Pride and Polyjuice Potion

Explanation

(TW: mentions suicide)

Please only read this if you were confused by the ending and really had no idea what was going on. It was deliberately ambiguous and confusing and at first I wanted to keep it that way, but I am sure a lot of people would appreciate knowing what it all meant a lot more.

If you interpreted the epilogue in a completely different way, please let me know because there are multiple ways to read it, and not just how I wrote it.

This, however, is my interpretation:

The epilogue is Draco confessing that he has made up this whole story as a fantasy, wondering what it could have been like if he hadn't been such a coward and had let himself fall in love with Hermione. The initials and the date (Hermione's birthday) at the bottom of chapter 35 tell us that Draco is writing twelve years after the Battle of Hogwarts.

The story is mostly through Hermione's point of view because his biggest fantasy is knowing how she felt about him, knowing that she loved him. That's all he has ever wanted.

And so now, in 2010, he has written it all down before he kills himself as his 'final act of selfishness'. In writing it all down, he feels as though he has given himself and Hermione something: happiness or hope, maybe. Ambiguous somethings have always been present in their eyes throughout the story. His words being like 'phoenix tears' suggest that he feels as though he has also somewhat succeeded in reviving Theo, who died at the Battle of Hogwarts.

After having redrafted the story and epilogue multiple times, he has now accomplished all he's set out to do, he has no further reason for living. 'He must sleep'. The redrafting symbolises how he has tried relentlessly to rewrite the past.

Ten years later (in 2020), Hermione reads the manuscript and the epilogue. Through reading his words and the story he has concocted, Draco's true feelings are revealed to her. Draco may have always intended Hermione to read it, looking particularly at the last line he writes which is explicitly directed towards her. But we can't know if this is true.

She decides to add on a post-script, and writes in continuation as Weasley, Hermione. She is letting the Draco that lies at the bottom of the grave before her know that she has read it and wants to play into the fantasy too.

People who have killed themselves are often traditionally buried at crossroads. In the past, suicide was viewed as a sinful crime that sent the soul to hell. The crossroads were intended to confuse the ghost of the victim, so that they would not spend an eternity of damnation. It was an old English tradition that is now much out-dated, but perhaps not for prestigious pureblood families like the Malfoys.

The ring on Hermione's finger could be her wedding ring, or it could be the ring that Fred and George gave her on her birthday. We may also question whether Fred and George unknowingly gave Hermione Marvolo Gaunt's ring with the resurrection stone in it. The ring's true nature is open to interpretation and deliberately ambiguous.

However, when Hermione writes 'now turn those initials upside down', it suggests that she also shares Draco's feelings, because the initials now become Hermione Malfoy. She is writing herself down into Draco's fantasy as his wife, continuing his fairytale and almost allowing it to come true.

If the ring is Fred and George's or Marvolo Gaunt's, then we are left wondering if twenty-two years later, the two of them might be reunited momentarily. Whether they'll get that moment that Draco spent his whole life trying to achieve.

Maybe that is why she smiles.