Head Boy and Girl! Dramione
When Hermione Granger decides to complete her Hogwarts education and return for an eighth year, she has no reason to believe she will not be head girl. It’s the perfect image: war heroine returns to lead Hogwarts into a new era. She’s dreading the spotlight, the attention, the reverence the position will bring. Even though she fought a war for the right to exist, she wants nothing more than to disappear when she thinks about walking through the hallways with a gleaming gold badge plastered on her chest.
When Draco Malfoy receives his reduced sentence, some part of him wishes he could just go to Azkaban. At least there he could be alone, isolated in his self-hatred. He reads the dreaded words “return to Hogwarts to complete his final year” over and over and over and wishes more than anything that he could just be invisible. He knows he won’t be. With his hair, his height, his family name, Draco Malfoy could never disappear into the periphery.
They both pack their trunks slowly, reluctantly, lethargically. For the first time in her life, Hermione dreads school. Draco dreads the return more, having to walk through the same hallways that Death Eaters stalked, the same hallways in which innocents were murdered. But they both go, arrive at the station, go to their compartments, go through the motions.
Hermione is alone at the station for the first time in her life. She sees him across the way, and some part of her recognizes some part of him. She looks away quickly before their eyes can meet, rushes onto the train, hoping to find Ginny or Neville or Luna. Harry and Ron do not return with her. She doesn’t know if that is good or bad or neutral.
They are having an easier time of adjusting, of imagining futures and making plans. She frequently finds herself stuck in memories. It’s not to say they were not impacted by their prolonged adolescent trauma. They just have people to turn to. Harry has Ginny, Ron his siblings and mother and father. Hermione can’t bring herself to insert herself into a broken family, and her parents are still blissfully unaware in Australia. She knows the charms she cast on them were permanent. She doesn’t think she can deal with the heartbreak of trying to find an impossible answer.
And no matter how much she fears seeing Hogwarts, being in Hogwarts, she is also desperate for something familiar. Somewhere where she can go through the motions of studying and writing and studying and dressing. Somewhere where she will have very few large choices to make. Of course, she has forgotten she is Hermione Granger, that trouble and difficulty and challenge find her regardless of her desires.
McGonagall passes her the Head Girl badge, which she accepts with falsified pleasure and humility. She scours the Great Hall, searching for her male counterpart, scanning the room for a seventh year boy proudly flashing his golden ticket. She can’t find it anywhere. Strange. She sits down at Gryffindor table, slips into conversation, loses herself in words. She forgets, just for a moment, who she is.
She learns who Head Boy is during McGonagall’s speech. Was is intentional, springing Draco Malfoy on her when she’s surrounded, unable to react? Or did the old woman simply assume that Hermione would adapt and excel as she always has. Regardless, when Hermione hears the name, she can’t breathe and her eyes dart to Slytherin table and meet frozen gray ones and she’s caught between screaming and laughing because who thought this was a good idea?
They meet in the Headmistress’ office after the feast. They stand straight-backed, rigid next to each other, giving perfunctory nods and smiles. Every so often, McGonnagal cocks her head, perhaps due to curiosity or fear or wonder, as both of them absolutely refuse to acknowledge the other. When they are dismissed, they turn in tandem toward the door. Hermione tries to escape first, desperate to escape the inevitable awkwardness of him slamming the door in her face. She freezes when the door opens for her. She drags her eyes up from the ground, golden brown meeting icy gray, and this time she’s not cold or terrified. She’s breathless, in a different way.
It starts with little things, just like the door. Little things where she cant breath for a second because it doesn’t make any sense. He hands her an extra quill when she’s digging through her bag desperately to find one. He absentmindedly picks up her bag when they leave a meeting to go to the same class. He picks up her favorite chocolates—and just how does he know her favorite?—from Honeydukes. And she doesn’t ever reciprocate, because every time he does something, she’s shocked. She convinces herself it’s because he’s a Pureblood gentleman, that he isn’t really thinking about her.
In return, she notices him. She tosses him a grin when he gives an EXTREMELY attractive right answer in potions. She grabs his hand before her mind can react when someone calls him a death eater in the hallways. She blushes a furious red when he defends her against taunts, raising grateful eyes to meet his.
They’re engaged in an impossible dance, giving what they can, relishing what the other gives, accepting that neither of them is sure or confident or ok enough to give more. For a while, tiny tidbits of something are sufficient, and then suddenly they are anything but. Hermione no longer stops herself from reacting. Instead of actions, they begin trading words.
And they are total idiots, so they only way they ever stop obliviously circling each other—to the utter dismay of all their classmates—is for catastrophe to strike. It’s not in potions, where they brew immaculate potions silently and in sync. It’s not in DADA, where they duel beautifully, trading spells and continuing their ice-cold distance. They are polite, cordial, rarely emotional and never blunt.
Yes, the professors keep pairing them together, not because they are good partners, but because they are hoping to force their hands. Yes, their classmates find ways to trap them or trick them, but their mutual fear is so strong they manage to escape these perfect opportunities with only blushing cheeks and burning eyes and bitten lips.
No, it’s when an eighth-year prefect from Ravenclaw House mutters, “Mudblood bitch thinks she can push us all around, eh?” to Draco that things really begin. She hears, even from across the table, and her cheeks flush even as she continues to confidently outline her and Draco’s plans. For all the talk of Slytherin being reserved, of biding their time, Draco forsakes the traits of his house. He turns turn the boy beside him and punches him—quite nicely, he would add—through the jaw. Hermione stops talking, shocked, silent like all the other prefects. She’s not shocked by the violence, or by the comment, of course not. She is shocked by him.
He’s breathing hard, chest rising and falling in dangerously rapid waves, staring down at the boy who is clutching his jaw and swearing at him from his spot on the ground. His mind is blank, and maybe he’s shocked too. He didn’t expect himself to react in that way. Maybe he didn’t expect himself to react at all.
Hermione certainly didn’t expect him to react. Even after all the little somethings, she was never quite sure because he never said it. He never apologized—which of course she did not expect—but he also didnt articulate a change in opinion. Yes, she knew he didn’t use that word anymore and he wasn’t cruel but some part of her thought prejudice like that was sewn into his bones. And maybe, she thinks, it really is. But maybe his something for her is enough to overcome it, to rewrite it.
As she is lost in her thoughts and her shock and her confused, slightly guilty pleasure, she watches the scene unfold as though from afar. He’s talking to her and the boy is still on the ground screaming things about death eaters and expulsion and Hermione’s desperately wants to break out of her fugue to comment on his hypocrisy but she can’t. She’s watching his mouth move in front of her face and his silver eyes dart nervously searching for a reaction. She’s transfixed. And then she’s not. And then she’s threading her arms around his neck and pulling him down and she’s kissing him.
He freezes for a moment. Is this real? Is this ok? Is this really real? And then reality comes back and he realized she’s actually kissing him and he’s kissing her and they’re in front of a large group of prefects who are silent. She pulls back, blushing terribly but eyes unashamed, daring him to say something. Or maybe to say more than something.
Hermione Granger was never one to wait for the bloke to make the first move, so she gives him more-than-something first.
“Everyone get out. The heads need to discuss what to do about this incident.” Her tone is authoritative and strongly contradicts the embarrassed blush covering her face and spreading dow her collarbones. No one argues. And then they are alone. She turns to him.
“Thank you for…”—she struggles to find the right word, “for standing up for me. I appreciate it. And…I apologize for…um”
He’s been staring at her this whole time, but as she starts to mumble and go quiet with nervousness he starts to smirk.
“Oh, don’t try to get out of this, Granger. You just snogged me in front of everyone. It’s much too late to back out.”
She wants to scream. He’s teasing her, she knows, and she can read between the lines but damn it she just wants him to say the words and give her more than something because she doesn’t want to have to guess on a thing like this.
Maybe he sees her desperation. Or maybe he doesn’t know what to say. He steps into her, cups her face between his hands, and kisses her. Not urgently like she did, but slowly and prettily and despairingly. The kiss says I’m sorry and I want this and I want you and tell me to stop now because otherwise I will keep going.
They’ve spent the whole year communicating without words. And, in this moment, they both agree to continue on a little longer as they have been. There are years ahead of them to talk and discuss and argue. Right now, they are content to just be, to communicate with hands and lips and eyes. Because it’s something, and something is all they could ask for and all they can gives
