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Back To School Fest, Granger's Unhinged Writing Department
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Published:
2024-09-20
Updated:
2025-10-12
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105,521
Chapters:
19/?
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river bones

Summary:

A shoulder bumps into hers. It should mean nothing, not worth a second thought. The touch should not even register to her.

But it reverberates through her, rippling through her entire body until the aftershock is transferred to the ground beneath. Hermione’s teeth sink into her lower lip—lateral incisors scraping against flesh, molars pinching the sides of her tongue, sharp and pointy—holding back the pained gasp that threatens to loosen from her at the slight contact.

“Fuck,” a voice seethes, and she instantly places him.

Her eyes open and he’s there—tall, blonde, brooding and looming in her space.

Or: Not everyone comes back from the war. Those who do return are changed.

Notes:

Prompt:
Someone's hiding something. Something big.

Please pay attention to the tags. Will include a content warning at end of chapters with specific triggers mentioned.

Chapter 1: ignition

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Cover Art by EllieMess

Her vision is merely motion and sunbeams.

Mud cakes on the soles of her shoes, splatters of it mark her jeans. Each time her feet connect with the wet earth, it latches on like it means to keep her in place. If she had a second to breathe, she would feel the way it further stretches each tired joint.

But she doesn’t have a single second, not to breathe, not even to push a sob between her lips—which crack and bleed from exposure, or maybe exhaustion, or maybe it’s all of it. She doesn’t have a second because she must keep going forward.

The dry brush of winter whips past her, branches catching on her skin, thicket bruising as it slices through the air, a punishing switch as she pushes.

She doesn’t know how long she has been running. Each pump of her legs sends pain surging through the overexerted tendons. Weak from lack of use. Surging forward now only on primal instinct. Her brain rationalises mere minutes had passed since he caught her scent, but her muscles ache hours.

But surely, he would tire soon, she thinks, a twinge of hope pricking like a knife in her spleen. He wouldn’t last that long—would lose interest, pick up another scent, an easier kill before that much time had passed.

Too close, she hears his growl.

⨳

It should have been a passing touch.

The halls of Hogwarts are overfull– new students melding with old, children at unease in their too-long robes juxtaposing beanstalk teenagers teetering on adulthood, friends grasping and familiar in embraces heated by the long-stretched summer holiday.

Holiday feels like the wrong word.

Hermione is jostled in the tide of students, pushed to and fro. She’d changed into her outer robes, skin itching, wrists aching as she tried to navigate through the throng of bodies.

Somehow the heat of Scotland felt sweltering this year, hot enough to make the thin cotton of her undershirt stick wet against her skin. Sweat mats her hairline, the curls bunching tight from moisture, frizzy from the long hours twisting and turning in discomfort on the Hogwarts Express.

She thinks of the way her father sat at the kitchen table; glasses hanging precariously on the tip of his nose, brow furrowed in consternation as he flipped through the articles.

‘Global warming,’ he’d said, voice thick and croaked. He wet his lips, which had gone dry from the hour he’d spent in silence, mouthing the words of his newspaper to a silent room.

Then his warm brown eyes had turned to Hermione, shooting her one of those pensive looks.

‘I worry about your future. The world is on fire. I worry about…I worry about what we will have to leave you with when we’re long gone. All the streams and rivers will be bone dry. Your children might never see an elephant. Hell—I don’t even think your mother and I have, outside of a zoo–’

His next words were lost to memory. Her thoughts had been slanted red pupils and Death Eater robes, and she hadn’t focused—hadn’t listened more. She didn’t have time to think of metaphorical children and some future that wasn’t promised.

When she’d obliviated them, sending them straight to Australia, she wondered if she should send them to Botswana or Tanzania first. Let them have their safari. Far away from the war their daughter was a part of.

Now, all she has are the little vignettes of memories—tableaus of her father here, her mother there, Hermione in the centre, Hermione being there, Hermione being here, everybody smile on three, it had been real, happy, Hermione had been there, sad, Hermione had been real, no longer.

Now, she’s the only member of her family who remembers she’d been a part of it. But it was worth it, wasn’t it? It has to mean something, she tells herself when her bones ache deep in the night, when the guilt and grief and all of it weigh on her heavily.

The war was won, and that’s enough. This is evidenced by the gathering of bodies in the courtyard of Hogwarts.

Her wrists itch.

Perhaps it is the return to this place so soon after the events. The blood had been washed from the limestone, but it cloistered. Muddy. It all smells muddy and coagulated and rotted, it’s all death. An overripe Scottish September— global warming, he’d said, lips dry, voice croaked— and she hates it, hates it. The weather heats and the rush of bodies makes it stick. Makes her stick. She is stuck.

Hermione glances around, counting even though she doesn’t want to. There should be more people here. This is all pretend.

The war was won, and that’s enough.

A shoulder bumps into hers. It should mean nothing, not worth a second thought. The touch wouldn’t have even registered to her. It should be nothing.

But it reverberates through her, rippling through her entire body until the aftershock is transferred to the ground beneath. Hermione’s teeth sink into her lower lip, lateral incisors scraping against flesh, molars pinching the sides of her tongue, sharp and pointy—holding back the pained gasp that threatens to loosen from her at the slight contact.

“Fuck,” a voice seethes, and she instantly places him.

Her eyes open and he’s there—tall, blonde, brooding and looming in her space.

Draco Malfoy looks like he’s grown a foot since she last saw him—his shoulders wide, prominent even through the shrouded visual of his robes hanging off him. He looks down at Hermione with a flash of anger, eyes blaming and set to strike, a cunning viper. A second passes, and she watches it all dawn on him, slowly. She knows what’s coming.

Draco Malfoy does not scare her.

Even now, overgrown like a reed, shooting tall, and clearly having had some late bloom of puberty since she’d last seen him, he does not strike fear into her. She knows him. He will hiss, and lash out, because that is what Draco Malfoy does—that’s always been the nature of who he is. That was normal, and she–fuck, she wanted something to be normal. She waits, because what else can she do?

A moment passes, bodies moving around them, gossip and giggles. All the while, Hermione looks up at Malfoy, and he peers down at her.

She tracks the brief flash of recognition, but…his eyes soften. It’s wrong, she knows it’s wrong, but she feels warm, and his grey eyes are like soot—warm and dark, and he’s looking at her—like, like he sees her. And it’s wrong, this is not normal—someone has reached out and slammed a fist directly into her chest, just to squeeze her lungs.

She opens her mouth to speak, but the words are stuck.

Here, finally, now—under the sleepy glow of a late summer’s afternoon, all sound quiets when their eyes connect—she sees him. And it isn’t normal, none of it. There is no more chatter or footsteps on limestone. Hermione only hears and feels her pulse thudding through her ears, drowning out the reunions that chorus on around them.

A muscle flexes in Malfoy’s neck, and his jaw pulls tight.

She waits for him to be cruel—the war couldn’t change some things—but he remains, staring down at her, eyes flashing. She sees soot.

“Granger,” he murmurs her name, slowly like he’s tasting it for the first time.

It sends a jolt through her system, rewiring her brain and sending all nerves on edge. The name sounds so pleasant on his lips, lips she realises are full—cupid’s bow dipping in the middle, bottom lip falling shut on the last syllable.

Has she ever looked at him before? For longer than it took for him to hurl an insult, or to notice his haunted frame the year he’d been recruited to join the Death Eaters.

“Malfoy,” she whispers. It’s a stolen prayer, something secret and gluttonous, begged of the wrong god.

He grins at her. She sees the sharp of his incisors. Feels stuck. Rooted.

Before he can respond, she’s shuffled along. Looped away in hands that are bony and wrong, a fecund scent of vanilla and jasmine swirls around her as Ginny and Luna tug her away.

It feels bad. Makes her bones ache. Grief. Memory.

She chances a glance over her shoulder, looking through her curls.

He watches her exit, eyes lingering and dark. She smells the crackling embers of magic. Her breath catches.

Notes:

Cover Art by the wickedly talented and incredibly sweet elliemess.