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The spell hit him in the chest, and he thought, stupidly, that it felt like being opened by something that already knew the way in.
Then he was on the floor, and the water was in his ears, and Potter was saying something, maybe his name, maybe sorry, maybe nothing at all, and Draco couldn't really hear him because the sound had gone strange, had gone cottony and thin, like someone had wrapped the whole room in gauze.
The taps were running. He'd left them running. He'd been standing at the sink, and the water was going. He'd been crying, which he did now, and Myrtle had been hovering near the window, saying something useless and kind about how it was alright to feel things, and then Potter came in, and then the duel, and then this.
He was looking at the ceiling.
The ceiling had a stain on it. Brown, spreading, shaped like nothing in particular. He'd been coming to this bathroom for months and he'd never once looked up. He'd always been looking down.
At the sink.
At his hands.
At the thing on his arm that didn't wash off no matter how hot he ran the water.
The blood was leaving him. He could feel it, which was a strange thing to feel, like warmth moving in the wrong direction.The water carried it away in long pale ribbons that darkened as they spread, pooling and branching across the tiles like something looking for a drain.
Potter had gone. He'd heard the footsteps, the scramble, the sound of someone running from what they'd done.
Fair enough.
Draco understood the impulse. He'd been running from what he'd done for, well, all year.
The water was going cold.
Or he was.
Hard to tell anymore.
The sky was going pink and grey and gold all at once, layered, like someone had been mixing paint and given up halfway through. The water was far below, dark and slow, rolling against the rocks in a rhythm that sounded almost deliberate.
Draco was sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, and she was beside him.
Not touching.
Close enough that his shoulder was almost against hers, close enough that he could hear her breathing over the wind, but not touching.
She had her knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them. She was wearing a jumper he didn't recognize, something oversized and dark blue, sleeves pushed past her wrists. Her hair was loose, and the wind was pushing it across her face, and she kept swiping it back, and it kept coming forward, and she'd mostly given up the fight.
She looked different here. Softer. Older. Like the version of her that existed beyond Hogwarts, beyond the war, beyond all of it.
He wasn't in his uniform. Jeans. A shirt that felt worn, lived in. His feet were bare, and the grass was cold between his toes, and the wind was cutting through the fabric of his shirt, and he didn't care. He didn't care because she was beside him and the sea was in front of them and for the first time in months, the inside of his head was quiet.
"It's getting cold," she said.
"Yeah."
"We should probably go in."
"Go in where? There's nothing here."
She looked around. "Fair point. We're on a cliff."
"We're on a cliff."
"Why are we on a cliff?"
"I don't know. My brain just, I wanted somewhere that wasn't," he stopped. He didn't want to say the bathroom. Didn't want to say the castle or the corridor or any of the places where he was the version of himself he hated. "Somewhere with more air."
"Well." She pulled her sleeves further over her hands. Tucked them into fists inside the fabric. "There's certainly air."
"There is."
"Loads of air. Possibly too much air. I think the air is trying to take my jumper off."
"That's called wind, Granger."
"Thank you. I'd forgotten the word."
She was looking out at the sea, and her mouth was in a very slight upturn at the corner that she'd never give him in the real world, and he watched it happen and filed it in the drawer in his head where he kept everything she did, the one he opened compulsively and would rather die than admit existed.
On the bathroom floor, in the real one, in the cold and the blood, he was fairly sure he was getting that wish.
"Why am I here?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, of all the people your brain could've put on this cliff. Why me?"
He picked at the grass beside his knee. Pulled a blade out. Tore it in half. "Who else would it be?"
"I can think of several options. Crabbe. Goyle. Your mother. Literally any person who actually likes you."
"My mother doesn't sit on cliffs."
"That's what you're taking issue with in that sentence?"
"My mother is a very specific woman. She sits in drawing rooms. On settees. Occasionally in conservatories if the light is appropriate. She does not sit on wet grass overlooking the sea."
"And I do?"
"Apparently."
She turned to look at him properly. "You didn't answer the question."
"I thought I deflected it quite well, actually."
"You deflected it adequately. I'm asking again. Why am I here?"
He tore the grass into smaller pieces. Let the wind take them from his fingers. "Because you're the thing I think about. When everything else goes to shit. When I can't sleep and the walls are too close and I can feel the," he gestured vaguely at his left arm, at the thing under the sleeve he wasn't wearing, "when I can feel it all pressing in. I think about you. I don't decide to. It just happens."
She was quiet for a moment. The wind blew her hair across her face again and she left it there this time.
"That's," she started.
"Pathetic. Yeah. I'm aware."
"I was going to say unexpected."
"That's a polite way of saying pathetic."
"It's actually a completely different word with a completely different meaning. You'd know that if you ever paid attention in English."
"We don't have English. We have Hogwarts."
"Which is another issue entirely."
He almost smiled. He could feel the shape of it trying to happen and he let it get halfway before he caught it and put it back. She saw. She always saw. That was the whole problem, really. She saw everything.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Can I stop you?"
"Historically, no."
"Then go ahead."
She pulled at a thread on the hem of her jumper. Wound it around her index finger. Unwound it. "Do you hate me?"
He went very still.
"That's not a question," he said.
"It's literally a question. Full marks for question structure."
"It's an assumption dressed up as a question."
"Fine. Let me rephrase." She let go of the thread. Looked straight at him. "Do you hate me, Malfoy?"
The honest answer was so far from yes that the word felt obscene. He did so many things where Hermione Granger was concerned and hating her had never been one of them. The distance between what he actually felt and what he'd shown her was so vast he wasn't sure there was a crossing at all.
"Yes," he said.
She nodded. Like she'd expected it. Like she'd already built the shelf for the answer and was just sliding it into place. Something about the tidiness of that made him want to stand up and walk off the edge of the cliff.
"Right," she said. "Okay."
"Granger."
"No, it's fine. I asked. You answered."
"That's not what I,"
"You don't have to explain. You've been perfectly clear for six years. I just wanted to hear you say it."
"Why?"
She shrugged. A terrible shrug. Small and unfinished, and she looked away when she did it, looked out at the sea. "Because sometimes I think it's something else, and I wanted to know if I was being stupid."
His heart was doing something awful. Hammering, but also something lower and slower underneath, like a crack spreading through a wall he'd been leaning on for years.
"You're not stupid," he said, and his voice came out wrong. Too soft.
She looked back at him. Eyes very brown. He'd known they were brown since he was eleven. That fact should not still be doing this to him, this full-body thing, this stupid annihilating awareness of her.
"Then what is it?" she asked. "The something else. If I'm not being stupid, what am I picking up on?"
"I didn't say there was a something else."
"They're related and you know it."
"They're not."
"You said, and I'm quoting, 'that's not what I,' and then you stopped. What were you going to say?"
"That your question was reductive."
"Reductive."
"Everything about the way you and I interact is reductive, Granger. You've reduced me to a bully and I've reduced you to a, to a,"
"Go on. Say it."
He flinched. Actually flinched, his whole body pulling in, and he saw her see it happen. Watched her expression shift from sharp to something more careful.
"I can't take it back," he said.
"I know."
"It's out there, it's part of,"
"I know."
"Stop saying that. You keep saying I know like you've already worked the whole thing out and you're just waiting for me to catch up, and I find that incredibly,"
"Annoying?"
"Frightening."
The word fell out of him. He'd meant to say annoying. Frightening was soft and true and he wanted to grab it out of the air.
"Frightening," she repeated.
"Forget it."
"Because I'm what, too clever?"
"Because you see things. You look at people and you just, fuck, you know. You did it to Lupin in third year. Looked at him once and worked out what he was before anyone else even started asking. You do it to everyone. You see the bits they're trying to hide and then you just rearrange yourself around it. Make room."
"It costs me plenty, actually."
"And you never stop. That's what's frightening." His hands were gripping the grass now, pulling up fistfuls of it. "I've spent years making sure that when you look at me, you see something small enough to dismiss. Because the alternative, the idea that you might actually look properly, that you might see what's actually,"
He stopped.
The wind picked up. A gust that made his shirt press flat against his chest and blew her hair sideways and carried the scent of salt and something green up from the cliff face.
"What would I see?" she asked. "If I looked."
"Nothing worth finding."
"Let me decide that."
"There is nothing there, Granger. Underneath the name and the money and the bullshit, there is nothing. I am the most unremarkable person in any room you and I have ever shared. I've known that since I was eleven and you put your hand up in Flitwick's class and answered a question I didn't even understand." He was talking too fast. The dam was fracturing. "I thought, right, that's the whole game. I can memorise the textbook and buy the broom and have every advantage my father's money can purchase and she is still going to be better than me at everything that matters and I am going to spend the rest of my life standing next to her and pretending the cold doesn't bother me."
He was breathing hard. Hands full of grass and dirt, knuckles white.
"So I was cruel to you. Because cruel was the only thing that stuck. If I couldn't be brilliant, if there was genuinely nothing about me that was going to lodge in your mind on its own, then I was going to make you remember me another way. I was going to scratch myself into your life so deep you couldn't dig me out. Even if the scratching hurt. Even if the only version of me you'd carry was the worst one. At least you'd carry it."
She was crying. The way she cried when Snape said something cutting and she wouldn't give him the satisfaction. Quietly.
"That is," she started, and stopped, and wiped her face roughly on her sleeve. "God, Malfoy. That is the most fucked up thing anyone has ever said to me."
"I know."
"You hurt me for six years because you wanted me to notice you?"
"Yes."
"You called me that word because you wanted me to remember your name?"
"I called you that word because I'm a coward and a fraud and it was the ugliest thing I could find. Because I was entirely unremarkable in your light, Granger. Completely, totally, catastrophically unremarkable. And cruelty was the only remarkable thing I had."
She pressed both hands over her face. The wind blew and the grass bent around them and the sea went on doing its steady, unhurried thing far below.
"You could've just talked to me," she said, muffled through her fingers. "You absolute fucking idiot. You could've sat down and opened your stupid mouth and said hello, just hello, and I would've, I would've,"
"Would've what?"
Her hands dropped. Face red and wet and furious. "I would've been kind to you. That's what you're missing. I would have been kind to you, you unbelievable prick, and it would've been real. It would've been because I actually wanted to, and you took that from me when you decided cruelty was the only language I'd understand."
"If I'd been kind, if I'd been normal, you wouldn't have looked twice."
"You don't know that."
"I do. You don't look at people who aren't interesting, and kind isn't interesting. I'd rather be hated by you for the rest of my life than be furniture in your peripheral vision."
"That is not how any of this works."
"Then tell me how it works."
"You don't get to decide what I notice! You don't get to decide that the only door into my life goes through pain and then blame me for the fact that pain is the only thing filed under your name. That's not my failure. That's yours."
"I know."
"Then why are you telling me this like you're confessing something? Because that's what this is, isn't it. You're trying to tell me you have feelings for me."
Feelings. Like it was a head cold. Like it was anything less than the organising fact of his entire existence.
"That is the most absurd understatement I've ever heard," he said.
She made a sound between a laugh and something that wasn't a laugh at all. Pressed her hand over her mouth.
"Since when," she said.
"Since always. Since the train. Since I thought, who the fuck is this girl, and then I never stopped thinking about it. I just got angrier and angrier that the answer was someone I wasn't allowed to want."
"I don't know what to do with this."
"You don't have to do anything."
"You've told me six years of cruelty was your version of pulling my pigtails on the playground."
"Deeply reductive, but yeah."
"And I'm meant to feel sorry for you?"
"No."
"Good. Because you made me cry in a bathroom in second year, Malfoy. I sat in Myrtle's bathroom and sobbed because of something you said. And you're sitting here on this fucking cliff telling me you loved me the whole time. And I can't work out whether that makes it better or so much worse."
"Worse. I know it's worse."
"Then why tell me?"
"Because I think I'm going to die," he said. "And I don't want to die without someone knowing I was here."
She went very still. The wind blew her hair across her face and she didn't move to push it back.
"What?"
"Something very bad is happening to me, Granger. And I don't," his breath hitched, the real bathroom bleeding through for a second, the cold and the copper and the dark at the edges, "I don't want the only version of me that survives to be the one who was cruel to you. I need someone to know there was more. Even if the more is pathetic. Even if it's just a stupid boy staring across a classroom at a girl he thought was the most extraordinary thing he'd ever seen and having absolutely no idea what to do about it except the worst possible thing."
She was quiet. The waves hit the rocks below and pulled back and hit again.
"I exist," he said, and his voice cracked. "That's all I'm trying to say. I exist, and I loved you, and I know that's selfish, I know telling you is selfish, but I need the proof. I need someone to hold the proof that I was more than what I did to you, and I'm asking you because you're the only person I've ever trusted to hold things properly."
She uncrossed her arms from around her knees. Her hands went flat against the grass on either side of her, pressing down.
"You stupid boy," she said, and her voice was barely there under the wind. "You stupid, stupid boy."
"That's the second time you've called me stupid."
"Because you are stupid. You are catastrophically, comprehensively stupid. You are the stupidest person I have ever met and I once watched Ron try to eat a chocolate frog with the wrapper still on."
"That's a low bar."
"You are somehow under it."
He laughed. A real one. Small and tired and scraped up from somewhere deep, but real, and she heard it, and her face did something complicated.
They sat there. The wind kept going. The sky was losing its colour, the pink fading into grey, the gold dimming. It was getting properly cold now. She pulled her sleeves over her hands again. He could see goosebumps on her ankles above her socks. The grass was bending sideways in the gusts.
"I think about this sometimes," he said.
"This?"
"Us. Being somewhere like this."
"On a cliff."
"Near one. There's a cottage. Something small, stone walls. A garden that's a bit shit because neither of us knows what we're doing but we keep trying anyway. And there's a, there's a," he pulled at the grass. Tore it. "There's a kid. A boy. Little. Blond, proper blond, like mine. But he's got your face. This expression you do when you're working something out, this look, and he does it and every time I see it I just, I,"
He couldn't finish. Pressed the heel of his hand against his eye.
"Draco," she said, very quietly.
"I know. I know it's never going to, I'm not thick, I know what I am and what you are and I know a cottage on a cliff is a fucking fantasy. It's a stupid thing I play in my head when I can't sleep because if I think about what's actually happening to me I'll lose it. So I think about the cottage instead. And the garden. And this kid who's got my hair and your brain and your face when he's concentrating. And I think about standing at the window in the morning watching the sea and you're still asleep and it's so quiet and it's just ours. Nobody gave it to us. Nobody decided it for us. It's just something we chose."
She didn't say anything for a long time.
"That's a nice garden," she said, finally.
"It's a shit garden. I told you. We're terrible at it."
"I'd learn. I'd get books."
"You'd get books."
"I'd get so many books about gardening you'd want to leave."
"I wouldn't leave."
"You say that now. Wait until I'm knee-deep in a chapter about soil pH and making you test drainage samples."
"I wouldn't leave, Granger."
She looked at him. He looked at her. And this thing between them was so large and so awful and so tender that neither of them could look at it directly, so they looked at each other instead, which was the same thing, really.
"Tell me about the boy," she said.
"What?"
"The boy. The blond one. Tell me about him."
He blinked. Swallowed. "He's, I don't know. He's maybe seven? Maybe six. He's small. He's always running. He runs everywhere, like walking is just, beneath him, like he's got places to be. And he asks questions. Fucking hell, does he ask questions. Nonstop. Why is the sea that colour, why does the wind sound like that, why do snails have shells, why why why, like he's conducting a full audit of the entire world."
"That sounds like my child."
"He is your child. That's what I'm telling you."
"He sounds exhausting."
"He's brilliant. He's so fucking brilliant, Granger. He's the best thing I've ever, the best thing I could ever," his voice caught. He looked away. Out at the sea, which was getting dark now, the last of the light sitting on the surface like oil. "He's not afraid of anything. That's the thing. He's not afraid. He walks into rooms like he belongs in them and he says what he thinks and he doesn't check first, he doesn't look around to see who's watching, he just, he just is. He just exists. Fully. Without apology."
"Like me," she said.
"Yeah." He looked back at her. "Like you. Everything good about him is you."
"And the blond hair?"
"Alright, fine. One thing is me."
"Must be very disappointing for him."
He laughed again. Wet this time. His eyes were burning and the wind was cold on his face and he could feel the edges of this place starting to thin, the colours getting fainter, and he wasn't ready. He wasn't ready for it to end.
"Look at me," he said.
She was already looking.
"No, I mean," he turned toward her. His whole body. Knee pressing into the cold grass. "Look at me, Granger. See me. I need you to look at me and see that I'm here. That I exist. That I'm more than every shit thing I've done. I need you to look at me and tell me I'm real."
"You're real."
"You said that very fast."
"Because it's not a difficult question."
"It's the most difficult question I've ever asked anyone."
"That says more about the questions you've been asking." She reached over. Her fingers closed around his wrist, just above the cuff of his shirt. Her grip was firm. Grounding. Like she was tethering him to something solid.
"You're real," she said again. "You're here. I can feel your pulse. It's going about a hundred miles an hour, which I'm choosing to read as cardiovascular enthusiasm."
"You're ruining my moment."
"Your moment was getting heavy. Someone had to step in."
He laughed, she was still holding his wrist and his pulse was hammering against her fingers and the wind was blowing and the light was almost gone.
This. If I could keep one thing. One single thing from this and carry it into whatever comes after the bathroom floor.
She let go of his wrist. Wrapped her arms around her knees again. Shivered, a quick one, pulling her shoulders in.
"You're cold," he said.
"I'm fine."
"You're shivering."
"It's atmospheric."
"You're going to freeze."
"I'll survive. I've survived worse than a bit of wind on a cliff."
"That's not actually reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be reassuring."
They were quiet. She was looking out at the water. Her profile against the fading sky. The line of her jaw and her nose and the mess of her hair, and she was smiling. Very slightly. At nothing. At the sea, at the cold, at the fact of being somewhere impossible and beautiful and not real. The smile was so soft and so quiet and so entirely without armour that something in his chest turned over.
He reached over.
His hand was shaking. The tremor in his fingers, and he ignored it and reached for a strand of her hair, one of the curls the wind had pushed across her face, and tucked it behind her ear. His fingertips brushed her temple. The skin there was cold from the wind and very soft and she went still under his touch. Completely still. He heard her breathing change. Just the smallest hitch.
She turned her head.
Looking at him. He was looking at her. His hand still hovering near her face, trembling. The wind blowing between them and the sky nearly gone and he could feel the bathroom pulling at him, the cold water and the tile, and he knew this was ending. He could feel the edges thinning.
If I don't do this now I will never have done it at all.
He brought his hand to her jaw. Slowly. Thumb against her cheek. Fingers curving along the side of her neck where her pulse was beating fast and warm. He held her face and she let him hold it and neither of them breathed and his hand was shaking and he didn't care, he didn't care about any of it, because she was leaning into his palm, just barely, just the slightest tilt of her head toward his hand, and that tilt was the most she'd ever given him and the most anyone had ever given him and he was going to carry it out of this place and into the cold and the dark and whatever came after.
He leaned in.
He kissed her.
And it was soft and it was careful and it tasted like cold air and salt from the sea and something warm underneath, something alive, and her mouth was gentle against his and he felt his chest crack open, felt six years of holding come rushing up through the break, and she kissed him back. She kissed him back and her hand came up to the front of his shirt and her fingers curled into the fabric and she held on like she wasn't sure he was going to stay.
He pulled back.
His forehead resting against hers. Noses almost touching. Her breath against his mouth, warm in the cold air. Her eyes were closed and his were open and he could see her eyelashes and the faint freckle below her left eye and the tear tracks drying on her cheeks and he was crying. He was crying and he couldn't stop. He didn't care. He didn't care because her forehead was against his and her hand was in his shirt and for thirty seconds he had been kissing Hermione Granger on a cliff above the sea and it was the truest thing he had ever done.
"Hey," she whispered. "Don't cry, Draco."
He shook his head. Couldn't speak.
She brought both hands up. Cupped his face. Her thumbs moved across his cheekbones, slow and careful, wiping the tears, both sides. Her palms were so warm against his skin. He turned into her left hand. Pressed his face against her palm. Closed his eyes. Let her hold the weight of his head, just for a second. Let someone else carry it.
"I'm sorry," he said. Into her palm. Into the warmth of it. "I'm sorry, Hermione. I'm so sorry. For all of it. I'm sorry I was cruel and I'm sorry I wasted it and I'm sorry this is the only way I could, I'm sorry this isn't real."
Her thumb traced his cheekbone one more time.
The cliff began to go.
The colors first. Then the sound. The waves going quiet, the wind dropping, and then the grass under his knees and the cold air on his face and her hands, her hands were the last thing, her palms warm against his jaw, her fingers in his hair, and he held on. He gripped her wrists and pressed his face into her touch and tried to keep it, tried to keep any of it.
It went. It all went.
The warmth of her palms. The salt smell of the sea. The cliff and the grass and the stars that had only just started.
Gone.
The ceiling was back.
Stain. Stone. Water on the floor, cold, and the blood still going, still patient. Footsteps. Fast ones. Heavy robes on wet tile.
Snape was above him. Mouth moving. Words that burned where they landed, drawing lines of heat along each cut, pulling edges together. It hurt. It hurt so much he tried to scream and what came out was thin and animal. Snape's hand pressed flat on his shoulder, pinning him down.
His eyes wouldn't focus. Everything was watercolour. Snape's face above him, pale, furious in that cold contained way of his.
And behind him.
Or beside him. In the doorway. He couldn't tell. His vision was broken. A face somewhere in the blur. Dark hair. Could've been anyone. Could've been his mind refusing to let go.
He didn't know if she was real. Didn't know if she'd come running or if Potter had gone for help and she'd followed or if his brain was doing the thing it always did. Going to her. Going to her like it always went to her.
A face. Maybe hers. Maybe nothing.
His mouth was moving.
He could feel the words. In the blood and the copper. He didn't know if they were reaching the air or dying in his throat.
"...loved you," he whispered, or mouthed, or only thought. "Always. I'm sorry. Every mark I left was the wrong one. I just wanted... I wanted to exist... somewhere in your life... I wanted you to know I was..."
The face blurred. Fractured.
Snape's magic pulled tighter. Another stitch. Another seam.
He breathed. It hurt. He breathed again.
He kept breathing because that was all he'd ever really done. Kept going. Kept walking into rooms that were supposed to break him and walking out damaged but upright.
His eyes closed.
Behind his lids, the cliff was gone. The cottage was gone. The little blond boy who asked too many questions and ran everywhere and wasn't afraid of anything was gone. But she was still there. Still holding his face between her hands. Her thumbs on his cheekbones. Her palms warm.
He held on to that.
I existed. She saw me.