Lion Cub / A Dramione Story

May 1998 (Draco)

May 1998

(Draco)

XXX

She was gone.

Draco woke up and she was gone.

He still had the imprint of her lips on his, and the feel of her soft skin was barley at the edge of his fingertips; like she was still there right beside him. Like the bed wasn't cold without her. Like she hadn't left.

Draco jerked off the bed. Looking to the side he still saw her tank top discarded on the floor - what had she worn back to her room? He searched for his knit jumper he'd worn the previous night and found it gone. He checked to see if it was tangled in the quilt on the bed. It wasn't. It wasn't under the bed either, or thrown in the laundry basket in the corner of the room he'd claimed at Shell Cottage.

She must have worn it when she left his room.

After they had - oh god - he'd shagged her and then she had left. And not just left the room, she'd left the cottage. He didn't have to go downstairs and confirm with Fleur to know. Hermione wouldn't be sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, nor would she be trying to pry Weasley away from the radio in the sitting room. She wouldn't be on a walk by the rocks as the seashore line. She wasn't in the cottage at all, she had well and truly left.

Don't go.

He had not deluded himself further after that into thinking she would have actually stayed. She was Hermione Granger, and while he'd once teased her for the title of 'Brightest Witch of her Age', it was wholly correct. It suited her, and she was unstoppable.

She had completely blindsided him while at the cottage.

He would freely admit that when Hermione, Potter, and Weasel arrived at Malfoy Manor and he was summoned by his father to identify them, he could have. Even with her stinging jinx to Potter's face he was completely recognizable - the same lightening scare on his forehead, the same lopsided glasses. Weasel was Weasel. But Hermione he took a double take it.

He'd lost his prejudices in the past year. Living with Weasley's and frequently interacting with high clearance Order members, including his Aunt Andromeda and his cousin Nymphodora, had significantly rub off on him. Separated from his Parent's pureblood influence, and the Dark wizard who had infiltrated his home, he'd grown tolerant of half-breeds and muggle-borns.

Then he grew accepting.

He knew it was her on sight, but she was a far cry from the little bookish child he had seen the previous year at Hogwarts. Her snottiness and bossiness was replaced with undulated fear: eyes glazed and wide when she saw him, and finger's trembling as the snatcher held her arms behind her. Wandless. Helpless.

There had been a small cut on her lips, and a bruise on her cheek - both acquired through running away from the snatcher's he had presumed - and her curls were tangled in a nest like bun atop her head. She looked broken down, roughed, not like herself. She looked older.

Perhaps he'd even describe her in that moment as a wild version of lovely, a rabid Amazonian princess in the making.

He couldn't identify the guilt that dropped into his stomach when his deranged Aunt Bellatrix had separated the boys from her and thrown her down onto the ground. He'd nearly forgotten his mission and his promise to the Weasley's before he'd left. To make sure no indeed harm came to anyone who was captured at Malfoy Manor, heal them in secret.