Hermione looked at Ginny for a moment. “I'm sorry. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be here alone for so long.”
Ginny just gave a tight laugh and looked away. “I think it was a lot better than anywhere you or anyone else was that whole time. I really don't have any room to complain.”
“Still.”
Ginny nodded, and her expression grew pained as she looked across the garden. “Sometimes — I think about all the time I spent hiding the pregnancy, and it feels like a pit in my chest that I'm going to fall into someday. Sometimes I wish I had just died with them. It feels so wrong that I'm alive when no one else is.“
“Don't say that,” Hermione said. Her voice was strained and sharp. “You shouldn't think that. Harry cared about you being alive and safe more than anything else.”
Ginny looked down. “I know. I know — I'm not — it just feels that way sometimes, you know? That I'm only alive because I did something selfish and lied to everyone. Mum would have been so excited. She always said she'd be the world's best grandmum. She never even knew.”
“If anyone had known about your pregnancy, Voldemort would have looked for you. Draco wouldn't have been able to pass someone else's body off as yours. You and James are alive because it was hidden.”
Ginny still looked grief-stricken, but she slowly nodded.
“Harry said—” Hermione hesitated and felt a wave of guilt that she hadn't told Ginny sooner. “Before he made me promise to take care of you both — he asked me to tell you he'd be thinking about you to the very end.”
Ginny was quiet for several seconds before her mouth curved into a tight, wistful smile. “I'm really glad you told him about James. I'm glad he knew that least.”
Hermione reached out and gripped Ginny's hand. They sat in silence for several minutes, sharing the weight of all they'd lost.
Hermione buried herself into the lab when she couldn't handle all the excess time. If she were being productive, she felt able to breathe. It was nice to be creative without feeling like any amount of time she was spending there was countdown for someone's life.
There were countless things she could do. Draco had brought enough books and supplies to keep her occupied for years.
Draco, however, floated.
He checked the wards obsessively. He read. He practiced using his prosthetic hand. It took him two weeks to stop breaking the internal mechanisms, but in the process he figured out how to do considerably more with it than Hermione had expected. Then he'd sit in the lab and watch Hermione work for hours on end.
He didn't have anything to do with Ginny or James unless Hermione prodded him to.
Hermione left him alone about it. If he didn't want to do anything else for the rest of his life, he was entitled to do so. She liked having him nearby. If she couldn't see him, it would sit like a knot in the back of her mind, and she couldn't focus for as long before she had to go find him and reassure herself that he was alright.
When he was there, she could relax and focus.
She'd look up from a potion or from working on his new prosthetic and find him just staring at her with an unveiled expression of possessiveness that shivered down her spine and felt like fire in her veins.
She realised he'd muted the tendency at the manor. It had been buried under everything else. Smothered by his conviction that she'd never forgive him, that he'd die.
But as weeks shifted into months, his possessiveness reasserted itself. It was addictive, getting to relish something she'd never had more than snatches of.
She'd put down whatever she was doing and just drown in him. Kissing him, pulling his clothes off, and holding him in her arms, feeling him alive. They were both alive. They'd survived, and they had each other. He'd slide his hand along her throat, kissing down her sternum, and she'd hear him murmuring “mine” against her skin.
“I'm yours, Draco. I'm always going to be yours,” she'd tell him, the way she'd always used to tell him.
But there were ripples at the edges of her consciousness. Sometimes, when she looked away from Draco, Hermione would find Ginny's strained expression as she watched them.
Hermione refused to let herself notice it.
The only external thing Draco took an interest in was keeping track of the news regarding Europe. The elves brought an entire stack of newspapers every week: European, Asian, North and South American, Oceanian. Any Wizarding newspaper that was translated into English, the elves were instructed to purchase and bring back. Read collectively, it was possible to get a vaguely accurate account of current events.
It was the extent of Draco's interests.
Hermione sat squarely in the centre of his universe and, now that she was safe, his unrestrained attention had nothing else to obsess over. Everything but Hermione was superfluous.