Casalia

“Now—” Hermione conjured a length of parchment. It rolled out on the walnut surface. A little less than a foot. “—I’ve drawn up a table of sorts. It’ll allow us both to quickly tick off what is acceptable, an interest, and a flat-out no. Both as a receiver and a giver.” She looked at him steadily, chin lifted. “I don’t want either of us to feel pressured to do anything. If there is even a hint of doubt, just select no. Acceptable?”

He nodded.

I’d let you do anything to me.

His face remained hard, all those pesky emotions smothered deep within the layers of his mind. All that want, sticky, trying to attach itself everywhere—to his expression, his voice, his treacherous hands. He pressed his folded fingers tighter.

“Gemino,” she muttered as the parchment bred its twin. “To make things easier, and not imply pressure, we’ll each fill out our own. When we’re done, I’ll use a charm to combine the collected information into one solid table. Simple.” She graced him with a serene smile, her chestnut eyes warm from a fragment of daylight.

Clever. Salazar, she was absolutely brilliant.

Not that he imagined he’d say no to most—based on his sexual expertise. Which, as it turned out, was alarmingly little.

The parchment was ferried by her finger, the rustle of it loud in the quiet room. A fountain pen of deep blue wood—a new craze in the wizarding world amongst the younger set—appeared next to it. Draco still elected to use an endless inking quill. Felt more refined. Though it was more due to him not having visited a stationery shop in well over five years. Theo kept him in steady supply. It was the only way he would receive Draco’s letters otherwise.

Additionally, he wasn’t such a person anymore—refined, that was. But he’d kept close whatever hallmarks he could. It was all he had left of his old life—besides the creaky Tudor manor house in Buckinghamshire.

Peering down at the list, he nearly widened his eyes. It was rather… extensive. Ranging from the bland Kissing on the Mouth to Cock Torture.

It was very Hermione. He fought a smile that threatened to erupt on his lips.

Draco’s mouth ached from smiling as he held her hand, strolling through the greenhouse.

It was a strange ache—muscular and unfamiliar, like exercising something atrophied from years of disuse. The mask constrained the expression, pressing against his cheekbones and the corners of his lips like a cage, but beneath it his face was doing something it hadn’t done this consistently since childhood. It almost hurt. The pleasant kind of hurt.

He pointed out the wall of rose varieties—climbing Dames de Chenonceau with their quartered petals in shades of apricot and blush, the deep crimson Munstead Woods that smelled of blackberries and dark fruit, the miniature shrub roses his mother had cultivated from a single cutting brought back from Provence. The multiple beds of sub-varieties, rare and exotic magical plants whose blooms shifted colour with the phases of the moon, along with all the rest.

Hermione confessed Herbology wasn’t her favourite subject, but she could appreciate the magical specimens. She had a few of her own, along with Muggle varieties, in her apartments in the east wing. He vaguely remembered seeing them on the windowsill—the pothos trailing from its pot, the devil’s snare she called Millie—but the witch in his arms had been distraction enough to render every other living thing in the room irrelevant.

They made a slow, steady path through the gardens, exchanging pieces of themselves. The small pieces, like tiles in a mosaic, that composed the larger picture of who they were as people. Favourite colours—his was a reseda green that looked like a darker sage; hers, surprisingly, was a soft merlot. The puddings they’d preferred growing up—treacle tart for him, sticky toffee for her. A book they could read endlessly without fatigue—Persuasion by Jane Austen for him, It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas for her. Favourite spells—his was a modified lumos charm that cast constellations across ceilings; hers was an obscure weather charm she’d found in a Scandinavian grimoire that made it rain indoors without getting anything wet—she liked the sound.

He tucked each revelation away like a miser hoarding gold.

Though the air bit their skin, the conversation, along with a few warming charms she’d cast without being asked, kept the cold at bay.

Eventually, they decided they’d had enough of the winter air and sought shelter inside.

Fuck them. Fuck. Them. All.

Her throat constricted—that awful pressure that came before tears.

It had taken everything in her not to cry in that office. Every scrap of self-control she’d sharpened over nearly thirty-one years of being underestimated. Her Muggleborn Integration Programme. Gone. Seven years of backbreaking, soul-crushing, throat-scraping work. Obliterated. When it’d barely just come out of the womb. Effectively killed in its infancy.

Because of bloody budgets.

Her nails bit into her palms. She uncurled her fingers deliberately, one by one, and pressed them flat against her robes. Breathe.

The Ministry had no problem funding Magical Sports and Games—enough Galleons thrown at broomstick races and Quidditch pitches to rebuild half of Diagon Alley. No shortage of coin for the DMLE or International Wizard Cooperation either. But Muggleborns? Muggleborns were where they drew the line in the sand.

The action was clear—you are second-class citizens. The stepchild ruining a fresh start for the newlyweds.

She swallowed against the lump in her throat. It wouldn’t move. Stubborn thing. Like everything else in her life.

It all hinged on the lack of clear success. Not that success would’ve been an option with the shoestring budget they’d given it. It was a miracle the programme had worked at all.

Knowing the Ministry, it was launched to fail for this very reason. Racist pricks. Like a parent giving a child a mint when they’d wanted a sweet.

She reached blindly for the wine bottle on the coffee table, refilled her glass without looking, and took a long swallow. The ceiling stain still flipped her off.

She thought of the Muggleborn kids. Eleven years old, handed a letter by a stranger, told to abandon everything they knew in four weeks. A metaphorical “here, now leave”. Her own mother’s face flashed behind her eyes—blank and polite, the careful smile of a woman greeting a guest. She swallowed hard against further tears.

The statistics lived in her head like tenants who never paid rent. Muggleborns struggled harder in their first years. Landed worse jobs after graduation. Some gave up and went back to the Muggle world, only to find the exchange rate had eaten their savings. A few Diagon Alley businesses had shuttered just this month, their windows papered over with old editions of the Prophet. The pubs and bookshops were the only ones thriving.

Because people needed a means to escape.

Didn’t they bloody all.

Crookshanks pressed his head against her ribs, purring louder now, as if he could feel the frequency of her unravelling. She scratched behind his ear and felt her throat tighten again.

She’d hoped the programme would help strangle blood prejudice in its cradle. Give Muggleborns a leg up instead of a leg down. Build the case for adult programmes next. Regulations. Rights bills for her kind.

A level playing field.

Was that really so fucking much to ask?

Though she didn’t want to get ahead of herself and dismantle an entire government before the age of forty—she’d take it up in middle age. Her failed attempt at twenty notwithstanding. But she didn’t think about those times. Impulsive and stupid. Brain not fully cured.

Grabbing a navy pillow from behind her head, she pressed it to her face and screamed into it—a raw, ragged, ugly sound muffled into cotton and down. Exorcising the drunk and addled demon inside her chest. She screamed until her lungs ached, until the sound thinned to nothing.

Until Crookshanks’s purr was the loudest thing in the room.

Due to a budgetary shortfall, we are unable to continue funding your programme as it did not meet the full requirements its first year. In order to proceed with the 2009 school year, the remaining funds must be supplemented by a donation, anonymous or otherwise. If not, the programme will be discontinued.

Something heavy and warm—ungodly so—draped around her.

It wasn’t the type of heat that sat in her chest, squeezing her lungs until all thought extinguished. This was different. External. It had a shape to it—angular and firm, the solid geometry of limbs and torso along with the slow mechanical rise of a ribcage that wasn’t hers.

It felt male.

A tight cage of arms imprisoned her, one banded across her upper back and the other tucked beneath her waist, shoving her against a gently breathing chest. A neck that smelt of cedar and rosemary kissed her nose in damp skin—the scent thick and heady at this proximity, concentrated in the hollow beneath his jaw where sleep and body heat had turned it into something almost liquid. She knew this scent. Had catalogued it involuntarily for six years across conference tables and narrow corridors and within the airlessness of the Department lifts.

But she’d never smelt it from the source before. Not like this—with her cheek pressed against the origin point, her nose buried in the warm dip where his pulse tapped steadily against her temple.

This is the heart of it. The fire before the smoke.

And the skin beneath her cheek—gods, it was soft. Firm and warm and impossibly smooth, like the inside of a wrist. She couldn’t recall arriving in this position. Couldn’t sequence the events that had led from separate sides of the mattress to this entanglement, this mortifying pretzel of limbs.

Though she couldn’t entirely pretend it felt bad.

It felt good. The admission crept in like a draught under a door.

It also scared her. Knowing whose skin it belonged to.

Malfoy’s hot morning breath whistled past her ear, disturbing the few curls that had escaped her sleep-flattened bramble. Like wind through tall grass—rhythmic and intimate in the way only unconscious proximity could be.

Hermione remained frozen. Her body rigid as a board, every muscle locked in a paralysis of if I don’t move, this isn’t happening. It was already awkward enough to find yourself cradled in the arms of your frenemy colleague. Entirely another when that colleague was Draco fucking Malfoy.

The same Malfoy who owned a dog that gazed at him like he’d lassoed the moon. Who’d travelled the world and came home with foreign magic and a broader mind. Who wore Muggle denims and joggers on weekends. Who’d furnished a flat in creams and browns with hints of sage green like some approximation of a Hobbit hole and named his pets after Hobbits themselves.

Somehow, since the vessel had opened, it seemed more logical that she’d awoken in an alternate universe than accept the one she actually inhabited. Because in no world that Hermione Granger knew was Draco Malfoy nice.

At least not without an ulterior motive. Just like a Slytherin.

And most certainly not nice to her.

Though she’d been ignoring—or trying to ignore—his behaviour these past few days. The gentleness when she burned. The patience when she snarled.

Stop it.

Despite everything he’d shared of his past, she was still suspicious of him. Couldn’t help it, the way one couldn’t help flinching at a loud noise even after the threat had passed. Stripped of his prejudice, Malfoy was still Malfoy—cutting, snarky, and oh so superior. Nice on occasion in the way a cat was occasionally affectionate: briefly, on its own terms, and always leaving you wondering if it was genuine or a prelude to being scratched.

One of the only ex-Death Eaters to have escaped imprisonment altogether. Perhaps she’d have a different opinion if he’d served his time and—

She caught herself. Her jaw tightened.

Maybe you’re being too harsh. It was one thing to hold a grudge against a frenemy colleague. Entirely another to wish Azkaban on someone for deeds committed as a child. A boy of sixteen.

She exhaled a slow, careful breath through her nose, trying not to disturb the arm across her back.

Her eyes cracked open. The world resolving into smudges of twilight and shadow, Percy’s diamond-lattice window blanketing a pale geometric quilt across the navy duvet. The room still held that particular hush of a house where no one else had woken yet.

Something weighty and warm enveloped her. A striking contrast against the bite of the room’s chill, sharp enough to prickle the exposed skin of her forearms. Rythmic puffs of breath caressed the shell of her ear—each one a tiny bloom of mint-tinged heat that dissolved into gooseflesh along her neck.

The blanket—six foot three, Draco-shaped—clung to her like a fist grasping an errant Snitch. His limbs were soft and certain around her, cradling firmly but gently, one arm slung across her waist, the other tucked beneath the pillow they shared. His chest pressed against her back through the thin cotton of her navy t-shirt, his heartbeat steady like that of a slow upright-bass instrument plucked in a jazz song.

She hummed in contentment, wanting this moment to last like a magical photograph—looping over and over again forever, never quite fading.

She felt wanted.

The thought settled into her chest like a warming charm. She wouldn’t say loved—it was much too soon for that, and she didn't slap labels on things before the ink had dried. But within the span of weeks, they’d apparated from frenemies to this—not quite lovers, but crossing the borders of it. Hands clasped at the frontier, peering into the territory beyond with the mingled terror and exhilaration of explorers who’d burned their maps.

Learning the shape of each other’s lips and the music of their passion. How they fit in this new box. Whether they were boyfriend and girlfriend or something that sounded less juvenile—a label with more weight earned through sacrifice.

Despite the heaviness of such thoughts, A stirring sort of excitement battered against her ribs—the sort a child overflows with on Christmas morning that drives parents to distraction and the threat of silencio—thrummed in her veins at the thought of the day ahead.

At the life ahead. With Draco.

She hadn’t felt this way in a long time. Not since the day she’d opened that acceptance letter from the Curse-Breaking Division, parchment trembling in her fingers as the words Congratulations, Miss Granger blurred behind rapid, embarrassing tears. She’d neatly forgotten what this particular brand of excitement felt like. As if her days had been watercolours, pale and washed, and she’d only just opened her eyes to the vibrance of oils.

All because of Draco.

A wizard who’d caused her so much grief, strife, and so many endless hours of self-doubt that had calcified in her chest like old plaster. Those endless hours staring at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror at Hogwarts, poking at the shape of her teeth or fingering the wildness of her hair, wondering why she wasn’t enough. And yet—he’d saved her. Revealed parts of himself that she suspected he’d never shown another soul. Shaped by pain, just like her. Two sculptures carved by the same brutal chisel, forced into different moulds.

She wondered, idly, who he would have become had different choices been made. Had he been born into better circumstances. A childhood where love wasn’t transactional and approval wasn’t purchased in blood and pain and obedience. A world where the Dark Lord was a paragraph in a history textbook rather than a nightmare that had taken up residence in his dining room. Into a home with mismatched armchairs and a mother who measured love in jumpers and second helpings.

But then he wouldn’t be him.

A wizard of many shades—light and dark and every murky gradient between. Nothing so tawdry as a one-dimensional villain hiding its sins on the reverse side. He wore his shades openly for better or for worse. Paying penance for the darker ones with a quiet, grinding diligence that broke her heart a little every time she caught him at it. And somewhere in there—beneath the sneers and the occasional Occlumency and the mask and the lifetime of blood-prejudice conditioning—was a man who’d read Jane Austen in Azkaban and said thank you to a house-elf for the first time in his life as if the words were in a foreign language he was only just learning to speak.

That’s the man I’m lying next to.

She turned within the tight cage of his arms and nosed his neck, inhaling hints of dried sweat, remnants of French-milled pine soap, and something deeper—oaky and warm, distinctly him. Tenderly, she kissed the small ridge of muscle along his throat where neck met shoulder, lavishing it with the kind of delicate attention she’d reserved for particularly rare manuscripts.

Draco stirred. His grasp tightened a fraction, the blunt edges of his fingers digging into her cloth-covered hip. He lifted his chin—not quite awake, nor quite asleep—giving her more access in silent surrender as she trailed her lips down and down, right into the hollow between his collarbones. She gave a tentative lick. Bit the skin lightly beneath her wide front teeth.

A shuddering breath released from him, long and slow, as if she were unspooling him. His hips shifted against her.

“Minx,” he purred. The word rumbled through his chest and into her lips where they pressed against his sternum.

She kissed a path up the column of his throat, across the angle of his jaw—feeling the faint scratch of overnight stubble, white-blond and barely there—and was just meandering her way towards his mouth when he captured her lips.

Her thoughts—unbidden, frankly unwanted—meandered back to just half an hour ago. The phantom touch of his knuckle grazing the outer curve of her naked breast—barely, the ghost of contact, less than a whisper really. The smooth glide of his palm as it cupped her side, dragging along her rapidly goose-fleshed skin. The gentle grasp of his hand. Catching her before she fell, his face so close to hers that she could count the darker flecks in those grey irises. The tickle of his exhale as it washed across her lips in a swirl of wintergreen mint and something warmer underneath.

Stop it.

But her body refused to cooperate. A low heat pooled in her stomach—the treacherous kind that bloomed from memory rather than intention. It had been so long since another person had touched her like that. Skin to skin and firm. Just being held had become a novelty, foreign as a language she’d once spoken fluently and forgotten. Something sharp had stabbed between her ribs at that contact—a feeling she refused to examine under proper light.

It couldn’t be desire.

Not for Malfoy.

Never Malfoy.

Though he was handsome. She’d concede that much, if only under threat of Veritaserum. She wasn’t blind, nor stubborn enough to disregard visual fact when it was staring her in the face with quicksilver eyes and irritatingly symmetrical cheekbones. At school, she could write him off as a pointy-faced prat with slicked-back hair—a boy whose complexion had been translucent enough to reveal the topography of blue veins just beneath the surface, like something unborn and not quite finished. Youth had made him annoying in the way of abstract modern art set amongst the old masters—a Piet Mondrian propped beside a Caravaggio, all angles and no substance.

Unfortunately for her, time had smoothed those edges with the patience of water against a cliffside. Turning pointy features into something architectural. The shading of maturity transforming something flat and sharp into something remarkable—skin less ghoulish and more arresting, like the cool light of a full moon over dark water.

Though that last opinion may have been born from anger rather than honest appraisal.

Regardless, this mature incarnation of Draco Malfoy had assembled himself into a tall wizard with high cheekbones that could cut glass and lips in a shade of dusky rose that had no business being on a man who used to—still did on occasion—sneer for sport. A strong nose with the barest hint of a bump along the bridge—picked up sometime between the Final Battle and his first day haunting her department corridor.

A boyishness still clung, though. She’d caught it in his eyes—the way they’d spark with mischief a beat before his mouth caught up. In the way he swung his arms sometimes when he walked, loose and easy, like the world wasn’t watching. Even in the shadow of his smirk when he needled her about something inconsequential.

Not that I notice. Just accidentally observe. Peripherally. As one does.

She’d never wax poetic about Draco Malfoy. Never. Especially not about those darker brows that made his quicksilver eyes glow instead of merely exist.

Her mind turned traitor again, circling back to that touch before she’d even grabbed his hand. It’d been perfunctory on his part—the way someone might slide their hand along a rail or doorframe. Habitual and unhurried. And yet a lingering heat had trailed in its wake, sinking beneath the surface of her skin like warmth from a cup held too long. Another feeling she hadn’t experienced for quite some time. Had nearly forgotten what it felt like to have someone’s hand leave that phantom tingle similar to the aftershocks of an earthquake.

A quick fumble between her legs with her own fingers was the closest approximation she’d had of that particular warmth of late. And on the tail end of that thought—unwelcome and insistent—she thought of his fingers. The length of them. The way they’d trailed down her forearm. How they might feel if they—

No. Stop. Do not think of it. Think of anyone else. Any wizard.

A beat.

Well, maybe not Ron or Harry.

Anyone else.

Hermione blamed it on the simple fact that Malfoy was close. Proximity and deprivation made fools of everyone. It was like smelling the previous course as you took a bite of the new one—a trick of the senses, nothing more. Her fists balled at her sides, knuckles bleaching white through her heat-tinged skin.

“So…Malfoy. How long has that been going on?” he asked, hands folded on his chest, one leg bent, mirroring her pose somewhat. His tone was light and conversational.

“Officially? Not at all,” she confessed, turning her head to face him slightly.

Bill’s scarred face caught the bright light as he turned toward her—the relief of his long scars thrown into sharp shadow, more topography than disfigurement now. Time and Fleur had softened them into something that looked almost dashing.

Dangerous even, in the way recluse heroes were in the depths of her paperback romances.

“Quite a story between those two sentences, Granger,” he tutted, revealing large straight teeth behind semi-thin lips. The comma-shaped creases around his mouth deepened.

Her eyes found Draco in the sky. Just a floating dot on a borrowed Cleansweep, circling with the patient and predatory grace of someone long used to scanning the skies for a momentary gleam of gold. She wondered if he was scanning for the Snitch or scanning for her. It was a toss-up, considering how excited he’d been to put on his old Quidditch kit.

Upstairs, she’d sat on the edge of the bed, threading a leg into her denims, keeping her gaze fixed on the scarred floorboards. They’d dispensed with the pretence of privacy for convenience—and, well, other reasons. Ones neither had given voice to.

Not yet, at least.

Soon though.

The anticipation of such a conversation hovered on the horizon, like the way one feels as a storm gathers in the distance. A change in pressure. That telltale shift in the air. That steady quiet.

But not a rushed discussion before a Quidditch match.

While she’d wrestled with a stubborn button, she’d tried to give him some measure of privacy by averting her eyes, but the temptation had pulled her in like a riptide. She’d glanced up just as Draco was tying the leather forearm straps of his Quidditch kit, the buckles creaking softly as he cinched them into place, the tendons on his hand flexing taught with the movement. He’d caught her looking and smirked. It was a newer version, absent of it’s previous cruelty. The one that did something inconvenient to her pulse and stained her cheeks with a flush.

Despite her general aversion to Quidditch, she couldn’t deny the effect of that bloody uniform. Especially with Draco in it. She’d needed to cast a few tailoring charms to adjust the fit for safety—the kit had been made for a broader, healthier version of him—and she told herself that was the only reason her eyes had lingered.

Liar, came that same voice—Ginny. Like her friend had cast a permanent imperius on her conscience just to force needless commentary.

As the fabric skimmed closer to the lines of his torso, revealing the lean planes of his chest visible beneath the fitted jersey, and his arse framed tighter by the cut of the trousers—he looked, dare she say it, quite fit.

Even in Slytherin green.

When they’d walked out to the makeshift pitch, Ginny had given him a quick covert once-over through lowered lashes—a look she thought nobody noticed. Hermione had noticed. A stab of jealousy narrowly twisted her features before she caught herself.

Before they went to retrieve their respective brooms, Draco had turned to her, running a bare knuckle down her cheek. It was the only exposed strip of skin beneath the leather fingerless gloves. The touch burned a trail of along her jaw like a wandless warming charm as it travelled and pooled somewhere beneath her breastbone.

“Take it easy, all right?” she’d said, feeling a traitorous blush creep up her neck as he continued that sweeping back and forth caress. If only she could blame the cold.

“Yes, dear,” he’d murmured, and the endearment ignited something in her chest—tendrils of heat that curled low and spread outward like a flame to a lake of petrol. Or even the first sip of Firewhiskey on a winter’s night.

The fingers of the late morning sun had bounced off the black porcelain of his mask, revealing those hairline fractures she’d noticed before—just a shade darker than the rest, normally invisible unless the light caught them right. The silver serpents framing the eye holes glittered alongside the Celtic knotwork running along his cheekbones and temple.

He’d removed his hand slowly, leaving a trail of phantom fire in his wake. She’d wanted to catch his fingertips and press her lips to them—but she thought better of it. Instead, she was left watching the ripple of his cloak as he sauntered confidently toward the nearby shed to grab his borrowed Cleansweep Seven. She’d stood rooted to that spot far longer than she meant to, the December air sharp in her lungs, her skin still humming where his knuckle had traced.

Just as they joined the queue outside the kitchen, a figure in purple pyjamas covered in galloping centaurs and glittering constellations materialised at their elbows.

“Morning, Malfoys.” George’s grin was wide, sly, and entirely too awake for the hour. “Happy Christmas.”

Hermione rolled her eyes—a reflex that was becoming its own Christmas tradition where George was concerned. She grabbed two plates from the small sideboard just outside the kitchen doors. “Happy Christmas,” she muttered, handing a plate to Draco, who accepted it with a quiet thanks. He continued to hover at her back like a well-dressed shadow.

Not that she was complaining. There was something unexpectedly pleasant about being wanted—even if the wanting was primarily motivated by the need for a human shield against Weasleys.

“Is everything you own in green, or is that a happy coincidence?” Charlie asked as he joined the queue behind them. His own navy flannel was covered in silvery-blue Swedish Short-Snouts breathing miniature puffs of embroidered fire.

“Knowing the Malfoys, there’s probably a fair bit of black and silver in the wardrobe as well,” Bill called from the nearby dining table. His plate was piled with a full English, golden yolk bleeding into beans. Beside him, Victoire sat in her high chair, small fingers exploring her scrambled eggs with the focused determination of a tiny archaeologist. “No—don’t stick your fingers in the eggs, Tori!”

“I do, in fact, own some navy, charcoal—” Draco began, his voice carrying the clipped precision of a man defending his sartorial range.

“There’s nothing wrong with green,” Ginny interrupted, appearing behind Charlie. Her own matching set was green and gold, covered in various Chasers—including a miniature, animated version of herself—from the Holyhead Harpies. “Though charcoal’s part of the black family, isn’t it? Doesn’t really count, does it?”

“Isn’t he one of the last remaining members of the Black family?” Bill quipped between bites of hog’s pudding, simultaneously directing an enchanted spoon toward Victoire’s mouth in looping broomstick swoops. “Makes good sense, then.”

“Godric’s sake, leave him alone, you three,” Hermione tutted as they reached the kitchen threshold.

All three grumbled but acquiesced—the combined force of Hermione’s tone and the proximity of food proving a reliable deterrent.

“Still looks like a knob,” George muttered.

Hermione’s fist connected with his upper arm with the precision of someone who’d been practising the manoeuvre for years.

“Oi!” he whisper-yelped, rubbing the spot.

Draco dropped his mouth to her ear. The ghost of his breath touched the shell, warm and close.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

“Just give me five more minutes.” The words were muffled, spoken directly into the pillow.

“This is what sleep deprivation gets you,” he tutted, crossing his arms. “Now get up. Let’s go.”

“No. Just a few more minutes.” She drew her legs up, curling into herself like a hedgehog deciding the world wasn’t worth facing.

“I’ll pull you from the bed.”

“Just…a…few more…minutes,” she breathed, each word slower than the last, the pauses between them widening like gaps between stepping stones sinking into mud. She was falling back under, rapidly, her breathing already evening out.

“I warned you.”

He got off the bed, leaned back over, and yanked her by the legs towards the edge of the mattress. The percale rumpled beneath her like a tide being pulled back.

“MALFOY, WHAT THE FUCK!”