The astonishing thing, in the end, is how well he sleeps.
He’d expected to toss and turn all night, unaccustomed to the lingering presence of someone else in his bed, and extra-unaccustomed to it being her; but exhausted from their late night and time exploring each others’ bodies and fucking each other into oblivion, Draco’s out like a light. He sleeps through Hermione waking up and wriggling against him, and then— almost sleeps through her tiptoeing out of his room.
He notices the shift on the mattress, the weight going away, and he peels an eye open after she’s gone, squinting at the bedroom doorway. Waits, a little paranoid, for the click of the front door and the sound of her sneaking out after all.
It doesn’t come.
So, curious, Draco rolls out of bed a few minutes later. And true to form, he does stop first to scoop up all their discarded clothes from the floor, and half-fold them into quick little stacks on his dresser. He’s a little neurotic, this one. He tugs his black briefs back on, walks out into the apartment proper—
And is greeted by that lovely sight. Hermione Granger, naked, looking through his collection of books.
She’ll have found an eclectic mix, the texts loosely thematically grouped together in the stacks. Some Quidditch theory and a biography of Dangerous Dai Llewellyn; textbooks on potions and alchemy; a field guide to local herbs; a book on memory charms, standard issue for rookie Obliviators.
Draco crosses the creaking floor and joins her, dropping to his heels beside her; he leans over to kiss Hermione’s bare shoulder, which also gives him a good view of what she’s currently picked out from the tower. “Does it pass muster?” he asks, bemused.
She will find it very amusing that he's folded her clothes as well, when the time comes, but Hermione is hyperfocused on the tomes before her for now. She should have more awareness of the sounds and movement happening behind her, but there's a little tome on brewing potions from scratch that she absolutely has to take up from the pile.
It's in the centre of a stack, and she doesn't want to knock the rest of the books down and gods, Malfoy needs a bookshelf. Move in properly. Don't be so dramatic.
With some wandless magic and carefulness, the pries the desired book from its place, and is skimming through it - delighted to find that there's a historical aspect to the book too - when touch of lips against her bare skin comes, and she jumps a little.
She turns her head to find him, astonishingly, wearing clothes, and becomes aware that she isn't and - not really shy about it, to be honest. He did ask a question.
"Yes - very. The collection is ecclectic and interesting, Malfoy, but you need a bloody shelf - and a sorting system."
It really isn’t a plausible excuse. He’s been at the Ministry for the better part of a year now. And he still hasn’t fully settled into the flat, in all that time.
There’s a contemplative pause, Draco chewing over that realisation. Why hasn’t he gotten proper bookshelves? The sofa and the bed both look like something out of an interior design magazine: pristine but soulless. And does he actually want to peel back those layers and burden Hermione with whatever thoughts are ping-ponging around his skull?
But, somehow, he realises he hates the idea far less than he thought. Because who the fuck else can he talk to? He hasn’t really hung out with Goyle since Crabbe died; they’re always too-aware of that missing third in their group, and it hadn’t felt right, and they’d never been equals as friends anyhow, and so they’d gone their separate ways after graduation. Nott and Zabini were capable of keeping up with him, but they’d always been closer to each other than to Draco.
He’s still a terrifically lonely boy.
“I think,” he says slowly, discovering this about himself even as he broaches the theory and says it aloud, “I’ve been holding off in case the whole Ministry thing falls apart. If I can’t cut it and I’m sacked and have to go back to Wiltshire in shambles. I don’t want to, obviously. But I think I’m— waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Lucius kept treating it as such. Thinking the whole honest job thing was a lark; expecting his son to give up any day now, and to go back to the safety of the idle rich and the family fortune.
If he can make her come so hard her knees still feel wobbly ten hours later, he can bother her with emotional stuff - and it isn't a bother. She asked. She doesn't judge him, there is no expression of distaste or criticism.
She watches him as he explains and elaborates, and then finally nods.
"I had an extensible tent and three weeks' worth of food shoved inside my purse for two whole years after the war," she admits, "and every time I argued with my managers I kept thinking this is it, they'll tell me that just because I'm Potter's best friend doesn't mean I'm instantly qualified for anything, and I should just go back to the muggle world."
She never fit, as much as she wanted to (desperately), in the pureblood wizarding world. It has changed since, somewhat, but still.
They're lonely people both, perhaps. She tilts her head and considers his living room, then turns to face him, her legs still tucked under her.
Once upon a time, the prospect of baring his throat to Hermione Granger like this would have rankled; would have made him feel ill-at-ease in his own skin, like he’d handed her a knife ready to stab him with. But instead, he drops that confession in her lap and she reciprocates with one of her own, and he doesn’t hate how this feels.
Because she gets it. Of course she gets it.
At her suggestion, though, he cocks his head with absolute blank-faced nonrecognition. “Eye Key what? Is that a cocktail bar or something?”
It really was truly absurd how much the purebloods could get away with not knowing, in their insular little world. You would think that, even with living between the cracks of the Muggle world, they would’ve picked up enough bits and pieces to get by, and yet. It took real, concerted effort over sheer centuries’ worth of bigoted ancestors to leave Draco looking quite so lost at the reference.
She has this moment of clarity, imagining Draco Malfoy wandering through a muggle furniture store looking absolutely shocked by everything, and almost wants to laugh. Definitely wants to make it happen, as well.
"It's a store where you can get furniture, Draco. It is, however, muggle and you'd need to exchange some money into pounds if you're going to buy anything there, but it's being advertised as very handy for young people starting fresh in their own place."
She offers him a grin, and then unhelpfully adds: "Most of my stuff is from there. I'll show you when you - " And at this, she stops, for a moment feeling very exposed. Vulnerable, which she doesn't make a habit of feeling, but which feels fitting considering that she's sitting on his living room floor naked and wearing his shirt. She was going to invite him over to her place.
She was going to invite him over to her place, so they can do this again. So they can give this a try, whatever it is. Whatever it stands to be.
"If you wanted to come over, that is," she adds, in a murmur.
It’s careful, this thing — whatever this thing is — because there are so many bricks in this teetering tumbledown tower, which feels at risk of collapsing any moment if they push on it just the wrong way. The fact that she’d bled into the flagstones in the basement of his family manor. The way he had been awful to her, and she had thus been awful in retaliation. That volleying push-and-pull of their dynamic throughout school. His complicated relationship with her best friend. His family. Hers.
But Draco Malfoy wants very little to do with his family anymore, his mother aside.
So he looks at Hermione, and he sees that dip in the road which she just tripped over; quite similar to the one he’d suffered the evening before, with that sudden pique of anxiety hammering in his throat when he’d asked about disclosure forms. So this time it’s Draco’s turn to reach out, a hand absentmindedly brushing some of her hair out of her face and behind her ear (it has gotten really voluminous and out-of-hand in its morning tangles, it’s a wonder he didn’t suffocate in the night).
“I’m not done with you,” Draco says, echoing her earlier words. “So if you’d like to show off your flat and rub it in just how much better-appointed it is than mine, then by all means.”
Wry and arch, his voice dripping with what she’s learning is his usual fond yet slightly sarcastic humour, but it’s a way of papering over that brief blip, that temporary stutter in her voice.
It camouflages the momentary stumble just right, and opens the door for an opportunity to be smug right back at him which she really appreciates him giving her. There's something wildly beautiful about this moment alone.
She's sitting on the floor of his living room, nearly naked except for his shirt, with him still crouching (very athletic of him) by her side. There are faint marks of her kisses and her nails against his skin, and she knows that her hair must be a mess from all that she was writhing last night. They've not showered since before the party that brought this whole thing on, and there's a hole in the pit of her stomach that could be identified as hunger-for-breakfast.
But in observing this moment, and in Draco brushing her hair behind her ear, it's a different kind of hunger that awakens, sudden and undeniable. She doesn't give him much warning, and doesn't ask first if it'll be welcomed. Instead, she sets the book down gently and reaches up to brush his hair behind his ear too, curling her hand over the back of his neck and tugging him towards her.
"I liked the sound of that," she says, before kissing him.
Very athletic indeed. He was a genuinely good Quidditch player for a time, good at bracing himself against that broom for long hours. So his thighs aren’t half-bad, is the thing,
except that Draco finally wobbles when she pulls him closer and kisses him, losing his balance and that careful equilibrium, and he half-topples to the floorboards with her. But he kisses Hermione back, unhesitating; doesn’t give a shit that it’s morning and they haven’t brushed their teeth and it’s not picture-perfect. It had always been a little messy from the start, her mouth tasting like wine and shoved in a closet and accidentally knocking over cleaning supplies.
When he has to surface for air, he catches himself and readjusts so he’s sitting next to Hermione on the floor instead. It’s just nice to sit here. Unpretentious. There is a sofa on the other side of the room — oh, look, his coat’s still lying there from last night — but it seems horrifically far away, when he could stay here and kiss her again instead, his fingers curling into the fabric of his own shirt.
After a moment, a contented sigh, and: “You said something about breakfast across the street?”
She ends up laughing against his lips at that half-topple, and is tempted for a moment to push him down on the floor and sit in his lap again, but what if the books will mind? Better not traumatised his poor books, before they've had a chance to sit on bookshelves.
Then the first kiss becomes a second, and he's close and he looks soft and content, and she's got a flutter in her belly that's not from nerves.
"They serve breakfast until pretty late," she murmurs back, nudging her nose to his nose, and letting that suggestion hang between them. They don't have to rush to breakfast, if they'd rather do something else first. (Each other.) "So...yeah..."
Hermione dangles that invitation right in front of him, and Draco finds himself doing some mental gymnastics and calculations and wondering exactly how uncomfortable would it be to fuck on a hardwood floor without any padding, and is there a chance they’ll both get splinters, or should they get up and move to the sofa—
“Y’know, I haven’t actually broken in this room yet,” he muses aloud.
Is that dreadful and sleazy to point out? Maybe. Or not. Maybe it’s just refreshingly honest; there’s a cheeky half-grin on his face, just visible out of the corner of her vision, as close to his face as she is. And there’s a decision teetering in the moment, before he reaches out for her again, she lets herself tip into him, and then they’re just a tangle of limbs on the floor after all.
“Ah fuck,” he laughs as she lands more on him than not, and the floor is hard which is not quite as easy as the porno mags always made it seem, but: there’s still Hermione over him, and both of them failing to bite back laughter, and Draco dragging his shirt off her, his mouth against the bared skin of her shoulder, her hand already reaching between them. It’s quick work to get their few scraps of clothing off again, eager to get their hands on each other once more even in the bright light of day.
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no subject
He’d expected to toss and turn all night, unaccustomed to the lingering presence of someone else in his bed, and extra-unaccustomed to it being her; but exhausted from their late night and time exploring each others’ bodies and fucking each other into oblivion, Draco’s out like a light. He sleeps through Hermione waking up and wriggling against him, and then— almost sleeps through her tiptoeing out of his room.
He notices the shift on the mattress, the weight going away, and he peels an eye open after she’s gone, squinting at the bedroom doorway. Waits, a little paranoid, for the click of the front door and the sound of her sneaking out after all.
It doesn’t come.
So, curious, Draco rolls out of bed a few minutes later. And true to form, he does stop first to scoop up all their discarded clothes from the floor, and half-fold them into quick little stacks on his dresser. He’s a little neurotic, this one. He tugs his black briefs back on, walks out into the apartment proper—
And is greeted by that lovely sight. Hermione Granger, naked, looking through his collection of books.
She’ll have found an eclectic mix, the texts loosely thematically grouped together in the stacks. Some Quidditch theory and a biography of Dangerous Dai Llewellyn; textbooks on potions and alchemy; a field guide to local herbs; a book on memory charms, standard issue for rookie Obliviators.
Draco crosses the creaking floor and joins her, dropping to his heels beside her; he leans over to kiss Hermione’s bare shoulder, which also gives him a good view of what she’s currently picked out from the tower. “Does it pass muster?” he asks, bemused.
no subject
It's in the centre of a stack, and she doesn't want to knock the rest of the books down and gods, Malfoy needs a bookshelf. Move in properly. Don't be so dramatic.
With some wandless magic and carefulness, the pries the desired book from its place, and is skimming through it - delighted to find that there's a historical aspect to the book too - when touch of lips against her bare skin comes, and she jumps a little.
She turns her head to find him, astonishingly, wearing clothes, and becomes aware that she isn't and - not really shy about it, to be honest. He did ask a question.
"Yes - very. The collection is ecclectic and interesting, Malfoy, but you need a bloody shelf - and a sorting system."
no subject
It really isn’t a plausible excuse. He’s been at the Ministry for the better part of a year now. And he still hasn’t fully settled into the flat, in all that time.
There’s a contemplative pause, Draco chewing over that realisation. Why hasn’t he gotten proper bookshelves? The sofa and the bed both look like something out of an interior design magazine: pristine but soulless. And does he actually want to peel back those layers and burden Hermione with whatever thoughts are ping-ponging around his skull?
But, somehow, he realises he hates the idea far less than he thought. Because who the fuck else can he talk to? He hasn’t really hung out with Goyle since Crabbe died; they’re always too-aware of that missing third in their group, and it hadn’t felt right, and they’d never been equals as friends anyhow, and so they’d gone their separate ways after graduation. Nott and Zabini were capable of keeping up with him, but they’d always been closer to each other than to Draco.
He’s still a terrifically lonely boy.
“I think,” he says slowly, discovering this about himself even as he broaches the theory and says it aloud, “I’ve been holding off in case the whole Ministry thing falls apart. If I can’t cut it and I’m sacked and have to go back to Wiltshire in shambles. I don’t want to, obviously. But I think I’m— waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Lucius kept treating it as such. Thinking the whole honest job thing was a lark; expecting his son to give up any day now, and to go back to the safety of the idle rich and the family fortune.
no subject
She watches him as he explains and elaborates, and then finally nods.
"I had an extensible tent and three weeks' worth of food shoved inside my purse for two whole years after the war," she admits, "and every time I argued with my managers I kept thinking this is it, they'll tell me that just because I'm Potter's best friend doesn't mean I'm instantly qualified for anything, and I should just go back to the muggle world."
She never fit, as much as she wanted to (desperately), in the pureblood wizarding world. It has changed since, somewhat, but still.
They're lonely people both, perhaps. She tilts her head and considers his living room, then turns to face him, her legs still tucked under her.
"Have you ever heard of IKEA? We should go."
no subject
Because she gets it. Of course she gets it.
At her suggestion, though, he cocks his head with absolute blank-faced nonrecognition. “Eye Key what? Is that a cocktail bar or something?”
It really was truly absurd how much the purebloods could get away with not knowing, in their insular little world. You would think that, even with living between the cracks of the Muggle world, they would’ve picked up enough bits and pieces to get by, and yet. It took real, concerted effort over sheer centuries’ worth of bigoted ancestors to leave Draco looking quite so lost at the reference.
no subject
"It's a store where you can get furniture, Draco. It is, however, muggle and you'd need to exchange some money into pounds if you're going to buy anything there, but it's being advertised as very handy for young people starting fresh in their own place."
She offers him a grin, and then unhelpfully adds: "Most of my stuff is from there. I'll show you when you - " And at this, she stops, for a moment feeling very exposed. Vulnerable, which she doesn't make a habit of feeling, but which feels fitting considering that she's sitting on his living room floor naked and wearing his shirt. She was going to invite him over to her place.
She was going to invite him over to her place, so they can do this again. So they can give this a try, whatever it is. Whatever it stands to be.
"If you wanted to come over, that is," she adds, in a murmur.
no subject
But Draco Malfoy wants very little to do with his family anymore, his mother aside.
So he looks at Hermione, and he sees that dip in the road which she just tripped over; quite similar to the one he’d suffered the evening before, with that sudden pique of anxiety hammering in his throat when he’d asked about disclosure forms. So this time it’s Draco’s turn to reach out, a hand absentmindedly brushing some of her hair out of her face and behind her ear (it has gotten really voluminous and out-of-hand in its morning tangles, it’s a wonder he didn’t suffocate in the night).
“I’m not done with you,” Draco says, echoing her earlier words. “So if you’d like to show off your flat and rub it in just how much better-appointed it is than mine, then by all means.”
Wry and arch, his voice dripping with what she’s learning is his usual fond yet slightly sarcastic humour, but it’s a way of papering over that brief blip, that temporary stutter in her voice.
no subject
She's sitting on the floor of his living room, nearly naked except for his shirt, with him still crouching (very athletic of him) by her side. There are faint marks of her kisses and her nails against his skin, and she knows that her hair must be a mess from all that she was writhing last night. They've not showered since before the party that brought this whole thing on, and there's a hole in the pit of her stomach that could be identified as hunger-for-breakfast.
But in observing this moment, and in Draco brushing her hair behind her ear, it's a different kind of hunger that awakens, sudden and undeniable. She doesn't give him much warning, and doesn't ask first if it'll be welcomed. Instead, she sets the book down gently and reaches up to brush his hair behind his ear too, curling her hand over the back of his neck and tugging him towards her.
"I liked the sound of that," she says, before kissing him.
no subject
except that Draco finally wobbles when she pulls him closer and kisses him, losing his balance and that careful equilibrium, and he half-topples to the floorboards with her. But he kisses Hermione back, unhesitating; doesn’t give a shit that it’s morning and they haven’t brushed their teeth and it’s not picture-perfect. It had always been a little messy from the start, her mouth tasting like wine and shoved in a closet and accidentally knocking over cleaning supplies.
When he has to surface for air, he catches himself and readjusts so he’s sitting next to Hermione on the floor instead. It’s just nice to sit here. Unpretentious. There is a sofa on the other side of the room — oh, look, his coat’s still lying there from last night — but it seems horrifically far away, when he could stay here and kiss her again instead, his fingers curling into the fabric of his own shirt.
After a moment, a contented sigh, and: “You said something about breakfast across the street?”
no subject
Then the first kiss becomes a second, and he's close and he looks soft and content, and she's got a flutter in her belly that's not from nerves.
"They serve breakfast until pretty late," she murmurs back, nudging her nose to his nose, and letting that suggestion hang between them. They don't have to rush to breakfast, if they'd rather do something else first. (Each other.) "So...yeah..."
no subject
“Y’know, I haven’t actually broken in this room yet,” he muses aloud.
Is that dreadful and sleazy to point out? Maybe. Or not. Maybe it’s just refreshingly honest; there’s a cheeky half-grin on his face, just visible out of the corner of her vision, as close to his face as she is. And there’s a decision teetering in the moment, before he reaches out for her again, she lets herself tip into him, and then they’re just a tangle of limbs on the floor after all.
“Ah fuck,” he laughs as she lands more on him than not, and the floor is hard which is not quite as easy as the porno mags always made it seem, but: there’s still Hermione over him, and both of them failing to bite back laughter, and Draco dragging his shirt off her, his mouth against the bared skin of her shoulder, her hand already reaching between them. It’s quick work to get their few scraps of clothing off again, eager to get their hands on each other once more even in the bright light of day.
She’s right; breakfast can wait.