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The wards shimmer and shake just seconds before Hermione hears him at her front door. Trying and testing the knob and finding it locked. Moments before a heavy fist meets hardwood.
All of which she readily ignores.
She doesn’t move from her spot in her study, books open and strewn about on the desk in front of her. She doesn’t answer the muffled voice that shouts her name, or the hard pounding that follows. No longer satisfied with a polite knock, there’s no doubt that he wants in.
Her eyes begin to blur from staring at the page so hard, words beginning to bleed into strange and illegible lines of ink. Hermione grips her quill and keeps on, outlining the sections she needs. Information flows with her renewed focus, scratching notes on blood curses. Adverse effects from potions and hexes. Co-morbid symptoms observed in outpatient environments. The case she’s been assigned at the clinic needs her attention more than he does.
The noise from his ire becomes background static, but it isn’t until it ceases completely that she notices something is amiss. The muted sensation of her wards has slowly slipped away, leaving cool awareness in its wake.
She releases a long exhale, and knows what is coming next. Heavy footsteps, boots dragging across her floors—he’s made it inside.
She doesn't need to turn around to see his lean build in the doorframe to her study. She feels him, his presence, in a way that can only come from an unfortunate amount of magic. Her magic, stitched into his skin, flowing through his veins. It’s an oddity, and one she hasn’t quite had the time or energy to study quite yet. It’s the only explanation for how easily she can sense him, her body being so deeply in tune with his. It's exactly why she left her door locked tonight instead of leaving it open.
She’s lost track of how many times she’s healed him over the last two years. Some weekends back to back, several nights in a row. Others more sporadic, with empty gaps between his visits. Recently though, they've been growing farther and farther apart.
But he always comes to her, and now she’s paying for it.
“Granger…” he drawls. Unsurprisingly, she’s lost any residual focus. Cut like weak threads, he’s severed all of them with a single word.
Still, she goes back to pretending and writes a line of nonsense words on her parchment that she’ll have to vanish later. “Go away, Malfoy. I don’t have time for you tonight.”
“I brought you work.” Amusement drips from his tone.
With a scoff, she drops her quill before turning to flash him a scowl. “There are plenty of other healers in the city. Go find one of them.”
Draco Malfoy, for all of his faults, looks truly comfortable standing in her home. Beaten and busted and bruised, it looks like he’s been attacked. In a way, she supposes he has, and she watches as drops of his blood drip onto her floors. Vaguely remembering the days when it was something considered to be pure. Special. She’s not sure if that’s the case anymore to anyone but her.
He gives her a lazy, exhausted smile, ignoring her ire. Blood stains his lips, framing straight white teeth. His hair is clumped together and the fine strands fall onto his forehead, haphazard. “None of them have your touch.”
“Really?” She rolls her eyes and turns back to her work, ignoring the tightness that’s creeping around her throat. “That’s rich, coming from you.”
“The dusty cobwebs in my Gringotts accounts would argue otherwise, I assure you.”
Still, he doesn’t leave. Instead he wanders closer, and with his increased proximity she can’t help but automatically assess the things that become clear.
Warmth from his body, and the sharp tinge of blood alongside something slightly herbal.
His own blood replenishing potion. Which means he came prepared. Which means his lazy steps and sluggish smile aren’t entirely from blood loss. Pain and fatigue, perhaps, but definitely more.
Beneath it are faded notes of antiseptic—muggle?
Hermione’s heart kicks up, the light flutters transforming into hard thumps. Suspicion and nervousness begin to drown out her exasperation. Adrenaline takes priority, shoving every other reaction else out. She focuses on it. Latches on to it like a weapon. Wields it like she knows she can.
“Stop pretending you need me for a bit of bruise paste. Despite what you may think, I’m not your personal healer.” He's not that hurt tonight, but he wants her to think he is.
“So this is it, then? You want to play difficult because you’re scared?” he asks from behind her, dragging his finger across the seam of her jumper. He follows the line from her shoulder to her neck, lightly caressing the soft, sensitive skin just above the collar. “My my, Granger, how you’ve fall—”
She moves so quickly he chokes on his words, the tip of her wand pressed against the hollow of his throat. Stopping them before they can surface against the traitorous plane of his tongue.
She’s done with this. With their game. With him.
“I’m finished,” she hisses, leaning up onto her toes so she can peer closer into his eyes. His irises balloon black, drowning out the grey until they’re mere slivers of silver. “Get out of my house.”
“No.”
Malfoy lifts his chin, showing her the bruises and cuts along his neck and jaw. The spread of blood beneath the skin, forming the ghosted imprint of knuckles, and big ones at that. The tracks of blood he’s sloppily wiped away. But up close, the most impressive thing she notices is the shadows that weigh around his eyes. She has her own matching set.
“You must have lost tonight if you’re still looking for a fight.” Hermione presses her wand harder against his neck, letting a slight shock of magic flow through her fingers and into his skin. Letting him feel her anger, her ire, her fury. At him, at the situation he’s put them in, at the way he’s inadvertently made her feel.
She never wanted it. Never asked for it. And yet, this new version of Malfoy still takes and takes and takes just like the old one used to as a child.
From the moment she found him laying in that dark, dirty alleyway outside of her flat, face so swollen he was nearly unrecognisable, she hasn’t been able to shake him. She’d thought she was doing the right thing—helping the wounded, tending to the injured, following her healer’s call—but all she’d succeeded in doing was falling down into the filth with him.
“It’s over, Malfoy,” she tells him, pushing every bit of conviction in her body up through her throat until each syllable feels as dense as a lead weight. It sinks through her stomach alongside the desire that pulls her forward several steps. Close enough that his chest brushes against hers, their breathing totally in sync.
He’s bare from the waist up, shirt miraculously gone, showcasing the cuts that bisect scars both old and new. Bruises creep across his ribs and collarbone, blood wells beneath the surface of his skin in a map of his injuries. Part of her wants to dig her knuckles against each mark, to reach into him until he feels as affected as she is.
Until he feels the same pain she’s grown to accept.
If it’s not the shock, or the horror, or the disgust…it’s the worry. The fear. The anxiety. As bad as it is when he shows up, it’s infinitely worse when he doesn’t. When he could finally be dead and gone forever. The barbaric nature of the fights has claimed more than one life, and no matter what he thinks, his isn’t too precious to be spared.
And yet…
“It’s not,” he says on a slow smile. He takes a moment to run his tongue across the edges of his teeth, and to swipe the remaining dab of blood from his lower lip. He couldn’t care less about her warning pressed into his jugular. He’s already been through worse, and they both know it. The biggest difference is that it doesn’t hurt as bad when it’s voluntary. "It'll never be over."
She’s wondered for a long time if he likes it. If that’s the draw. Or if there’s something more. Finally, she asks.
“Tell me why, then.” It’s a question that’s lived dormant in her chest for months, buried so deep that it has solidified into a demand. At first she didn’t want to care enough to acknowledge it, but it’s only sprouted and grown larger with every day she feigns indifference.
Malfoy’s fingers wrap around her wand, forcing it lower until she drops her arm. Until her fingers loosen and it falls on top of her forgotten notes. He takes a step forward, pressing his body into hers and sending her stumbling back against her desk, grinning wider when she baulks at his audacity. The wooden edge digs into the backs of her thighs and he takes another step—forcing her up and onto it, and taking up the newfound space between her legs. His message is clear: she can climb around him to get away, or she can let him in.
It’s not really a choice. Not like she wishes it were. Not that it ever has been.
“Why what?” He lifts a cut brow and leans down, placing his knuckles on either side of her, right on top of her notes. If her nonsense scribbles hadn’t already ruined them, then the bloodstains most definitely will.
He knows why. Just like she already knows more details about the fights than he’s shared with her. During the long stretches where she didn’t know if he was dead or alive, she couldn’t help but follow her curiosity. It took her right into the underbelly of London, where witches and wizards alike fight night after night for whatever it is they desire most. Money. Reputation. Or, in Malfoy’s case, redemption.
Why do you keep doing it? Why do you keep coming back to me? “Why won’t you stop?”
Stop fighting. Stop showing up at her house. Either. Both. There’s so much that she doesn’t know that she wishes she did, and so much she does that she wishes she didn’t.
There are two kinds of fights. Those with wands, and those without. She knows, based solely on his regular injuries, that Malfoy prefers to use his hands. It’s a ridiculous way to rebuild a future from the rubble of his past, but he’s never asked her opinion. Only that she fix him, time and time again. But now she’s done. She’s done mending his cracks and fractures, done charming him whole so he can break himself again. All she’s managed to do is absorb them into herself, feeling each one strike through her soul with every cast of her wand.
At some point over the past two years, in the quiet of her kitchen, in the dead of night, Malfoy went from enemy to something else entirely. Something she doesn’t want to name, and never wanted for herself.
“You were right,” he acknowledges, and she feels each syllable brush across her lips. It takes every bit of will not to sink forward or crawl away. Instead, she holds still and steady. His words aren't quite a kiss, but only just. “I am looking for a fight. And I have been. For years.”
Her brows pull together.
“And I’ve told you—I’m done patching you up.”
He laughs lightly, shaking his head. Her body is growing warmer with each lingering second, her instinct to get to work on his bruises warring with the desire to make him feel the full weight of his injuries. Alongside both, a base part of her wants to wrap her arms around him. To comfort herself with a touch that isn't detached or medicinal.
“No, Granger. With you.”
With her? Looking for—
“There it is,” he muses. “Took you a bit to catch up, didn’t it?”
Her hands hit his chest, shoving him back. Instead, he catches her by her wrists and pulls her closer, right up against him. Her legs bracket his hips, and she can feel the hard line of his body with every pump of blood in her veins.
“I’m not fighting with you,” she says, trying to pull away, but he doesn’t let go. Stuck in a clinch. “I should have let you rot in that alley. I shouldn’t have ever let you think I cared.”
The lie burns, acid creeping up her throat and blooming across her tongue. At this rate, keeping up the ruse will eat through her teeth before the end of the night. But this is her technique, her style—she’s done going after life with bare fists and an angry heart. She left that part of herself behind years ago, and now she wants the safety and assurance of the things she knows and can hold in her hands. He won't ever be that, and he’s proved it more nights than not.
Malfoy drops his head, burying his face into her curls until his nose brushes her ear. When he inhales slowly, she shivers. “I don’t think you care. I know you do.”
This is the closest they’ve ever been, and yet she’s never felt farther apart. Even on the nights she’s had to levitate him inside and carefully strip off his clothes in order to heal his injuries, the sense of isolation always waited to permeate her skin until after he was gone. Now it exists like a constant covering, a cloak she can’t quite shake.
“You don’t know me well enough to know what that looks like.”
No one knows about them. No one is aware that he comes to her when he’s beaten and barely breathing, trusting her and only her to fix what he’s broken. No one sees what she does—the pride etched into his exhausted features, the naked vulnerability that accompanies his pain, the trust he holds when his body relaxes against hers. The day she realised how well they fit was the worst day of her life.
“You’d be surprised at what I’ve noticed, even with a fair few concussions.”
“Let me go,” she demands. Even with her wrists bound by his hands, she presses back against his chest. Digs the side of her fists into the splotchy, swollen patch right beside his sternum.
“I can’t.” Malfoy winces, his voice straining through the pain as she resists. He rests his forehead against hers for a breath, then two, and looks directly into her eyes when he speaks next. “Because you don’t even realise that you’re the one who’s got me on the ropes.”
Everything between them goes still, tension snapping through her muscles and against her bones.
“No.” She shakes her head, disbelief quickly knocking out any hope that thought to bloom in the empty space between her lungs. Stuck in a backpedal, she won’t risk belief. “You’re upset because I don’t want to heal you anymore. It’s the same selfish story, night and night again. You don’t want to risk getting arrested by—”
“You asked me why,” Malfoy interrupts.
Pulling back just enough to lift her chin, she challenges him. “And?”
“Well, I’ve one of my own: Why didn’t you ask?” He takes care to enunciate slowly, to spell out each word with his tongue against the edges of his lips and teeth. To make sure she hears every single one, spoken from mere millimetres away.
With every breath, ire and desire grow equally within her. It's a preposterous question, one framed as if they live in a different reality where she would have the right to do such a thing. Yet still, she can’t deny the appeal of it. She can’t pretend she doesn’t want it, doesn’t wish for it, doesn’t hate it with every fibre of her being.
“I think you do need more specialised care. Apparently I’ve not done a well enough job keeping your brain from swelling after all those hits if you think that's a valid question.”
Malfoy drops her hands in favour of grasping her chin and gripping her hair. Keeping her in place, he takes back the distance that she just claimed. “Ask me.”
Hermione swallows, the movement just brushing the edges of his hold. There’s an invisible noose woven from self-preservation snaking its way around her throat, and he must feel it too.
It’s barely a whisper. “Would you stop?”
It’s not quite the same. There’s a difference between what he meant and the words she chose, and they both know it.
“For you, I will,” he says.
“I’ll do anything,” she hears.
While she’s left reeling, registering and replaying his attack, his overall approach… he kisses her. He presses his lips to hers like he’s sealing a promise. It’s soft and precious, in direct contrast to the man he presents himself to be. The one with bloody, broken knuckles pressed against her jaw and cracked ribs that are mirrored back against her own whole ones. He coaxes her slowly, and although his lips are tinged with the metallic tang of blood, it’s everything she never allowed herself to imagine.
She fell for the feint and never saw him coming.
She’s the one who opens the kiss, who presses it further. Who tugs him closer by the belt loops in his trousers, who claws at his skin and relishes in the sound of the deep groan that echoes from his chest. She doesn’t care if it hurts, because isn’t that just it? They’ve both been hurting each other this whole time.
The kiss deepens, tongues chasing and teeth clicking. When she nips at his cut lip he hisses in pain before returning the action in kind. His hand drifts from her chin to her throat to the hair at the base of her neck, where he fists the strands between his fingers.
He tastes like blood and she can’t stop. Need expands through her chest and into her abdomen until it feels like she might suffocate. It shoves every one of her organs out of the way, taking up its rightful space in her body. Denied for so long, it’s claiming its due.
Malfoy must be suffering from the same affliction, using his grip to tilt her head back until he can get the access he needs. He kisses her deeply, sliding their lips together as he tastes her. Her hands leave his body long enough to tear at her clothes, breaking the kiss just long enough to pull the fabric over her head. He helps without a word, a miracle that he’s distracted enough to stop talking and taunting, and it isn’t until her knickers are sliding down her thighs that she is saved by a flash of logic.
Undressing should be the last thing on her to do list. Listed beneath more mature, reasonable things like healing his injuries and discussing what “stopping” really means to the both of them. But while she’s stuck thinking, each breath cutting awareness through the fog of her arousal, she realises that that’s the last thing she wants to do.
She’s spent the last two years overthinking every interaction with Malfoy. Weighing her conscience and wondering if he was worth helping. Even though he wasn’t hers to save, it wasn’t until the depth of her feelings came into clarity that she was willing to do what she needed to protect herself.
So tonight, she won’t. She helps him unbutton his trousers and shoves them down his hips as he kisses the sensitive spot below her ear, and takes in the sight of their skin side by side. His scarred and pale, hers soft and freckled. Everything else can come later—after.
Malfoy strokes himself, his fist wrapping around his cock as he looks down at her. There are textbooks and parchment beneath her arse, and for as much as she was worried about ruining them before? She would light them on fire if they came between them.
Heat floods her core at the stark desire in his gaze, and she watches him as he watches her. As his eyes track down her body, resting on her chest where she plucks at her nipples, then down to the thatch of neatly trimmed hair between her legs. She’s seen his body so many times she’s lost count—there’s rarely any place for modesty in healing—but this is the first time she’s really looked. To see the whole man in place of the pieces and parts.
He’s grown broader in the years since the war, honed his body into a machine of muscle and bone. There’s a few scars she recognises and others she doesn’t, all in varying shades of pink and white and purple against his alabaster skin.
Her cunt is aching by the time he lines himself up between her legs. But before he moves, he takes her by the chin again.
“I’ll give you your why.” He starts with a slow push, an agonising stretch to accompany his words. Dropping her head to rest against the base of his throat, she holds her breath until he finishes. “Because it was the only way I could justify bringing myself back to you.”
Hermione cries out when he thrusts forward the rest of the way, biting her lip just in time to muffle the tail end of the noise. But once it’s out, she knows it’s too late. She looks up in time to see his gaze sharpen with the same shade of satisfaction that she’s seen when he comes to her after a particularly hard-fought win.
Everything else was just a warm up before now. This—tonight—is his title fight.
Opening her thighs wider, she shifts her hips to take him deeper. Each thrust is getting longer, smoother, as he works their bodies together. His fingers dig into her hips as he takes her, his jaw set into a hard line as he gives her, and this, his entire focus.
Heat grows in her abdomen, and she grows wetter. Pleasure twists up her spine as she rocks into his thrusts, rolling herself against him. The desk shifts beneath her, bumping into the wall, and she leans back with one hand to open herself up even more. It gives her just enough room to reach between them, her fingers eagerly seeking her swollen clit.
Her touch sends a shock of sensation across her nerve endings, her whole body twitching at the contact.
“Impatient witch,” Malfoy teases, pushing her hand away and replacing it quickly with his. “Arch your back.”
She does as directed, and he curves forward to kiss a path across her chest. Bared to him, her nipples pebble as he rewards her breasts with his attention. He touches and kisses and fucks her all at once, every single faculty focused on bringing her right to the edge. She can feel her orgasm approaching rapidly, the climax building deep in her core. She’s wanted it for so long, denied it so vehemently, that it’s now completely out of her control. His fingers are just calloused enough to give her the rough touch she needs, and it’s too much. Each circle sparks pleasure, sending her higher and higher.
“I can’t—” She shakes her head, powerless against the sensations that are currently consuming her. When his teeth graze her nipple, she moans. “Not yet. Not yet.”
She wont let herself fall first. Not again.
When his head snaps up, there’s a dangerous glint in his eyes. His touch lightens, the heavy circles around her clit becoming delicate flutters. Enough to make her cunt spasm, but still enough of a difference that it settles the worst of the frantic pleasure in her veins.
It feels good. So good.
His kisses match his touch, softening until it's just a delicate brush of his lips across her skin. He leads a path across her chest from one breast to another until she’s writhing, then leaves them untouched in favour of focusing his attention elsewhere. Feather light kisses that track from one end of her collarbone to the other, up her neck and back down again. Around the shell of her ear and brushing against the soft, sensitive lobe. Though she strains forward, he doesn’t nip or bite or suck. Even his thrusts slow to a languid pace, pushing deep before pulling back again.
Frustration builds while pleasure simmers, keeping her right on the edge. Hermione latches on to his shoulders, clawing with her nails until she knows her own marks will be added to his tally. Leaving bits of herself behind, no matter what happens.
Malfoy stiffens against her, his hips snapping forward.
So she does it again, and his lips find hers. This kiss is harder, deeper. Another rake of her nails, and he tugs at her bottom lip in return.
And again and again.
She does it enough times that she knows she’ll be responsible for the cleanup, but she can’t bring herself to care. Not when he grows just as frantic as she feels, the forceful movement of their bodies sending books and papers fluttering to the ground. A cup of quills falls to the floor at the same time he presses her onto her back, moving just enough to stretch her out over the top of the desk.
Spread out before him, Malfoy leverages her legs up until one knee is draped over his elbow and the other ankle is propped up on his shoulder. It changes the angle of his thrusts, his cock hitting deeper now. Stroking the spot inside her core that lights up with every pass, until her nerves are completely on fire. It’s almost unbearable, and with every one she cries out.
“I don’t care if you stop,” she admits, lost to everything that’s brewing between them. Her back arches, twisting up and around when he touches her clit again. “Just as long as you come back to me.”
Her eyes open just enough to see him give her a cocky smile.
“I haven’t stopped yet, have I?”
Except that he has. He's forgotten all of the nights that he disappeared and didn’t show up when she expected him. All of the dawns that she witnessed, waiting up while stuck wondering if he was dead in someone else’s alleyway. It’s not really about the fighting. He has his reasons, and she respects that. But what she doesn’t want, and can’t take, is the distance.
Beneath him, she begins to whine with at the onslaught of sensations. Her chest feels like it might crack open the longer it goes, the more she exposes herself and her feelings to him. All of the hairline fractures he’s caused in her heart over the last two years were enough to make her brittle.
“You have.”
His pace begins to quicken, whether through frustration or need or both, and it stokes the fire of her own.
“Would you have let me?” he asks, his breathing growing heavy. His chest is flushed red, and she focuses on that instead of the hard look in his eyes. “Would you have allowed me here if I didn’t need you?”
No. Yes. Maybe. Before? Now? The answers vary too much to be clear.
“For you?” She tries hard to hold off, the first tendrils of her orgasm beginning to take hold once more. “I will.”
When her thighs begin to tremble, the muscles shaking with the force of trying to hold off, she knows she’s lost to it and him both.
“I will,” she cries out, knocking her head against the hard surface of her desk. Her hands clutch at his hips, latching on to the wrist between her legs. Holding on with everything she has so she doesn’t shatter completely. “Just don’t—don’t stop, don’t stop, please.”
She still breaks. Pleasure crashes against her shores, and she’s no longer impervious. Her orgasm takes over then, a wash of sensation flooding her system and senses both until there’s nothing left. It starts deep in her core and spreads out, down through her thighs and up and into her spine. It tingles and sparks and bursts, and it’s not until it fades moments later that she registers that Malfoy has dropped her legs and has fallen forward on top of her.
Braced on his elbows above her, there’s a set to his brow that she hasn’t seen before. In all of his expressions that she’s studied over the years, this one is new. Vehemence. No—
Victory.
When her nails dig in to his shoulders and her legs come to wrap around his hips, he follows her over the edge. She wont let go—refuses to with as much determination and dedication as she just saw in his eyes—and kisses him when her name falls from his lips.
“Fuck, Granger—”
Her body tightens around him, his cock pulsing deep in her core. Each one throbs with the same tempo as her heart, and it isn’t until then that she releases a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She kisses him long and slow, reaching blindly to the side to find and pick up her wand. Resting between the desk and the wall, it’s a miracle that it didn’t get lost in their frenzy, and she slowly drags it across his skin.
She heals him, spells whispered into their kiss and against his lips. From her lungs to his, she lets the magic flow between them. It’s not the first time, and she settles into the knowledge and security that it wont be the last.
By the time she’s finished, their bodies have cooled. Malfoy still holds himself above her, stroking her cheek lightly as she completes her work. Patiently waiting. No longer fighting.
“Stay tonight,” Hermione tells him.
Healed completely, Malfoy’s lips lift into a smirk. They looked better before, slightly reddened and cut, but she won’t tell him that. Not when she now knows she has plenty of opportunities to see it again in the future.
“For you? I will.”