The corner of her mouth quirked up. “I should have guessed that. I remember that you were good at them. You could take it up again. Alchemy uses charmwork quite heavily. Maybe we could work together on projects someday.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Maybe.”
He looked tired. Hermione burrowed against him, and he tangled his hand in her hair, pulling her closer.
“We're safe here?” she asked again, running her fingers along the placket of his shirt. “You're not — you're not just saying that we are so I'll stay calm, are you?”
Draco drew back and looked at her. “We're safe, Hermione.”
A catching sensation in her chest faded away. “Alright then.”
She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes.
When she woke hours later, he was asleep too. It was as though nine years of exhaustion had finally risen up and swallowed him.
He slept for days, nearly insensate. Hermione could unbandage his arm and treat it, and he wouldn't twitch.
She slept with him for the first week. She hadn't thought she was tired enough to sleep for consecutive days on end, but it was as though a relentless tension she hadn't even registered had finally eased for the first time in memory, and sleep was more refreshing than it had ever been in her entire life.
Her headaches gradually went away for the most part. She found some parchment and a quill and carefully wrote down everything she could recall of the fading memories, and when she reviewed them several days later, many of the details were unfamiliar.
But her mind felt as though it had found a precarious type of equilibrium.
Draco kept sleeping steadily into the next week. He'd wake briefly to get up and eat, check the wards, and then collapse back into the bed, gripping Hermione. Sometimes she worried he must be ill to sleep so much. She'd check him with diagnostics to reassure herself.
He didn't sleep if she left.
She tried slipping quietly into the next room to explore the bookshelves, but he appeared in the doorway within two minutes, wand in hand. She grabbed several books off the shelves and returned to their bed.
“I can get up now,” he said, still standing in the doorway.
“No. I should keep resting,” she said, lying smoothly. “I just wanted to do some light reading.”
He was asleep again in minutes. She laced their fingers together while she read.
He'd been sleeping for nine days when there was a light tapping on the door.
Ginny slid the door ajar and peeked in. “James is having his nap. Can I come in?”
Hermione closed the book and nodded. They'd sent each other several notes via house-elves, but she hadn't seen Ginny for more than a few minutes since the day they'd arrived.
Ginny picked her way through the rooms into the bedroom and then paused, looking at Draco for several seconds before glancing away and conjuring a small chair.
They sat staring at each other for several minutes. There was apprehension in Ginny's eyes as she studied Hermione. Hermione's gripped Draco's hand as she waited for Ginny to say something.
Ginny stared at their hands and then looked away, shifting uncomfortably. “I didn't — I didn't realise how intense you'd be with each other. I mean, I knew Malfoy was intense, but I guess I didn't expect you'd — that it wasn't just Malfoy — that you're both — that way.”
Hermione could see the concern in Ginny's eyes. She didn't say anything.
Ginny had a wand in her hand, and she kept tossing it from one hand to the other. When she realised she was toying with her wand, she stopped and stared down at her hands for a moment. “You know, he didn't give me a wand for the first year.”
Hermione didn't know what to say. She traced her fingers over the tooled cover of her book.
“It was probably for the best,” Ginny said, her mouth twisting wryly. “I tried to murder him about a dozen times anyway. The last thing I remembered was being drugged with something on a lab table, and then I woke up here, alone. The first time he came, he told me everyone was dead but you, and I threw a steak knife at him. Later he told me about what you'd been doing during the war — that you'd—” Ginny's expression twisted faintly, “you'd been with him — I didn't believe him at all. I mean — I had thought there might've been someone you were with, but not — Malfoy. But when he said how it happened — it did sound like you...” Ginny's voice faded away.
She looked down and cleared her throat. “But it was Malfoy. He killed Dumbledore. His dad—” her hand brushed over the ragged scar on her cheek. “The Malfoys have always hated Muggle-borns. And then Malfoy kept claiming he was going to bring you here but not. So, I assumed it was a trick. I thought Voldemort was planning to do something to James once he was born.”
“I'm sorry,” was all Hermione could think to say.