Draco Malfoy stormed out of the Great Hall and strode down the entrance corridor, his jaw set with fury.
The biting draught did nothing to cool his temper. He moved quickly, searching for a bathroom where he could splash cold water on his face and talk himself out of punching Viktor Krum.
The corridor ceiling was haphazardly strung with mistletoe, holly, and great red lanterns. Hogwarts had gone to considerable lengths with the décor, filling every archway and alcove in an attempt to create a festive, international atmosphere for the Triwizard Tournament.
But the once-cheerful corridor was now deserted — every soul in the castle was dancing in the Great Hall, including Mr. Filch and his cat.
Draco paid the decorations no mind. His eyes drifted restlessly over the tapestries lining the walls — the four Hogwarts houses, Beauxbatons, Durmstrang — and a hollow feeling settled over him. Abandoned by the whole of Hogwarts. He hated how lonely that made him feel.
Then hurried footsteps shattered the quiet. The sharp click of heels came rushing from behind him, and despite himself, he glanced back.
Hermione.
She was hurrying toward him, one hand lifting the hem of her gown. Her cheeks were flushed from dancing, and her brown eyes — bright as polished amber — held a captivating light that would make any boy who met her gaze forget himself entirely.
But the last thing Draco wanted, right now, was to see her looking so radiant.
That radiance was Viktor Krum's doing. Not his.
The bitterness that followed that thought was almost unbearable.
He turned away, exhaled quietly, and kept walking — trying to outpace the hollow ache in his chest before this infuriating girl could make it any worse.
"Draco! Draco!" Hermione caught up and grabbed his sleeve.
His white dress shirt was immaculate, cut in a way that made him look like some wayward nobleman — or a foreign prince sent into exile. That prince turned to look at her, his expression ashen.
"Don't go!" she exclaimed, clutching his arm. "What's wrong? Why are you angry? Let's go back and dance."
Draco stopped. He looked away, jaw tight.
"I think you know perfectly well why I'm angry," he said, his voice cold and carefully controlled. "I need an explanation."
"I'm sorry, Draco," Hermione said quickly, tightening her grip on his arm. "I — I forgot to tell you. He was very disappointed when I turned him down, so I promised him one dance. That was before you gave me the Runic Dictionary, before any of this..." A flush crept up her cheeks as she spoke.
She hoped desperately that he would turn around and look at her properly — just once.
He didn't. He kept his neck stiff, staring forward, and missed entirely the colour in her face.
Hermione pressed on, her voice dropping. "After that, I... got distracted. I was busy going to meet you at the Three Broomsticks. Busy practising dancing with you. I completely forgot what I'd promised him."
She had been too consumed, at the time, by the memory of him kissing her.
Draco's anger eased, fractionally. Even so, he kept his expression hard, eyes fixed on a tapestry ahead — utterly wretched.
"Draco, you have to understand — when I agreed to dance with him, we were in the middle of a row." She shook his hand gently, her tone almost pleading. "I don't know what I was thinking. Truly."
"Perhaps you genuinely like him," Draco said quietly, each word measured and flat. "It would be difficult not to."
He remembered how they had looked together in his other life — Hermione descending the steps on Krum's arm, the two of them leading the procession across the Great Hall. It had been the first time in his life he had felt jealous of his own idol.
They had been luminous together. He had watched from the edge of the crowd, his pulse stupid and unruly at the sight of her — more beautiful than he had ever allowed himself to notice. In the end, he had forced a smile and murmured to no one in particular: *Lucky man.*
That night, something in him had gone wrong. He hadn't sought her out to make cruel remarks, the way he'd planned. Instead he had simply... watched. His gaze had followed her without his permission, unable to settle on anyone else. Wholly irrational. Wholly embarrassing.
He'd been too busy watching to understand what was happening to him — and she, back then, had never once looked his way. She hadn't liked him. Hadn't cared about him in the slightest. She'd had no interest in speaking to him at all.
*Perhaps it would be the same, even now.*
He had never been certain of her feelings. She always skirted the subject of what existed between them — their kisses, their closeness. She would never say it plainly. He always had to probe, carefully, for the smallest crumb.
She had pulled her hand from his in public, once. Resisted him. Quarrelled with him over Krum.
Perhaps even now, she didn't feel what he felt. Perhaps he had imagined the whole thing.
Draco pulled himself out of his thoughts, closed his eyes briefly, and said, "You liked him from the very beginning —"
"Krum had nothing to do with this from the very beginning!" Hermione said sharply. "It has always been you, from start to finish!"
"Nonsense. The night the delegations arrived, at the welcome feast, you couldn't take your eyes off him —"
"I was looking at *you* sitting beside him!" She was so frustrated she nearly stamped her foot. "I was worried because you're terrified of water, and you were about to sleep at the bottom of the Black Lake — I was studying your dark circles!"
Draco went very still.
He had never imagined anyone had noticed that. He had thought he'd buried it well.
*How did she —*
"You always looked as though you hadn't slept in days," Hermione said, glaring at him as though he were the most oblivious person alive. "I asked you repeatedly if you were having trouble sleeping. You always brushed me off. Don't you remember?"
Draco had, in fact, forgotten — because he hadn't been sleeping badly lately. Not since that kiss in the library.
These days, he was eager to go to bed. He loved lying there, turning the memory of it over in his mind. He loved the dreams that followed.
He had spun that single kiss in the Restricted Section into countless variations — most of them ending with an overturned ink bottle, with black stains spreading across a mahogany table and onto both of them; some ending with a row of bookshelves swaying and tipping, sending books cascading to the floor in a way that would have given Madam Pince an apoplexy. In short, his recent dreams had made the old bedtime ritual of *the Black Lake water will not rise, it will not overflow* entirely redundant.
She kept appearing, warm and unguarded, letting him in fully, without hesitation — his imagination filling in every detail she withheld in waking life. Who had time to think about the lake?
"But at the Quidditch World Cup, you were absolutely fixated on him —" Draco said, dragging himself back to the argument, staring at her lips against his better judgement, trying to keep hold of his grievance. "You even started researching how many players are on a Quidditch team!"
"Because of *you*!" She looked genuinely incredulous. "There is more than one Seeker on a pitch, Draco. Long before I knew anything about Krum, I already thought the best Seeker in the world was — well, I thought it was you. Is it really so strange that I started paying attention to Quidditch? Which of your matches have I ever missed?"
He snapped his mouth shut on whatever he had been about to say next. He looked at her properly, for the first time since she had caught up to him.
She held his gaze — steadily, openly, without flinching.
She was telling the truth.
The last of his resentment went out of him like air from a punctured balloon.
"Ah. Perhaps... I was mistaken." He felt the strange confluence of disbelief, surprise, and something warm crowding in on him all at once. "You never talk about our kisses, so I thought —"
He would have been overjoyed to hear any of this at another time. But now he couldn't manage even a relaxed smile. He tried, and produced something weary and hollow instead. He suspected he looked dreadful.
"Even so," he said quietly, "I think Krum has ruined tonight. Completely ruined it."
Hermione felt her eyes sting.
She had ruined it. She shouldn't have acted on impulsive sympathy for the dejected look on Krum's face; shouldn't have accepted anyone's invitation out of spite, just to punish Draco for a row. She had wanted to show the Hogwarts spirit of welcome to international guests — and had forgotten entirely to ask herself whether her actions might cause lasting harm to someone else.
She had hurt him.
And she had known all along how sensitive he was where Krum was concerned. She had known about his possessiveness, his jealous streak — which, given the unspoken and undefined nature of what existed between them, had at the time fired her own resentment and stubborn pride. So she had done it deliberately. A test. A provocation. She had wanted to see how much he cared.
She felt like an idiot. She had been jealous too — of the girls who had grown up alongside him, of his female friends, of the queue of admirers who existed purely to admire him. She had wanted him to feel what she felt. She had wanted his jealousy to prove something.
But this was not jealousy. This was something closer to heartbreak. And she knew exactly how that felt — she had lived with a version of it for the better part of six months, trying to be sensible, trying to talk herself out of him. She could imagine, with uncomfortable precision, what he was experiencing.
Hermione dug her nails into her palm. She wanted to say something — anything — to break the silence. But when she looked into Draco's eyes, quiet and desolate and grey, every word she could think of turned to dust.
She couldn't let him leave like this. She couldn't let the warmth she had finally coaxed out of him freeze over again.
Above them, mistletoe wound along the ceiling, its tender branches putting out small white flowers one after another — like stars appearing in a dark sky.
Hermione looked up at it.
An idea formed.
She acted before she could talk herself out of it — snatching his arm before he could turn away. "Not yet!" she said quickly. "Tonight isn't ruined — not yet. Draco, wait —"
He stopped, turning to look at her. His face was pale and still, his expression bereft.
"Listen to me." She rose onto her toes, wrapped her arms around his neck, drew his head down, and whispered urgently into his ear: "The night isn't over. There's mistletoe blooming directly above us — you can't refuse me."
Then, before the courage left her entirely, she pressed her lips to his.
She was terrified he would pull away.
She had to hold him here. Whatever it took.
Her eyes stayed open, searching anxiously for the warmth she knew he was capable of — looking for the light she had seen in him before.
Draco went very still.
Did she have any idea what she was doing to him? Merlin. Did she understand how little that gauzy gown was concealing?
It was thin enough that through his shirt he could feel everything — the intoxicating softness suddenly pressed against his chest, the impact at once gentle and jarring, scattering his thoughts entirely.
Heat radiated from her skin straight through the linen, reaching his ribs, reaching somewhere cold and locked-away inside him.
How could he still be angry? Her smooth arms were around his neck; her lips were against his — soft and clumsy and completely without strategy, like a match struck against flint, landing with a quiet, decisive crack somewhere behind his eyes.
And then there was her scent. Her hair, her neck, her lips — the warm, maddening fragrance of her wound through every rational thought he possessed.
He had wanted to do this for a very long time. He had wanted to kiss her properly, not glancingly — had wanted to taste her, devour her, had been holding himself back with both hands. And now she had walked directly into his arms and offered him exactly this.
The dark, heavy gate in his chest — bolted shut with every chain he owned — swung open at her light, hesitant kiss.
*Hermione, do you have any idea what you're about to unleash? If you don't stop now —*
Draco stood perfectly still. His expression gave nothing away. But his hands, hanging at his sides, had closed into fists.
He tried to hold on. Inside he was fraying at every seam. And she kept touching her lips to his, again and again, tentative and persistent.
Hermione had anticipated many reactions — a smile, relief, some softening in his expression. What she had not anticipated was the look she found there instead. The misty grey of his eyes cleared, sharpened, darkened — bottomless and intent.
She hesitated, uncertain. Drew back slightly, trying to read his expression properly.
She never got the chance.
His arm snapped around her waist and pulled her in.
Her lips parted in surprise.
He kissed her.
Not carefully. Not with any preamble. From the very first moment he moved, his lips found hers and didn't stop — fierce, hungry, furious, his breath coming fast and hot. It was nothing like the times before. This was something unleashed.
Hermione gasped and tried to lean back, to catch a breath and ask what in Merlin's name had come over him. His other hand pressed against the back of her head and made escape impossible. He pulled her flush against him — like a desperate spark catching dry tinder, the flame erupting all at once.
He had shed every last scrap of restraint.
She had no time to think. She had no time to feel much of anything individually — only the rushing tide of it all at once, wave upon wave.
She kept her eyes open, watching him kiss her with furrowed brows — his expression pained and raw and terribly resolved — and felt the full force of what he felt for her strike her somewhere below the ribs.
She had not known it was like this. She had not known it ran this deep.
That one stunned second of hesitation was, apparently, all the permission he needed.
He grew more unrestrained. He kissed her greedily, one hand in her hair, and her heartbeat became something wild and ungovernable against his chest.
Hermione was shaking. She didn't know whether it was the cold draught, or his sudden ferocity, or the sheer force of the kiss — but her whole body trembled.
He noticed. She felt him shift, still kissing her, and without any apparent interruption in his focus, she found herself turned and walking — until the silver-green Slytherin tapestry at the corridor wall was at her back, and then behind it, the wall at her shoulders, and a shallow alcove around her.
He had pressed her into the alcove. His arm had come up between her and the stone before she could feel it. She registered the uneven wall and then, immediately after, the fact that it didn't hurt — he had shielded her from it entirely.
Her heart pounded.
She wasn't sure whether this was violence or tenderness. One hand cradled the back of her head with exquisite care; the other gripped her waist hard enough to leave a mark.
"Draco —" His name came out soft, half a question.
He kissed it away before she could say anything else.
The corridor outside was silent and empty.
Only the swaying tapestry witnessed the two of them.
In the enclosed dark, his cedar scent filled the air completely. Through the brief flash before the tapestry had fallen back into place, she had caught a glimpse of his eyes — unguarded, determined, burning with something she had never seen there before.
She stopped trying to see him and simply felt instead. His kiss, his breath, the rapid, heavy thud of his pulse where she was pressed against him.
He had stopped being reserved entirely.
He was a painter in the grip of a fever — meticulous, reckless — tracing her lips as though he intended to memorise every detail of them by touch alone.
The warmth of it moved through her in waves. For a moment she forgot she needed to breathe.
In the dark behind her eyelids, the colours came: black for the loneliness he carried without complaint; silver-grey for the melancholy he mistook for calm; emerald for the wild, consuming jealousy; crimson for the possessiveness that was terrifying and somehow tender all at once; platinum gold for the imperious, unbending will that underpinned everything.
Within his silver-green Slytherin heart, she felt it: a blazing, gold-red flame, fierce enough to rival any Gryffindor she had ever known.
In the sudden storm of it, she felt herself go soft, helpless — the way she had in the library, when she had nearly slid straight down the bookshelf. She wanted to escape. She tried.
She couldn't. Only then did she register his cunning: his thigh was pressed between hers, wedging her firmly into the alcove. She squirmed, trying to free herself; his hand gripped her waist in response, pulling her upward, and she gasped.
She had lost all control of the situation. She was entirely his.
*Draco Malfoy, that is a foul,* some small, furious voice informed her — and a mortifying sound escaped her before she could stop it.
He was absolutely wicked. She clutched his shirt in both hands.
He did something deliberate with his leg — a shift of weight, a grind through fabric — and the soft, undignified noise she made in response drew a low, satisfied laugh from him.
He knew precisely what he was doing. She resented him enormously for it.
She was a helpless mess and he was revelling in every second, and she hated how thoroughly she couldn't bring herself to make him stop.
He wasn't kissing her to be kind. He was kissing her like a man settling a very particular score, and the score was Viktor Krum.
Finally, reluctantly, he moved away from her lips — only to bend to her ear, where he pressed his mouth close and said, low and hoarse, "You are mine. Only mine. My dance partner — in my arms. No one else gets to kiss you. No one. Do you understand me, Hermione Granger?"
He admitted it freely. He had always been jealous of Krum. Thoroughly, irrationally, completely jealous.
Because of her, he had lost control again. He always lost control because of her. Only because of her.
He had become barely recognisable to himself — no longer cold, no longer composed. Just a boy with a raging fire in his chest, naive and foolish enough to admit he couldn't resist her.
His voice, slightly rough, sent a shiver straight down her spine. His cedar scent bypassed every sensible function of her brain and rendered them useless. His words sank in like barbed hooks, catching somewhere in her chest.
She was trembling. His leg pressed against her, refusing to let her forget herself. She tried to press her thighs together, and only succeeded in pressing closer to him.
Her coherent thoughts, never plentiful at this point, scattered entirely.
*Where has my composure gone?* she thought desperately, searching for some remnant of the calm, logical person she had been an hour ago. She couldn't find it.
"Yes," she whispered, and even to herself she sounded dazed. "Yes... I'm yours. Your dance partner. In your arms."
She stopped reasoning. She simply repeated what he said, because his lips were back at her ear and his hand was still in her hair and she was far past the point of forming original sentences.
It wasn't winter anymore. Somewhere in the dark behind the tapestry, she had been transported to a private courtyard in spring, out of the wind, fragrant and soft and warm.
"I'm yours... only you can kiss me..." she murmured.
Her reason had thoroughly abandoned her.
"Yes," Draco breathed against her ear, lips brushing the curve of it. "Sweet girl. Mine. Only mine."
"Yes... only yours..." Her fingers were making wrinkles in his shirt that would never come out. She couldn't bring herself to care.
A deep, satisfied sigh escaped him. His most consuming need — the possessiveness, the desperate wish to be certain of her — was temporarily, blissfully quieted by her voice.
He kissed from her ear to her lips, one hand still wound through her hair as though it were the only fixed point in the world.
Then he wanted to hear more of her voice. He shifted his free hand from her waist, meaning to trace lower, to coax more unguarded sounds from her —
Voices in the corridor. Footsteps.
"Severus, wait —" Urgent, familiar. Karkaroff.
Draco wrenched himself back to sense.
*Merlin.* What had he done? What had he been about to do? Her voice had gone so small and soft — had he frightened her? He forced his hands still. He forced himself to stop.
His loss of control a moment ago landed on him with sudden, cold clarity.
And then, on the heels of that: Voldemort. The Death Eaters. What Bellatrix had done to her.
"Did I go too far?" His voice came out unsteady. He pulled back just far enough to see her face in the dim light, steadying her with his hands as she swayed. "Are you alright?"
He was trying to suppress everything — the want, the heat, all of it — and concentrate only on her.
"I'm alright," Hermione murmured. Her whole body was warm and loose, and she was leaning against him without much evidence of bones being involved.
She was pressed against his chest with complete, unselfconscious trust — the way she fit against his favourite silk pyjamas, which did absolutely nothing for his composure.
He was burning. He shifted, discreetly, hoping she wouldn't notice.
She didn't appear to. She rested her head against his neck, breathed him in gently, and whispered in a voice like a drowsy kitten that she was a little dizzy, that she loved his hugs, that she loved his kisses.
"I don't avoid talking about our kisses because I dislike them," she whispered. "I avoid it because I'm embarrassed."
The soft confession moved through him like a warm, tingling current.
He closed his eyes with some difficulty and tried to hold her with something approximating a pure heart.
She shifted. Unconsciously, innocently — and bumped into evidence of how thoroughly pure his heart was not. His breath caught.
"Don't move," he said quietly. There was something in his voice that made her go very still. "Let me hold you for a moment. Please."
She seemed to hear the warning in it. She went obediently still, letting him hold her, and listened to his slow, deliberate exhale.
After a long while — when his breathing had steadied and her legs appeared willing to support her weight again — Draco gently let her go.
The faint light filtering around the edge of the tapestry let him see her face: flushed, bright-eyed, her lips unmistakably red.
"You're not to look at any other boys tonight," he said softly. The desire in his eyes, fully visible now, undermined the calm of his voice somewhat. "Not tonight. Remember — you're mine. Every dance from here until midnight belongs to me."
The girl nodded. Whatever she had recovered of her good sense dissolved again under his gaze.
A moment later, they slipped out from behind the tapestry and back into the lamplit corridor.
"Look what you've done," Hermione said indignantly, blushing scarlet as she reached up and found a loose strand of hair on her shoulder. "Your own hair is a complete disaster."
Draco glanced at her dishevelled bun and smiled — genuinely, wickedly, the exact smile she had been hoping for when she first kissed him under the mistletoe.
His jealousy was gone. The bitterness had lifted entirely. She was absolutely certain of it.
"You started it," she muttered, reaching up frantically to salvage her hair, shooting him a reproachful look.
"Let me." His smile softened, turned somewhat boyish. He leaned close, lifted the loose strand of hair, and with careful hands, tucked it back into place.
His breath was warm against her forehead. Hermione looked up at him, and the words came out before she thought about them: "I love your smile."
Draco looked at her for a moment. Then, quietly: "I love you."
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, gentle and deliberate.
Her face flooded with colour.
He looked at her — his Hermione, as beautiful and composed as ever, but with watery eyes and red lips and flushed skin, and the knowledge that she had said *I'm yours* and meant it. Joy welled up in him, simple and complete.
Tonight, she was his. No one was taking her anywhere.
"Come on," he said, and took her hand. "Let's go back to dancing."
"Yes," she said vaguely, "dancing..." — and let herself be led.
The reconciled partners walked back down the corridor and into the entrance hall, which had thinned to a handful of stragglers. As they passed through the doors of the Great Hall, a low whistle came from somewhere behind them. Both of them went scarlet and kept walking, neither willing to look back and see who was responsible.
The Great Hall was still packed — the lights dimmer now, the atmosphere loose and rowdy as the Weird Sisters launched into something fast. Ron was in his seat exactly where they'd left him, draining the last of his drink.
"You're back, then." He yawned and tossed Draco's robe at him without getting up. "Made up quickly this time. I was about to keep that." He levered himself to his feet and ambled off towards Harry at the drinks table.
Draco caught the robe one-handed, turned, and gave Hermione a look of pure, satisfied triumph.
Hermione was still gathering herself. She watched him shrug the robe on over his white shirt — smooth, unhurried, impeccably graceful — and felt an entirely inconvenient warmth move through her.
There was something almost dangerous about how effortlessly elegant he was. She pressed the word down firmly and did not let herself think it.
She looked at him a moment longer, struck by the fact that she had never quite realised how much she enjoyed doing so.
Then Draco took her hand, wrapped his fingers through hers, and held firm — with the quiet, settled air of someone who had decided she was staying exactly where she was for the remainder of the evening. He led his little witch straight to the centre of the dance floor, and she followed without a word of argument.