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If a witch asks you, “Want to go for a walk?” You shouldn’t say yes.
The smoke of magical London, the one hidden in the alleys behind Diagon Alley, never smelled clean. It carried the scent of rain on pavement, of drunken mead-soaked nights in shabby pubs, and of coal dust.
Draco Malfoy looked at the girl sitting across from him at the splintered wooden table. They had bought steaming pumpkin pastries from a street stall run by an old blind wizard, eating them out in the open while the magical world around them struggled to rebuild itself. Or to forget.
It had taken time after the war for their glances to stop being blades. But once the hatred had faded, all that remained was an immense emptiness. Their first real moment had been a quiet “Who cares?” whispered by Hermione one rainy evening outside the Ministry, in front of reporters still demanding answers about his past. She had taken him by the wrist and pulled him away.
That was when Draco understood. Not that she knew how to use a wand, he had known that for years, but that she was a witch in the oldest, most primal sense of the word. She had that innate power to shift the center of his world with nothing more than a shrug. Sometimes it took very little to have your mind completely undone.
And who could deny it? She wasn’t the polished, artificial beauty of the pure-blood girls he’d grown up with. Hers was a messy kind of beauty, made of hair that fought English humidity and eyes far too intelligent, eyes that looked straight through you. Hermione Granger, to the whole world and to him, had become the beginning and the end of everything. The alpha and the omega of reconstruction.
And him? He felt like an insignificant letter from a forgotten alphabet. A meaningless scribble in the margin of an old archive parchment. Beside her, while she held laws and reforms in her hands, Draco realized he had no idea what it meant to truly live without the weight of his surname setting the pace.
If a witch asks you, “Want to go for a walk?” You shouldn’t say yes.
And yet he had.
When she had crossed paths with him in a dark Ministry corridor and said, “Malfoy, want to go for a walk? I need to breathe,” he should have Apparated away. He should have made an excuse.
Instead, he followed her.
How beautiful hidden London is, its damp streets seeping with the leftovers of magic.
They walked for hours through enchanted alleys invisible to Muggles drifting past only a few yards away. They ate greasy food bought for a handful of Sickles and wandered aimlessly until clocks stopped meaning anything. They lost track of the hour, the day, themselves.
Draco watched her laugh with powdered sugar on her lips and felt his chest tighten in a steel vise. It was a death sentence, but it was beautiful.
That’s how people fall in love, after all: without a plan, while everything else is falling apart.
That night the sky above them was too clear to be real. The stars were so sharp that Draco could almost believe she had enchanted them herself, put them there just to confuse him. It wasn’t Dark Magic, it wasn’t an Unforgivable Curse, but it was a spell just as deadly.
Only, Draco thought with a bitter taste in his mouth, for her it had never been such a great sacrifice.
What use did Hermione Granger have for a broken former Death Eater?
If a witch asks you, “Do you want to kiss me?” You have to say no.
But once again, he had not been able to save himself. He kissed her, with the taste of pumpkin and rain on her lips, binding himself to her forever.
Now, months later, Draco watched the sun rise over the rooftops of London from the window of his apartment.
But it had nothing to do with that dawn.
This was a gray, foggy, city sunrise.
Nothing like that night.
The night they had walked to the very edge of magic, lying on damp grass and watching the sky grow lighter. It had been a dark dawn, heavy with promises they both knew they could never keep, suffocated by the ghosts of the war that still danced around them.
What a cruel trick that dawn had been.
Beautiful and hopeless.
In the old days, the Malfoys would have burned witches like her at the stake. Or at least, that was what he had been taught. Instead, he had watched her burn and decided to burn with her.
Who cares, he had thought. Who cares about pure-bloods, bloodlines, prejudice?
And yet the melancholy twisting in his stomach now was unbearable.
Draco ran a hand over his face, speaking to the emptiness of the room.
Sorry for the outburst, Hermione, wherever you are this morning.
But now, with the benefit of hindsight, he didn’t know whether the yoke of that secret, impossible love had been worth the chain of pain he dragged behind him, now that she had moved away, swallowed up again by her battles and her perfect life.
If she walked through that door right now and asked him to do it all over again, Draco knew what he should say.
He would tell her no.
For pride.
For survival.
And yet… There was always an and yet with Hermione.
If she really appeared, wearing that oversized sweater and those tired eyes, he would fall apart all over again. One look from her was enough to shake every one of his damned certainties.
The sun was high now, but the light in London stayed dim, filtered through smog and memories. It wasn’t the bright, spotless dawn of paintings, or the kind Muggles sing about on summer beaches.
It was a dawn meant to be sung in the city center, among the cracks of spells and the bustle of Diagon Alley, or whispered alone while sitting before a dead fireplace, as cold as the side of the bed she had left empty.
The sound of Apparition snapped him out of his thoughts.
But it wasn’t Hermione.
It was an ordinary girl, a pure-blood his mother had introduced him to, someone he had started seeing only to fill the silence of the house. She stepped up beside the window, resting her chin on Draco’s shoulder as she looked out at London’s leaden sky.
“You wanted to see the sunrise, Draco?” she asked, in a voice that didn’t carry the same music as Hermione’s. “I don’t think today is the day. There’s too much fog.”
Draco didn’t move.
He stood there, staring into the emptiness, wrapped in a sadness that had become his second skin. He thought of Hermione, of her fierce, introspective magic, of the walls of the Ministery, of the pastries they had eaten in the street, and of the yes’s that had ruined his life.
“Yeah,” Draco whispered, while the other girl walked away to pour herself some tea. “Yeah, whatever. What a cruel joke.”