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jomiddlemarch · 4 months

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While You Were Sleeping

Chapter 4

Some people, primarily Muggles, count sheep when they have trouble falling asleep.

Wizards preferred Puffskeins or occasionally crups. Molly Weasley had once admitted she counted crups in Weasley sweaters, after George had spiked her tea with something she made him pull from the store shelves.

(Hermione did not believe anyone who said they counted dragons other than Hagrid, who listed them off by their forenames.)

Hermione preferred facts.

Fact: the Eguzkiko continued to think she and Draco were a married couple.

Fact: Draco was fluent in at least five languages.

Fact: Draco wore a subtle cologne that smelled like Hermione imagined the Silk Road would, minus the camels.

(Unconfirmed fact: this was exactly what Amortentia now smelled like to Hermione, forget cut grass and parchment.)

Fact: Hermione’s facts were usually about statistics, geopolitical historical alliances, and characters in Dickens’ novels because her father had loved those dearly but since the start of this mission, her facts had increasingly, exclusively become All About Draco.

Fact: Hermione appeared to have Feelings for sodding brilliant, widely accomplished and knicker-incineratingly fit Draco Black Malfoy, Esq., Feelings she felt ill-equipped to express.

Fact: She felt no more drowsy now than when she’d extinguished the reading lamp and turned on her side to avoid trying to make out his profile or the exquisite line of his neck against the pillowcase.

Fac—THUMP.

“What was that?” she exclaimed.

“I don’t—” Draco began.

THUMP. Thump. thump.

“What the bloody fuck?!” Draco said, sitting bolt upright. There was a yelping quality to his cry, that couldn’t be denied, though his voice was still pitched low enough that no one would have called it a shriek. Also, being bolt upright showed his broad shoulders to notable advantage (who knew pyjamas could be so impeccably tailored?)

In any case, Hermione had that covered, the shriek-department that is. She did manage to keep it to one solitary shriek that she choked back at the end, right at the moment when Draco reached over and grabbed her upper arms. She only had a split second to evaluate the grabbing, but it was definitely from the making-sure-you’re-real and I’ve-got-you-don’t-worry categories, not the get-a-hold-of-yourself-witch or I’m-about-to-shake-you-silly-for-being-a-silly-bint. Also, his hands were big and warm and transiently made her feel very much cherished and she was glad she’d tied back her hair so he didn’t accidentally pull any of it, though the prospect of his hands gently running through her curls was dreadfully appealing.

When she wasn’t devoting her not inconsiderable brain-power towards the mental recitation of facts, she was capable of noticing quite a bit.

“Are you all right?” he asked. With the grabbing, he’d closed the distance between them and they were close enough she could see the hints of green and blue in his grey eyes, the faint shadow of his beard, a darker shade than his hair. There was a small scar near his left temple and she wondered at what curse had caught him there, how badly he’d been injured to leave such a mark impervious to the Healers at St. Mungo’s. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, are you?” she said. Her heart was still beating very fast, but it had more to do with Draco than the earlier noise.

“Yes,” he said. He loosened his grasp on her and let his hands drop, but they still rested on her forearms, lightly enough she could shrug him off. She did not.

“What was that?” she said when the moment had started to grow too intense, the hollow at the base of his throat too tempting.

“I don’t know,” he said. “At home, I’d guess it might be an old house settling for the night or a storm brewing, but here—”

“Could it be something magic?” she said. She swallowed, then said what she’d first thought, when all she had felt was terror, when she’d wanted to call out his name. “Don’t laugh at me—”

“I won’t,” he said.

“A monster. Under the bed. I know it sounds foolish,” she said.

Hermione was absolutely certain that every single one of her acquaintances, with the sole exception of Luna Lovegood, would agree it sounded foolish. And even Luna was likely to give her reassuring smile and tell her that kidakomori were far fonder of people than people ever gave them credit for and Hermione would have to pretend that she was aware of kidakomori and their undeservedly dubious reputation.

“It doesn’t sound foolish. Not to me,” Draco said.

“What?”

“I didn’t want to say it first, because I agree it makes me sound unhinged, but I also thought of a monster under the bed,” he replied.

“You were supposed to talk sense to me. To tell me I was overreacting,” Hermione said.

“Are you even capable of overreacting?” Draco countered. “I realize I am tacitly validating your prior assault on me—”

“We were children! And you were beastly,” Hermione said.

“And I deserved it,” he said.

“Well, no one deserves to be hit,” Hermione said.

“I understand the progressive Muggle approach to childhood discipline and in general, I don’t disagree but in that particular situation, I must say I did. And not only because I was making a point.” He smiled at her and she liked it far too much.

“Do you really think there’s a monster under our bed?” she said, trying not to whisper and failing.

“You said our bed,” Draco replied.

“That’s what you’re choosing to focus on? Not the monster part? And the fact that we have no wands and even wandless magic is verboten in here, even assuming either of us knew what spell to cast for a monster under the bed,” she ranted. Her exposure to Parseltongue had been so negative (whose wasn’t?) she kept herself from hissing, but it was a close call. Draco moved his right hand from her forearm to her wrist and then laced his fingers through hers. It would have been the sexiest move she could remember any man making except for the possible monster beneath them.

“Inanis belua, but you have to put the emphasis on the bel and let the final a drift. Like leviosa,” Draco said.

“Inanis belua,” she repeated.

“Perfect,” he said. “You’ve always had an ear for incantation.”

“How did you learn it?” Hermione asked. It seemed he wasn’t going to make her face the implications of our bed. At least not at the moment.

“Narcissa,” Draco said, again referring to his mother by her first name. Hermione almost wished for another round of eerie thumps to distract them both from the ticking bomb that was his relationship with his mother. “She coddled me, as much as she could—the Malfoy heir was expected to be superior in all regards, but the Blacks tend to be high-strung, overly sensitive. It was a secret, that she taught me the spell. I wasn’t to tell my father.”

“I don’t think it’s coddling to make your little boy feel safe,” Hermione said, hoping she’d picked the least inflammatory aspect of what he’d shared. The less she said about Lucius Malfoy the better. Even after all these years, she wasn’t sure she could talk about him without venom and however Draco felt, the man was still his father, albeit immured in Azkaban .

“Perhaps,” Draco said.

“I suppose you think it’s horribly middle-class of me. Or Muggle,” she said.

“I think you were raised by kinder people than I was,” he said. Hermione thought of the estrangement that existed between her and her parents and also how it had been as the Grangers’ little girl, the plush calico kitten that had been tucked with her under her covers, the bedtime stories, the trips to the library with a trolley to bring home her latest acquisitions. When she thought of them, they were still Mum and Dad.

“It was Bellatrix who taught her the spell,” Draco said, watching her face. His own eyebrows were drawn together, a serious expression similar to one he wore when wrangling with a particularly thorny bit of medieval Eguzkikan legislation.

“I take it you’re of the confront your fear persuasion,” Hermione said. “Or is this some kind of weirdly roundabout apology Or a Pureblood thing? If it’s a Pureblood thing, you’ll have to give me some context, like whether it’s all the Sacred Twenty-Eight or just the Blacks. It doesn’t feel authentically Malfoy.”

“I’m not sure what it is,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand, still hanging onto her right with his own. “I thought, we’re talking about monsters, from our past, we’ve never spoken about what happened with Bellatrix. We’re sleeping together every night, it seemed odd not to address it but perhaps that was better—"

“It wasn’t better. But this isn’t necessary,” she said.

“I think it is,” Draco replied. “Necessary, but not better. She’s so hard to talk about and no one wants to, beyond cursing her, and I understand, but to not talk about her, it’s as stupid to me as blasting Andromeda off the tapestry. And I’ve never told you how terribly sorry I am that I couldn’t figure out some other way to help you, when she was hurting you. I don’t know what I could have done but that’s not enough, Hermione. It never was and now—”

Draco broke off and Hermione found herself raising her left hand to cup his cheek, stroking her thumb across his cheekbone. It went on far to long for him to mistake is for only gentleness.

“D’you know, I think we’ve had enough of monsters,” she said. “Only I wonder—”

“What?” he said.

“There’s been no more noise. Might we have done wandless magic with that spell of yours, banished the bedframe’s resident horror to parts unknown? And if we did, will the Eguzkiko be deeply offended and break off diplomatic relations?” Hermione asked.

“I won’t tell,” Draco said. “Wandless is near-impossible to trace and tandem wandless hasn’t been recorded. Or regulated in any magical region. I think we’re safe.”

Fact: Draco’s eyes weren’t only grey.

Fact: Draco had been a little boy afraid of monsters.

Fact: Hermione wanted to fall asleep holding Draco Black Malfoy’s hand. And he let her.

#dramione #there was only one bed #fake marriage #rom-com #but with angst #hermione POV #hermione granger #draco malfoy #hermione x draco #post-hogwarts #epilogue what epilogue #sleepy time tropes #diplomat!hermione #lawyer!draco #getting into family stuff #the author repudiates JK Rowling

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