@dhrdump

Hello, and welcome to my Tumblr! I go by Rye as a fandom pen name, and I’ve quite clung with it for a year now. It’s an absolute pleasure to meet you, fellow fandom friend.

I write most days, but not too much posting is done. *shrugs* But whenever I do post, it’s mostly angst or tragedy sprinkled with a bit of fluff, so if you ever brush through my posts, please tread wisely.

Trigger warnings are placed mostly at the beginning, but sometimes at the end to not spoil the content. But I’m going to place drabbles after the cut if I feel like it’s going to be a bit sensitive.

I’ve been here for a while, but I’m transferring my threads from Twitter to here, just for safe keeping.

“Why are you doing this, Malfoy?”

His first words to him, fuming.

Meanwhile, he can only pretend.

“Please, Potter, I don’t need you coddling me.”

“I’m here for Hermione. And you hurt her.”

He flinches. He knows why he’s here, of course. He’d hurt her when she was the one who confessed first. He’d hurt her when he didn’t respond to her feelings. When he only stared at her. When he only retreated.

“Probably better now rather than prolonging it.”

Potter pulls him by the shoulder a bit too hard.

“What are you doing? You’re in love with her!”

Draco tries so hard not to lose the walls in his mind.

“I never said that.”

“I can see it in your eyes, Malfoy.”

He almost laughs, but there is only the unease in his breath. He seethes instead.

“There’s nothing in my eyes. Do you see images of her anywhere? What the fuck have you been drinking—”

“Arsehole! It’s when you’re with her, you’re happier.”

Draco blinks, then sighs when he looks down at his feet. He knows that. There's no need to tell him that.

“Why, Malfoy?”

Draco smiles, the saddest one he could muster.

“It’s because I don’t deserve her, Potter,” he says, shrugging Potter’s hand off his shoulder. “She deserves someone better.”

When Potter leaves the Manor, Draco pretends not to hear his last words to him.

“You’ve been better than you were, Malfoy. I just hope you see that.”

The sun was out, the clouds dissipated.

It was finally over.

Hermione looked over her friends—their tired eyes and weary smiles told her that they’re okay. That they wouldn’t look for her if she went away. Ron was in an embrace with his mother; Harry, with Ginny. Luna and Neville holding each other’s hand.

Then, she realized…

She didn’t have anyone to go to.

And as much as she wanted to be with her second family, she knew she had to find someone else.

She went out—out of the Great Hall and into the field clattered with boulders and damage, rubble and dust. The dark sizzle of magic disappeared like its master had. Ron and Harry’s distant calls were far from her mind.

Was he…?

He couldn’t be.

She went to the entrance where every casualty was set. Student, faculty, death eater, creature. Every single body that didn’t survive the battle. She thought she saw platinum strands.

But it wasn’t his.

If he wasn’t here, then he should be safe.

But Hermione just couldn’t help but look for him.

She needed to know that he’s safe.

And alive.

She went back to the castle, tried to ask some unsuspecting people.

“Malfoy? Why would you look for him?”

“I saw him with his parents.”

“They walked out of the battle. Probably to hide their cowardly arses where—”

She almost hexed the last one she asked, but only walked away, not wanting to hear what they would say next.

Her heart clenched. She needed to go. She needed to breathe. Anywhere, but inside the castle. Anywhere, but these suffocating walls. Anywhere, but the buzzing whispers and tense looks for her as she went looking for the person most of them didn’t want to see.

Without realizing it, her feet brought her in front of the lake.

Hermione heaved, her hand to her heart as she went closer to the only tree standing.

Her—no, their safe space.

And she almost felt her heart stop when she realized she wasn’t alone.

Platinum blond was the only thing in her mind, and she ran. Towards its owner—towards him. Like she hadn’t seen him in years. Like her soul wanted to latch onto its other half.

His grey eyes were liquid when he saw her, and he almost fell when she crashed into him.

He smelled like death, but who wasn’t when they were at war?

And it’s finally over.

Hermione lifted her eyes to face him. Her voice hoarse, breath hitched, chest clenched.

“I thought you were gone…” she whispered, hoping he’d hear her words.

And of course, he heard her.

“I came back, of course.” He lifted his hand to ease her tears. “I came back for you.”

Nothing ever compared to his fingers, even if they were cold to touch. His voice always did wonders to her heart—and it warmed her enough. He will always be her warmth.

“Did you really?” she asked, her ear settling at the beating inside his chest.

“I promised, didn’t I?” he said without a beat, fingers stroking her curls gently, lips settling at the crown of her head.

She wrapped her arms around his waist tighter.

A sigh of relief escaped her.

“Of course, you did.”

“Do you ever think of the future often?” Draco asks her as she plays with his hair under the shade of an orange tree one summer afternoon.

“Sometimes.” She lies, and if Draco knows it, he doesn’t show it, or he doesn’t tell her. “You?”

He hums, opening his eyes to her, as if he was examining her reaction to his question. She gets that look quite often—the one where she needs to give way to his feelings, to his dreams.

Sometimes, Hermione doesn’t know what to do about it.

“I think I’d like to be in a different country in a few years.” He says it while looking past her—the shadows of the leaves painting his pale skin and its rustles make a quiet accompaniment to the beating of her frantic heart.

She feels her eyes prick a bit at the corners and she looks away from him, tries to stop herself from sniffing, or else he’d think that she’s crying.

She might as well have.

So, she bites her lip when the wind whistles, and tells him, “I know,” with a smile that she forces to reach her eyes.

Her throat tightens and her chest clenches as her heart continues to thump. She thinks of his dreams, his ambitions, his wants.

And she knows them because he talks about them quite often—a writer, a wandering painter, a landscape artist; just wanting to travel around the world and see new and interesting things that he couldn’t have seen in this country he’d lived for twenty years; the beautiful sceneries he’d often show to her; the different kinds of people he’d want to meet.

She smiles inwardly. She smiles as if she understands.

And she does understand.

He’s her best friend. That’s what she is to him, as well.

For a decade, they’ve been friends.

For a decade, she had loved him.

She had never thought that they’d ever be apart.

“I’d never thought we’d be apart, though.” He says the words as if he’d plucked them from her thoughts. She looks down at him finally, and his grey eyes are pale on hers.

“Me too.” The wind takes away her soft voice.

“Maybe… this is going to be the reason we’d ‘break up.’” She only hopes she can hear the sadness in his voice.

“Maybe…” she repeats as she sighs, leaning her back to the bark of the tree, her fingers still on his hair.

She hopes he’d be sad to be away from her. She hopes in her heart that he’d think of her.

She hopes that he’d miss her too.

But she hopes as well that when the time comes that he’ll leave, he’ll remember her and take her with him.

Draco wonders if he’s dreaming sometimes.

He wonders about the smell of honey every time he passes by her office at seven-thirty in the morning, the way his senses always catch them as if it were the most potent Amortentia that shouldn't have been there.

He wonders about the quiet taps of her heels, and if they really have that kind of rhythm—two on two from right to left and sometimes once more on the left—whenever she arrives at the breakroom just ten minutes after him while he lets his tea steep, and she walks just behind him to approach the stirrers and creamers.

He wonders about her quiet breath—the way she inhales sharply when he’s behind her as she reaches out for the cabinets with the refills. She never asks for anybody's help, even a quick please, and he rolls his eyes at that.

It takes her a month to slip her gaze to his while he waits for her heels to clack firmly onto the tiled-floor, waits for her sighs in resignation, and her cry for help.

And he smirks right behind her. But he doesn’t realize that his breath is as hitched as hers.

He wonders about the gold in her curls—if they had been there the entire time. He sometimes does a double take, checking if it was just the way his eyes tried to settle on the sparks of the sun’s rays at the start of the day, or an illusion, his mind playing tricks on him.

He has never found her pretty before, never even takes two minutes to take in the scent of the sweetness of her morning coffee. But now, the only indication of him staring at her is the way her lip lifts up as she walks away and his eventually cold tea.

He wonders if she already had those freckles on her cheeks. Or that little dent beside her lip when she bites the inside of her cheek. Or that little smack on her lips she does when she has that Eureka moment.

He wonders if that small smile she’d given him had been real, or if he’d just been imagining it.

Draco never talks to her, though—only nods at her in acknowledgment that they’re co-workers. He only wonders.

It’s the only thing he could do, the only thing that he thinks he deserves.

He wonders if she hadn’t been dating Weasley, if he’d asked for her time, would she have said yes.

But sometimes he knows.

Sometimes, the incredulity of Draco Malfoy’s simple words is mind-blowing, even to Hermione Granger.

“Granger, have dinner with me,” he says to her for the first time as she opens the door to her office one day—almost in a demand—coupled with the cockiness of his infamous smirk like he knows what her answer would be. Like he expects it.

And being Hermione Granger, of course she’s not going to give in. She’s known to be difficult, hard to get. And why in the world would she even give this arrogant man the time of day?

So, instead, she gives him a stare down and closes the door to his face. She smirks behind the door, but it takes only fifteen minutes for the kick in the gut to hurt.

But of course, she doesn’t let it hurt her.

It goes on for quite a while.

Days turn to weeks, and he has been there when she doesn’t expect him to be. She doesn’t count, of course. She’s not that stupid to even remember the fourth time he asked in front of her office at lunch, holding a bouquet of pink carnations with a sincere look on his face.

His blond hair shines like the moon even under the artificial lights in the Ministry. His eyes, bright grey, like he’s been searching, desperate. His lips quiver, probably in anticipation, the tremble in Draco’s voice can’t be hidden even under that light smirk.

That’s when she realized that Draco—no, Malfoy, is persistent.

But she has decided, hasn’t she? She’s not going to give in. And she’s not going to call him Draco.

“Granger.” She hears him say one day.

Her heart skips a beat whenever a taste of her last name escapes his lips.

It doesn’t sound like anything his twelve-year-old self would utter. Not like she’s ever thought about his voice, nor his lips.

Although, this time, the sound is different from all the other times.

This time feels like the last time.

Her stubbornness always wins. Hermione Granger is still not going to give in. Not to Draco Malfoy.

So, in the fifth time he asks with only himself to offer—no flowers or any other grand courting accessory—she looks straight at him and croaks an apology.

She almost doesn’t recognize her own voice as her gaze starts to fall heavy. The apology tastes bitter on her tongue, and she sometimes feels a slight sting, like a non-verbal hex, like she shouldn’t have said it.

He stares back at her with a storm in his eyes, looks down and sighs. With a lip turned up, he straightens, thanks her for her time, and walks away.

// canon reimagining

She tells herself not to be sad every time her eyes catch the red-rimmed corners of his. She tells herself, in her mind, to not care as he steps down from right to wrong at the beck of his mother’s call.

She can almost feel the ghost of his fingers at the back of her hand as he passes by her without looking back.

‘Don’t be sad, Hermione,’ he can hear him say as he tucks a strand, a curl behind her left ear. ‘You know this isn’t really meant to be.’ His cheekbones chiseled, gaunt, and his smile only grows, but it never reaches his steel-grey eyes.

And she remembers his platinum-blond hair from that night, and sees what it has become now—dry, dirty—much like the slur the other side exclaims.

She almost calls out his name—or maybe she whispers it into the air. But no one hears. Not one look from the same side.

But he stops—Draco—he stops as if he’s called by heaven, as if he’s pulled by a string that he never wants to fight.

His shoulders stiffen and he faces sideways, and he’s there. And she’s there.

Just the two of them in the middle of smoke, blood, and ruins.

He doesn’t meet her eyes, but it glimmers, and she knows.

“...Okay? Draco? Please— just stop fighting. I— need to do this. I need you to be safe. I need you to be alive...”

She cried and cried and cried and he wanted to scream at her and crush her in his arms at the same time.

He wanted to be with her in this wartime, not be away from her—even if she constantly tells him that it’s for his own good.

He wanted to fight with her, not to just be locked up at a safe corner, petrified.

“I’ll come back for you, okay? I’ll make sure this is a safe place for you and your family to live. Okay?”

He could never respond, but he didn't have much of a choice.

“This is for your own good, Draco.”

Her hands were cold on his skin as she cupped his face and pressed her lips against his. He wanted to hold her and make her stay. But he couldn’t. And he stayed immobile.

“I love you, Draco.”

His thoughts ran into overdrive.

‘No, Hermione. Please—’

A crack sounded. She Disapparated and he caught his breath at last.

link: https://twitter.com/dhrdump/status/1502122619558002689?s=21

“Draco?”

“Hmm?”

“Don’t go home,” she says.

She looks at him so sincerely, sitting beside him, shoulder to shoulder at a riverside near a muggle park.

Draco doesn’t want to either, but he has to.

“Granger...” he starts slowly.

Then she bursts out laughing. She’s laughing with tears, and he didn’t know what to make of that.

“I’m kidding! I’m kidding.” She wipes her tears as she breathes in between her laughs. But he hears another soft “I’m kidding” — like it was something she wanted to convince herself.

Then mindlessly, he asks, “Are you really?”

Her head snaps to his so fast he thought she might sprain her neck, but he isn't looking at her directly. He faces the sun closing onto the horizon that could only be reminiscent of the sweet amber and gold and hazel that he drowns into when he faces her.

She leans in closer—but how can she when they're already shoulder to shoulder, he thinks.

But she still does anyway, and the press of her arm towards his brings him warmth that he can never feel once he goes home.

Being stuck in an alternate universe does that. Hermione Granger can never be this close to him in his own universe. In his own space. In his own time.

“If it were me, Draco, what would you do?”

She asks like she never knew his answer. Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. If it was a Muggle Draco and a Hermione Granger from his universe, would they have had the same predicament?

“I'd probably let you go.”

The warmth on his arm leaves him, and she turns to him and grabs his face towards hers, surprising him. Her eyes are a sweet mix of ambers, gold, and hazel—he could never get enough of it. And they soften as her eyes look down to his lips, the corners of her eyes pricking with tears.

“Would you really?” She asks back.

And he breathes in her existence and drowns again.

“No.”

“Granger, what’s this?”

“That’s a cellphone, Malfoy.”

“What does it do?”

She looked at him and sighed. This may take a while.

“It’s a way of communicating with another person. Think about a floo call for instance, but it’s convenient because you can bring it anywhere without having to apparate to somewhere where there’s floo.”

He hummed, probably trying to understand what she had just said. The device looked a lot smaller with his long fingers than when she held it. He observed it’s intricacies and tried to flip it open and close, pushed a couple of buttons that returned clicks which fascinated him. His eyes never left the device no matter how hard she stared at him.

Hermione tried to call him.

“Malfoy.”

He almost faced her, but his eyes were still glued to the device. When he pushed one of the center buttons, it lit up the screen, as much as it lit up his mood.

Draco Malfoy was definitely a curious being.

And Hermione didn’t want to take this moment away. Then, she realized she’d been staring at him for almost fifteen minutes.

She couldn’t look away, especially with the way his grey eyes had been swirling with curiosity and awe. She could see the gears of his brain turn as he fiddled with it—probably thinking of some other way to break the device, or reverse engineering it.

And he had that smile—not a smirk—a real, actual smile that Hermione never saw him wear before. It made him—dare she say it—

It was in rare cases like these that she liked Malfoy.

Oh, did she really just think she liked him?

“You look happy.”

Draco looks right to the sight of brunette curls and a golden halo as she blocks the light piercing through his eyes, hair blown gently by the wind. Her amber eyes mix with the sunset colours of orange, pink and violet, and what a picture it paints.

His smiles only ever reach his eyes at a point—something he had been practicing when he needs to pretend.

“Yes, I am.”

The words only ever clench his heart more.

She is his warmth—his sun, his light, his only star—and she smiles at him like she had been pretending, too.

And she reaches for his hand and presses it like she always does when she feels he needs the comfort. Without another word spoken, she pulls back and walks away, his eyes following the very form of Hermione Granger.

And he whispers, and she doesn’t hear it, and she will never hear it in this lifetime.

The first time Draco asked Hermione to marry him, he was drunk. He felt like an arse, coming on to her like they were dating, when they weren’t.

He figured that they were already friends, so maybe she’d just dismiss the drunken moment.

And he knew that he’ll forget about this embarrassment by tomorrow.

But he was more surprised with her answer more than anything.

“Ask me again when you’re not drunk, Draco.”

He could hear her voice still, as his body went limp and relaxed on his bed.

The next morning, his head thumped like crazy, but her words were still ringing in his ear. So much for forgetting that embarrassment, he thought. He covered his face with the palms of his hands, as the image of her smile burned at the back of his eyelids.

The second time the question was asked, Hermione was drunk.

“When are you going to ask me again, Draco?” her words slurred against her tongue as Draco helped her get up to her apartment. They couldn’t Apparate when she had been drinking like she’d been through a break up.

Well, she actually went through a breakup with Weasley. Draco tried biting his tongue to avoid a wrong answer.

As Hermione climbed into her bed, Draco sat right beside her.

Hermione startled him when she cupped his cheek, stroking it gently—an intimate move, one Draco would end up with weak knees.

And then she smiled, drunkenly, as his eyes swam on the glazed ambers with a light glint from the moon that shone from behind her window.

And in a whisper, he answered her, “When the time is right, Hermione. When the time is right,” as he stroked the velvet box hidden inside his pocket. He thought he was ready, but she didn’t need to know that.

Hermione’s breathing evened at that.

But the right time never came, and everything else was forgotten.

Hermione went back to Weasley when he proposed to her just two weeks after their breakup.

Draco was too late.

He realized that he never really had her. Even though they were friends, he had never really courted her. They were just traipsing around their feelings for each other—at least for him.

Hermione never gave him any hints. She never told him how she felt.

‘But what about everything they had together?’

Draco could only clench his fist.

When the invitation came three months later, another envelope came with it. When Draco saw the handwriting in front, he never opened anything faster.

It read:

‘The first time you asked me to marry you, I thought you went barmy. But never in my life have I been asked by a drunk person whose eyes never left mine during the entire drinking session, and I told myself that if you’ll remember, then maybe I’ll consider.

So, I told you to ask me again.

Then the next time was when I was drunk, and it would have been the right time because by then, I would have been honest—emotional, yes, but honest. And I would have said yes if you have asked.

But now...’

He flipped the parchment, but nothing else was written. What happened? Was that it?

Then, he heard a knock on his door as if on cue. He opened it to find Hermione with her curls crowning her head as he had always loved and her eyes gazing into his as if to hypnotize.

She could have been his bride.

“Why are you here, Hermione?”

“Ask me again.”

Draco flinched a bit, confused.

“Weren’t you going to marry Weasley?”

She sighed.

“It didn’t work out. About two days ago.”

Stunned, Draco stepped backward, and Hermione went inside his apartment like nothing happened.

“Then, the invitation—”

“—is why I came here. I’m here to take it back.”

Her cheeks were as red as the scarf she wore. Draco moved towards her, inching closer until they were only a few inches within each other's privacy.

“Ask me—”

Draco embraced her, took in the scent of aloe from her hair, and citrus from her perfume.

“I told you.” Draco pulled away, placing his hands softly on her cheeks. “I told you I’ll ask you again at the right time.”

“Then, when is the right time, Draco?” The ambers in her eyes swam into his.

“You'll see,” he whispered as he closed the gap between their lips.

The last time Draco asked for her hand in marriage was the day they also got married. He planned everything with his mother and Ginevra—from the ceremony to the ornaments to the venue to the subtle things Hermione wanted.

And when Draco asked her, she never got him to finish. She kissed him and kissed him and kissed him, and he just smiled against her lips.

He considered himself lucky.