Wanderer

Jasmine

AN: Well, here it is! My first venture into Dramione fanfiction. I know this is a ship we all love so I really tried to pour my heart into telling their story and doing both characters justice. Some notes: this is SLOW BURN. In trying to make this as realistic as possible, I think both Draco and Hermione had a lot of growing and healing to do after the war before they could learn to love and open themselves up to love again. As well, I think that their rocky past means they would question their feelings. This might be frustrating at times (from some comments, I can see it is haha and I feel you!!) but unfortunately I think it's more in-character than surrendering to their emotions. They are both stubborn but we love them anyway.

Happy reading, and thank you for your lovely comments. They really do make my day ❤️

Lotsa love, E x

Chapter One

The stone underneath her feet was cold and sharp, chilling her bare skin and erupting goosebumps along her arms. She wrapped the blanket more firmly around herself but continued walking.

Hermione didn't quite know where she was going, only that she couldn't sleep because the castle was too eerily quiet and her mind was numb and there was something heavy, settled deep within her, that toppled precariously every time she tried to rest. It didn't help that she closed her eyes, and flashing lights from whizzing spells would assault the blackness lingering there. Every moment of quiet would lend itself to screams and yells, to a fear so debilitating she felt winded, and had to remind herself that this serenity was safe, that she could enjoy it, that she could just breathe-

Hogwarts was not the place she remembered it to be.

Where once, these same stone walls had been the foundation of everything safe and magical in the world, all Hermione could see was death. There were spiders lurking in the darkness, and the swish of a cloak sent her searching for a superseding glint of a silver mask. It was as though every time she closed her eyes, or stared for a little while longer than necessary, she was back there. Back with the monsters and the screams and the threat of a pain so agonising you'd beg Death to take you.

She had thought coming back to finish her final year would have been healing, something like facing her past and raising her chin in defiance to show she wasn't afraid. This was not like that.

Instead, it all felt like another stab in her back, another flesh wound to match the scar on her arm. Instead of closure, all Hermione had gotten so far was more pain. Instead of covering the grave, she was drowning in the dirt, suffocating in the coffin along with everything else that had happened here.

She had not had a full night's sleep since she had returned two weeks ago.

Harry and Ron had been adamant they wanted to move on with their lives, and Hermione could honestly say she had been bitter. Though they deserved peace, she selfishly tried to persuade them to change their minds because Hogwarts was nothing without their competitive but fruitless games of chess and Harry's consequent groan of exasperation when Ron won yet again. They wrote to her every day, but Harry's signature could not replace the frown of concentration he would do when trying to understand something new, and Pig's friendly bite of her fingers was nothing compared to the heavy weight of Ron's arm as he flung it around her shoulders.

She missed them.

She missed normalcy. She missed everything they had been promised before the war had gone and ripped it away from them. Hermione missed living without the poisonous inflection of fear that quickened her heartbeat when she walked down an empty corridor on her own, and the way the three of them used to thrive on youth, gulping it down and wasting it. They should have savoured the way the sun felt on their faces, when their biggest worry was Snape's essay due in the following day. They should have savoured living.