- NOT MY STORY! All credit goes to @morriganmercy on a03!
TW: discussion of hypothetical sexual assault including the word r*pe (nothing detailed)
Hermione woke early on the eighth day. She spent several minutes flipping through the hangers in her wardrobe, looking for her favourite fitted blouse. Once it was located, she took a bit of time to put on some makeup. Not for any particular reason; it just felt like a makeup sort of day.
Though Malfoy's closed door was in no way a reliable indicator of his presence inside the room, she still stepped over the creaky spot on the landing in case he was asleep. She padded quietly down the stairs, and her lips pulled into a soft smile as she eyed the chalkboard she had updated before bed the previous night.
4
She debated for a moment on what to have for breakfast but eventually decided on cereal again. She was standing at the counter, halfway through peeling a banana to slice on top, when she heard Malfoy on the stairs. A little thrill of excitement rippled through her, and she tried desperately to rationalize it in the few seconds before he appeared.
Any progress she made, however, was immediately obliterated at the sight of him. He was shirtless again, because apparently that was a thing now, and in grey sweatpants this time.
Hermione tried her best to give him a casual smile. "Good morning."
He returned the smile as he approached, and she looked back down at the fruit in her hands as he passed behind her.
Except that he didn't. He stopped behind her and braced his hands on the counter, bracketing her between his arms. She sucked in a breath as he leaned forward, pressing flush against her back. The heat of his bare skin enveloped her, and she dropped the banana as he kept pushing further, and further, until the granite edge dug into her hips with the force of him behind her. Her breath hitched as his hands swept underneath hers, smoothing up over her stomach.
"Good morning, honey," he murmured against her ear.
"D-Don't call me that," she breathed, her palms sliding flat against the cool surface of the counter.
He gave a disappointed hum as one hand came up to gather the hair away from her neck. "That's the fifth one you've shot down," he said with his lips against her skin. "I'm running out of things to call you."
"There's always my name," she reminded him.
"Hermione?" he purred.
Her eyelids fluttered shut. "The other one."
"Malfoy? Could get confusing."
"Gods, you're—"
Infuriating was what she had meant to say. But what came out was more of a strangled sigh as his fingers caught the hem of her blouse and slid beneath it. She melted against him as his hands teased across the band of her jeans, over her belly button, along the bottom of her ribs.
"Don't worry," he said, pressing a kiss just below her ear, "I still have a few more to try."
And then he was gone. As quickly as he came, he left her sagging against the counter with shaky arms and shockingly damp knickers.
Before he left the room, however, he stopped at the chalkboard to update their progress. As she watched him change the 4 to a 5 she couldn't believe how well things were going.
That really should have been her first clue that it was all about to fall apart.
***
About ten minutes after finishing her lunch, Hermione found a loophole.
It was buried in a footnote: a reference to another footnote in which the author of the original work's name was misspelled. One extra letter kept her cross-referencing spells from finding what they should have days ago.
Hermione spent the next several hours poring over every detail, examining every angle, determining exactly what would need to be done. She let the familiar single-minded need for information consume her completely, blocking out every confusing emotion that threatened to surface in the wake of her revelation.
Distantly, she was aware that Malfoy probably knew something was wrong. It had been days since she'd failed to leave her room for so long, and she couldn't bring herself to answer the door when he knocked to invite her down to dinner. She knew he wouldn't hear the sound of her Disapparating from her Silenced room, but once he noticed she was in the back garden, it would be painfully obvious that she had gotten there without having to pass through the house and see him.
But she couldn't worry about that. She needed space to think. The kind of space that only the warm night air and cloudless sky could provide.
***
The toe of her trainer scraped a rut below the swing as she sat there trying to come to some kind of understanding in her mind. She gripped the chains like lifelines as doubt threatened to drag her under.
She had thought that when she found a way out, she would take it no matter what. She would do anything, pay any price to have another option besides the path she was on.
But this...
"Need a push?"
She glanced up to see Malfoy leaning against the railing. He was backlit by the bright porch light, casting his face in shadow. That was probably the main reason she said, "Sure."
Her eyes dropped to the ground in front of her as he crossed the yard, and she didn't look up again until his hands pressed against her back. She lifted her feet and let him push her, the rhythmic creaking of the chains blending into the symphony of cicadas.
"Why do you still have this?" Malfoy asked.
She assumed he meant the swing set, and a reluctant smile tugged at her lips with the memory.
"My dad built it for me when I was younger," she said quietly. "Before we knew how much I would be gone for school. Gemma's older sister, Shannon, was my best friend growing up, and she still came over to play on it while I was away."
Hermione trailed her fingers over the links, lightly dusted with rust.
"It was hard for my parents to have me gone so much," she went on. "I think it helped my mum especially to have other kids coming round still. They had kind of an open-gate policy with the kids in the neighbourhood, and then once Gemma came along, she brought a whole new generation with her."
Malfoy listened silently behind her, still catching her momentum against his hands and pushing her away again.
"Where are your parents?"
Hermione swallowed. With as much snooping as he had done around the house, she was surprised he hadn't asked more questions before now.
"In Sydney," she answered. "Australia."
"What are they doing there?"
She could have said, being dentists, the same thing they had done in England, but she knew that wasn't what he was asking.
"Being away from me," she said. "Safe from the war."
Malfoy must have pushed her ten times before he spoke again.
"The war has been over for a long time, Granger."
"Not for them."
She could have left it at that, and by his silence, maybe Malfoy would have let her, but the words rose up and out of her throat as though the still, dark air needed to have them.
"I knew they wouldn't leave me," she explained. "And they wouldn't be safe if they stayed. So, I erased myself from their memories and created new lives for them on the other side of the world."
Hermione glanced back at the house, at the flicker of moths in front of the porch light.
"It takes a long time to restore 17 years' worth of memories," she went on. "You can't do it overnight. They have most of me back, but—"
Her voice broke, and she gritted her teeth against the burning behind her eyes.
"My dad told me a little while ago that I still feel like a dream. A good dream, but... still something separate from them. When I made their new identities, I didn't want them to regret not having had a child, so I gave them reasons for why they hadn't. Rationales. That was my mistake—"
She shook her head in frustration. She had wanted to be thorough. If something happened to her, she hadn't wanted them to be lonely. It wasn't until now, faced with the prospect of having children herself, that she could really understand what a monumental decision it was. The way it had changed them at their core.
"I think eventually, the realness will come back," she said softly, not wanting to scare the idea away. "And maybe they will, too. But for now, I think it's easier for them to stay where they are—loving me from a physical distance to match the emotional one."
Hermione didn't notice that Malfoy had stopped pushing her until she came to rest at the center again, the toe of her trainer back in the dirt. His hands wrapped around hers where she still held the chains, and her chin trembled with her wavering resolve.
By the time he stepped around the swing to face her, her cheeks were streaked with tears.
She felt his thumbs smear them as they brushed against her skin, but the surprising tenderness of his lips eclipsed every other concern.
His fingers pressed against the back of her neck as he lifted her face to his. And then she was lifting herself, standing from the swing and raising onto her toes as she sought the comfort of his kiss.
He gave it willingly—meeting her touch for touch as she tasted and took—and his mouth on hers felt like the night itself: warm and dark and full of all the things you can only say when it feels like no one's there to hear them.
She breathed heavily against him, fingers twining in his hair as she slanted her lips over his again and again. His grip was tight on her jaw, and when he pulled back to look at her, she had nowhere to go.
The words spilled out as soon as she saw his face.
"I found a way out."
It seemed to take a few seconds for her words to register, but gradually his expression clouded with confusion.
"What?"
She swallowed, trying very hard not to look at the way his eyes were shining in the light from the house. Because it felt like he had kissed her not because she needed them to get comfortable with it, but because she had needed him to kiss her. Like maybe he had wanted to.
And suddenly, she didn't want him to be trapped with her.
"I found a loophole," she said. "A provision to dissolve the marriage."
That's when his hands dropped away from her face.
"The entire purpose of the law is to increase magical fertility," she said in a rush, "and the most heinous, traumatic crimes can injure the magic of the victim, compromising fertility at least temporarily, but potentially permanently. A severe enough action can warrant a nullification of the marriage bond."
Malfoy hadn't moved since she started speaking, but his eyes were running over her face as though he couldn't quite keep up with the words spilling out of it.
"You would need to plead guilty to sexual assault. First degree."
The words tasted like ash in her mouth. He would bear the brunt of the sacrifice—a minimum sentence of five years instead of twenty and the addition of a new moniker to his rap sheet. Rapist.
They would both face a year sentence for perjury if they were caught lying, but more than that, Hermione would have to live with a lifetime of guilt for falsely reporting a rape.
It was a ghastly thing to even consider, but so was a government willing to strip its citizens of every decent alternative. Though somehow, in the last few days, the need for an alternative at all had begun to seem more and more remote.
Which is why she wasn't surprised by the flood of relief she felt when Malfoy finally said, "I can't."
"Okay," she said at once, reaching for him again. "I understand."
He shook his head, seemingly needing to steel himself. "Granger, I can't rape you."
"I know," she said quickly, clutching at his shirt. "I'm sorry for even suggesting you might be willing to let people think that you had, I just—I wanted you to have the option."
He reached up and pulled her hands away from him, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. "I'm not speaking about my morals," he said in a pained voice. "I would never do that, but even if I w-wanted to, I am physically incapable of it, and there are people who know that. People who would know we were lying."
Something horrible was spreading through Hermione. A twisting sense of dread, seeping up through her arms from where he'd removed her touch from his body.
"What are you talking about?"
Malfoy actually took a step away from her then, and she watched numbly as he pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes. "Fuck," he muttered before taking a breath. Then, "Fuck," much louder.
"What's going on?" Hermione asked, and her voice sounded very far away.
When Malfoy looked at her again, he seemed on the verge of being sick. "I never thought you would actually find something."
"I don't understand—"
"I cannot seriously injure you without doing extreme harm to myself," he said. "I don't know what it would do to me to... assault you, but it would be horrible if I could even manage it."
"Why?" Hermione demanded.
"Because when we married, our magical cores were bound."
The dirt beneath her feet turned to quicksand.
"No."
No, no, no.
He just stood there.
She felt her head shaking. "I never agreed to that."
"You did. By undergoing the marriage ritual."
"No," she said firmly. "There was nothing in the law about core binding, I never would have—"
"It wasn't because of the Ministry," he said, looking suddenly exhausted. "It was because of me. The Malfoy magic is old, and core binding was the way of things for a long time. We can't marry without it."
"But—there's—that's... permanent." Hermione felt on the edge of fainting.
He had the audacity to nod. "Malfoys mate for life."
"I am not a fucking swan, you arsehole!" she screamed. "There must be a way to undo it."
"It can be undone," he said evenly. "Before consummating, we would lose our magic and probably die. After consummating, we would definitely die."
Hermione clutched her chest as her stomach lurched into her throat. It wasn't true. It couldn't be. There had to be something. Why—
"Why would you agree to that?" she asked desperately. "To forever?"
"I didn't have a choice."
"Yes, you did!" she cried. "Twenty years—"
"I couldn't let you go to Azkaban, Granger."
"Yes, you could!" she choked on a sob. "It's not that long—"
"No," he said, shaking his head firmly. "For you, in there, twenty years might as well be a hundred. I couldn't let that happen. I couldn't imagine you in that place—"
"Why didn't you tell me before the wedding?" she pleaded. "I should have had a chance to choose."
Malfoy regarded her sadly. "You would have chosen wrong."
"Fuck you," she sobbed. "That was my choice. You had no right. You stood there and watched while I was violated without me even knowing. My magic—"
"I'm sorry."
"Don't you dare!" she screamed. "You don't regret it. You would do the same thing again."
He didn't deny it.
"This past week," she murmured, her mind reeling. "Why did you let me research? Why didn't you just tell me there was no hope?"
He looked down at the ground. "I thought it would be better to wait until—"
"Until I trusted you even more?!"
He seemed to deflate at that, and Hermione couldn't bear to watch it. She turned and ran into the house, up the stairs, and into her room, slamming the door behind her. She warded it with every spell she could think of from her time on the run until the air was thick with magic.
And then she did something she thought she never would.
"Nilly."