansy Parkinson?"
"Alone in the place where you made such nice memories of sleeping with Weasley? Yes, I was," he said, keeping her close.
"Pansy Parkinson, from your collection of girls you liked to snog at parties?" Hermione said, twisting in his arms. "Your date to the Yule Ball, with the backless gown that she couldn't possibly have worn with proper underwear?"
He laughed. "You noticed who I took to the Yule Ball all those years ago? I never knew you cared."
She was still twisting, grunting in a high, adorably perturbed way as he held her.
"You've got nothing to worry about, darling," he cooed into her ear. "In a rather convenient twist of fate, our Pansy has taken a fancy to your Weasley."
Hermione stopped struggling. "She has not."
"She has," Draco laughed against her throat. "She has this mad theory about Weasley and I being the same person raised in different circumstances."
Hermione raised her eyebrows, considering it.
Draco was suddenly alarmed. "Don't. Stop it. Stop thinking about it. Pansy's off her head."
But Hermione was narrowing her eyes, her face setting into its hard, thinking expression. "No, I think she may have something there – "
"She does not!" Draco said.
She was laughing at him, her arms around his neck again, swaying with him, taunting and playful.
His arms were suddenly forceful, stopping her movement. His face was fierce, close, and then he was kissing her, there in the drawing room, showing her how little he had in common with hand-holding-only Ronald Weasley. But it was suddenly much more than that – the first proper, passionate kiss of their married life. Ron and Pansy were far away. It was just Draco and Hermione, finding each other at the end of a mad day. The kiss was different, as if the magic Kingsley had used to marry them was potent enough to change them in ways they were just realizing.
Hermione hooked her leg around Draco's. His hand was on her thigh, edging beneath the hem of her skirt, pulling her closer and higher, rocking them both with the rush of intensity. Draco stumbled, catching himself on the piano behind her. His mouth stayed sealed to hers as the notes sounded in the quiet house. The chipped old piano keys were discordant, their tones sharp, the urgency of his desire for her made audible.
Hermione's hands were on his tie, unwinding it. Without a thought, his hand rose from the piano to work the knot open himself. Just one kiss, one tug at his clothes, and he was undressing himself for her. Their kiss was still unbroken and she smiled against his mouth, easing his shirttails out of his trousers.
But he was not so easily seduced as to be completely hopeless, and he turned his mouth away from hers, taking her hands before she could get them inside his shirt.
He gulped a breath. "Let me show you to the room upstairs," he said. "It's a better place to – to change into your pajamas and go to sleep."
She swallowed, her breath fast, eyes slightly glazed. "Wherever you want," she said. It was her who was stumbling now, following as he led her back into the hall, rushing past the tapestry without looking at it, not noticing the dark brown threads beginning to form a shape like a cloud next to Draco's.
His breathing had quieted to normal when they reached the door of the tidied room. It still wasn't what anyone would call clean but the window wasn't broken and Draco had vanished quite a bit of the dust and cobwebs.
Hermione laid her bag on the dressing table.
Draco gulped, turning his back to her. "Go ahead and get changed," he said. "I'll be over here using Andromeda's wand to conceal the bed. If anyone looks in, we'll be hidden behind the concealed curtains, no Disillusionment spells needed."
"Good," she said from behind his back. "No Disillusionment. I want to be able to see you."
He swallowed again, speechless, trying to remember the spell he'd promised to cast for them. In the quiet, he heard the buzz of a zip being pulled open. Hermione hadn't asked him to unzip her dress for her. He let out his breath, his hand on his chest to steady himself.
Why hadn't she asked him to do it for her?
As he finished casting the concealment spell over the bed, she appeared at his elbow, dressed in loose pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. He startled at the sight of her, suddenly so close.
"Oh, there you are. Don't you look – cozy," he said. He wasn't sure what clothes he had expected her to change into. It wasn't like she had any wedding night lingerie in her wardrobe. There was the billowing, gothic, white nightdress he may have fantasized about rolling down over her shoulders and dropping to the floor – not that anything like that should be happening tonight, but still...
She was smirking up at him, playing their game on a different tack, dressing non-threateningly, so he was less likely to resist when her fingers set to work on the buttons of his shirt. "You need to get out of this shirt. It's still cold and damp from the rain."
His breath hitched as she moved past his chest, to the buttons over his belt.
"There's a good darling," she said, both her hands on each of his shoulders, about to push his sleeves down his arms and leave him standing before her in just a vest and trousers.
Alarm flashed over his face. With the shirt gone, the Dark Mark was about to be revealed again, reminding them they were only ever an instant away from destruction, especially with only one functioning Triad wand within reach. With a flick of Andromeda's wand, Draco snuffed out the light as his shirt hit the floor.
Hermione kept on as if she hadn't noticed. In the darkened room, her fingers traced the scar Potter had left on his chest, the one the Dark Lord kept his mother from coming to the school to heal properly. It wasn't just a battle scar, but a sign of his parents' loyalty to the Dark Lord being greater than their loyalty to their son. Draco might explain all of this to his wife someday. For now, he was hoping that, one way or another, he wouldn't have to.
"One of the worst arguments I ever had with Harry was on the day he did this to you," she said, her touch light on the hard, raised ridge of the scar. "He was wrong. It was a mistake. You didn't deserve this."
Draco's shoulders slumped, a burden he'd carried for years sliding off them. His unmarked bare arm bent around her neck and pulled her into his scarred chest. That night alone in the Hospital Wing, knowing he was scarring, knowing Potter wasn't sorry, was desolate. And somewhere in the same castle, though he'd never been anything but awful to her, the heart of his future wife had been going out to him.
He pressed his lips to her ear. "I love you."
She stroked his back through the thin cotton of his vest, up and down. And on the second down stroke, she slipped her hand inside the fabric, against his skin. The touch struck her senses like a hit of a drug, and she sighed and swayed in his arms.
One sort of tension was leaving him as tension of another, better sort was building. But when her hand came out of his shirt and found his left arm, he tensed again, moving the arm and its mark away from her fingers.
She looked up at him, her chin pressed into his sternum. "Fine. I'll be Psyche for a moment," she began. "So listen to me. When Psyche's sisters convinced her to look at her husband in his sleep, they told her to expect to see a monster. But that's not what she saw. Her husband was different and maybe he would have frightened her sisters, but not Psyche. To her, he was pure love and beauty, and she was happy to see all of him."
Her fingers were moving over his arm again, tracing the rough, burned outline of the mark. With some effort, he kept himself from snatching it away from her, learning the feeling of having this flesh touched in tenderness again.
She was speaking, still as Psyche. "And when the people sent Psyche away from them to satisfy Cupid's angry mother, they thought of her as a human sacrifice, as a tragedy. But once she and Cupid were together, it was no sacrifice at all. It was her happiness. Psyche's whole happiness, not half of it."
Draco bowed his head until their foreheads met.
"Make me like Psyche, Draco," she said. "There's no sacrifice. I want you to have all of me."
He was tilting his head, relieved, exultant, perhaps giving in...
Just as a terrible racket sounded downstairs. At first it sounded like screams. Draco clutched Hermione, Andromeda's wand drawn. But she was quick to recognize the sounds as non-human voices.
"Cats," she said, still holding tight to Draco. "Non-magical feral street cats. They've got into the kitchen and they're fighting."
"I'll go," Draco said.
She hated it. "I'm coming too – "
"No, I'll just be a minute," he said, disentangling her arms from his vest. "I'll cast a locking spell over the doors too. I meant to do that before I got – erm, distracted."
With a frustrated whimper, she sprung up and kissed him. "Just hurry."
"Right," he said, smoothing her hair with his palm, kissing her one more time. "You stay here and stay hidden. I'll check the tapestry for your face on my way back."
Eyes accustomed to the dim light, Hermione watched him leave the room, his long arms almost luminously white. She reached for her bag again. "Why not?" she said to herself. "He's earned it." Her pajamas were replaced with the nightdress, which she had brought with her, of course, just as Fleur advised.
Without Draco or the rustle of changing clothes, the house was quieter than Hermione had ever known it – no Weasleys, no Hippogriffs, no foul mouthed elves or wailing Walberga, nothing bubbling on the stove. She couldn't hear the cats anymore either.
It was unnerving. In sock feet, she trod carefully to the bedroom door, cracking it open to look up and down the deserted corridor. Draco should have returned by now. Her quick heart rate had gone from being driven by desire to being driven by worry. She closed the door and dashed back to her bag. From its depths she withdrew the only wand she had, Bellatrix's. It might not work well yet, but if it was all she had to protect them, it would have to do.
"Lumos," she whispered.
There was a crackle of blue static at the wand's tip, and then the shattering of glass obliterated the quiet. The bedroom window was wrenched out its pane and onto the floor. A gust of cool air flooded the room and a dark shadow slipped through with it, quick and agile and rushing toward her. The wand bucked in her hand as she tried to aim it at the intruder, more rebellious than ever. She and the shadow were almost within reach. It loomed over her. She ducked to the floor, ramming her shoulder against its knees, knocking it on its back.
The dark shape fell with a thud, and somewhere in the noise, Hermione was sure she heard Draco's voice, groaning as if hurt. She snarled and clambered up the intruder's prone body, Bellatrix's mad wand jerking in her grip. It might not work properly but the wand might frighten whoever this was into letting her take Draco and go.
"Where is he?" she shouted at its head.
She was on top of the intruder, hands grappling until strong fingers closed around hers, enfolding the wand. As they did, the Lumos spell quieted, the light strong and even instead of strobing. Lying beneath her was Draco himself, panting between her knees, squinting up at her, confused.
"It's you," he said. "I thought someone else was here, but it's you dressed like a wraith all of a sudden."
"What are you doing coming through the window?" she demanded.
"I'm rescuing you."
She scoffed, extinguishing the wand. "Well, nicely done. And you're drenched."
He pushed himself to sitting, and as he did she slid down his body, coming to rest in his lap, her knees on either side of him, the night dress bunched near the tops of her thighs.
"I stepped outside after the cats and the door locked behind me." He dropped Andromeda's wand on the floor. "This concealment wand is no joke. I couldn't even find the lock to undo the spell I'd just cast." He was not only breathless but shivering, pulling at his soaked vest to tug it over his head.
Her eyes fixed on his completely bare torso, white in the darkness. His eyes were on her deep neckline and exposed shoulder above the white of her nightgown. And lower, their bodies were responding to the intimacy of their sitting position. She made a slight, experimental movement of her hips, down and forward. Draco blinked, his hand rising from the rug to rest on the smooth skin of her thigh. His fingers flexed, inviting her to move again, more intentionally this time, a slow drag.
He was shivering, and not from cold. Both of his hands gripped her thighs now, and he bowed his head to her bare shoulder, his mouth open. On their own, he could have resisted the Psyche story, the ambush, the nightdress, and maybe even the thighs. But altogether?
Her hands had tracked down his stomach, and she sat back slightly to find the buckle of his belt.
He hissed and tipped his head back.
She stopped, watching his face, his mouth open and eyes shut. "Can I? Please?" she said.
His throat moved as he swallowed.
She waited.
His hands ran up the outer edges of her legs, finding her waist through the bunched fabric and holding her as he struggled to stand without losing contact with her. "Yes, you can," he said in a voice like a growl. "But not on the floor."
He vaulted them through the bed curtains and onto the concealed mattress, out of the paneless window's draught. He was heavy on top of her, so much of his skin against hers, nothing but the crown of his head visible to her as he devoured her, working down from her collar bones. She plunged her fingers into his hair, held his face close but told him, "I – I'm not going to be any good. Not at first."
His voice was a low rumble like she'd never heard from him before, the words muffled against her tingling skin. "You're already perfect."
She gave a pained laugh, "Don't say that, or I'll know you're disappointed when I'm not perfect."
He left his mouth on her, pausing at the point in his downward descent where he would have had to do something to take the night dress out of the way. "Disappointed?" he tsk-ed, settling between the peaks of her knees. "As our year's best students, we know perfection comes through practice, repetition, putting in the – hours." His settling had assumed a rhythm, a rocking between her knees.
She arched to invite him closer, her fingers working his scalp, kneading his shoulders. "I do love homework."
"That's my girl. My perfect girl."
Her laughter turned into a squeal, and then a sigh, and then into something urgent, famished. A pair of rain-soaked trousers and a nightdress were tossed outside the bed curtains. In the ruins of Grimmauld Place, Hermione Malfoy and her husband were almost as close as they could be. He moved to come closer, impossibly close, and she trembled beneath him with desire and nervousness, but no fear at all.
"Slowly," she said into his ear, almost a chant, like a meditation. "Gentle and slow."
By then, he could hardly speak but he forced himself to repeat it. "So slow." The rest of him needed to hear his mouth say it, the parts of him raging to go fast. "Slow and – Psyche, I love you."