Of the two of them, Dracoās insomnia is worse.
Since the war, it doesnāt matter if heās home in his own bed, he barely sleeps and the slightest sound jolts him awake, his hand goes for his wand, and his mind races like heās seventeen again.
The Dark Lord wants something.
Aunt Bellaās bored and looking for someone to āplay with.ā
Pettigrew, spying and skulking down the halls and emerging from the walls like the rat he is.
Draco lies in the dark for hours sometimes, listening to the silence, and unable to turn his brain off. So he reads. Anything. Everything. It takes him away, and eventually his mind is quiet enough that he falls asleep.
Itās been years now, and reading every night has become part of lifeās landscape.
Currently half the landscape is obscured by curls.
Hermione is lying sidewise on their bed, her head resting on his chest, and her hair is everywhere.
She suffers from insomnia too.
Hers stems from nightmares rather than paranoia. She falls asleep but then jerks violently awake. She curls close to Draco and gradually falls asleep again.
He finds it helps to read aloud to her. Poetry. History. Fiction. Books theyāve read before. Things she already knows.
Draco always keeps Hogwarts: A History on his bedside table. There are certain nights, the worst nights, when she wakes up gripping her left arm and screaming. After sheās calm and breathing slowly again, she curls up in his arms and he reads aloud to her, for hours sometimes, until she falls asleep again. On those nights, heās found that Hogwarts: A History is the only book familiar enough to comfort her.
Heās memorized passages. There are entire pages that he knows by heart. Itās fortunate because the damn thing weighs several pounds. At times he contemplated taking a copy to a printer and having it rebound into individual chapters, but the weight felt like a necessary part of the apology he always feels the need to make.
Itās been almost a year now since sheās needed it.
Tonight, she barely woke. A quick start, āHarry!ā, her eyes snapped open. She laid there a moment before she rolling closer, resting her head over his heart and looking up at him for a moment before closing her eyes. He began reading aloud, and she was asleep again before he reached the end of the poem. When her breathing grew quiet again, he let his voice slowly fade away.
His hand is nestled against the warm curve of her waist, and her fingers are limply tangled in his shirt. After a few more pages his wrist begins to cramp from holding his book high enough, and the bottom two paragraphs are still hidden by curls anyway.
He sets the book down, and just stares down at her.
As he watches, her eyebrows draw together into a v before her expression relaxes again. She nuzzles her face against his chest, breathing in, and the corner of her mouth twitches into a vague smile.
His eyes trace along her profile, following the slope of her nose; her thick lashes, dark smudges brushing against the arc of her cheekbones; and the curve of her lips. He knows every freckle. Heās memorised every detail of her face. Heād know her blind.
He follows the line of her neck and shoulder and down along her arm. The thin strap of her slip is sliding down off her shoulder.
She entirely relaxed, sprawled across the bed with her head resting on him. His fingers curling possessively against the silk of her slip.
Heās been called spoiled and entitled so many times throughout his life that heās lost track of them all. Even Hermione has teased him about his disdain for āpaperbackā books, his insistence upon an eiderdown for their bed, and embroidery detailing on his clothing that nobody will ever notice. He has always been largely immune to such criticism. Draco likes fine things and was raised believing he ought to have them.
But even after years, heās still awed at being with her.
She is the best of everything. Better than anything he has any right to.
Yet somehow she accepted his apologies and chose to trust him. Kept him company during all those unending nights in eighth year when he barely slept at all. Three years married, and sheās never said a word about the lights at all hours of the night. She stays with him when he lies in bed night after night and trying to find something to quiet his demons enough to sleep.
When he looks at her, everything else fades away.
His fingers curl more securely around her waist, his eyes close, and he dreams of her.
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