Chapter 3: Under No Compulsion
Hermione had always known the rule. Everyone at Magical Law Enforcement knew it; it was the first thing they taught you, along with which lift to avoid on Fridays and never to accept a biscuit from the Goblin Liaison Office. A prosecutor does not become personally involved with a witness. Ever. Under any circumstances.
She'd simply never imagined there would be a circumstance quite like this.
"He's not going for dismissal," she said. It was Sunday night. She was standing in Draco's kitchen with the Prophet spread across the counter, a cold cup of coffee at her elbow, and a sheaf of Mockridge's motion papers covered in her own furious annotations. "Dismissal's the headline. Look at the actual relief he's asking for. He wants your testimony excluded. Ruled inadmissible on grounds of improper influence by the prosecution."
Draco was leaning in the doorway in a grey jumper, arms folded, watching her pace. He'd been watching her pace for two hours. Every time she reached the far wall of the sitting room he twitched, slightly, as the Vow hummed.
"Without my testimony, he doesn't have a case," he said.
"Without your testimony, we don't have a case. And there's something worse." She stopped and turned to him. "Think about the terms. You swore to remain within reach until your testimony is given. I swore to keep you within reach until your testimony is given. If the Wizengamot rules that your testimony can't be given..."
He understood. She watched it arrive in his face.
"Then it's never fulfilled," he said slowly. "And it never dissolves."
"Fifty feet," said Hermione. "For the rest of our lives."
The kitchen was very quiet. The clock on his wall ticked. Down in the street, someone was laughing.
"Well," said Draco eventually. "I suppose that's one way to get you to move in."
She threw a dishcloth at him. He caught it. He didn't smile.
"What do you need?" he said.
She looked at the motion papers. She'd known the answer since about four o'clock that afternoon. She'd been avoiding it the way you avoid touching a burn.
"I have to recuse myself," she said. "Tomorrow, before Mockridge can make his argument. I hand the case to Padma Patil. She's good. She's very good. I stand up in front of the full Wizengamot and I tell them the truth: that the relationship began after every piece of evidence was gathered and documented, that the ledger stands on its own, and that I'm removing myself so that nobody can say your word was bought." She swallowed. "And then I sit in the gallery and watch."
"That's your case. Six months of your life."
"It's Selwyn's victims' case. And I'd rather lose it than have them lose it because of me."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"And the truth," he said. "What exactly will you tell them that is?"
She met his eyes.
"That it's real," said Hermione.
She told them.
She stood in the stone amphitheatre below the Department of Mysteries in her best robes, with fifty-odd Wizengamot members looking down on her and Cuthbert Mockridge smiling his silky smile from the defence bench, and she told them, in plain sentences, with no adverbs. She didn't look at Draco. He was sitting at the end of the witness bench, inside her fifty feet, and she could feel him there like a hand at her back.
When she finished, the courtroom was silent.
Ogden blew his nose. "Thank you, Miss Granger," he said, with unexpected gentleness. "Most refreshing. The court accepts your recusal." He turned to Mockridge. "Mr Mockridge, the motion for exclusion is denied. I've read the ledger. A ledger doesn't care who's sleeping with whom." A ripple of laughter round the benches. "Miss Patil will take the prosecution. We'll hear Mr Malfoy's testimony tomorrow at nine. And for heaven's sake, somebody open a window."
There were no windows. It was the dungeons. Nobody pointed this out.
She watched him testify from the gallery the next morning, in the very back row, as close to fifty feet as the Vow would allow.
He was magnificent. She'd spent six weeks preparing him and he didn't need a minute of it. He answered Padma's questions in his clear, cool, precise voice, with dates and Galleon amounts and ledger references, and when Mockridge rose to cross-examine and asked him, with a pained little smile, whether it wasn't true that he had a personal relationship with the former prosecutor, Draco looked at him with every ounce of disdain nine centuries of Malfoys could summon and said, "Yes. It's in this morning's paper. Page three. Is that your question?"
Mockridge didn't have many questions after that.
Halfway through the morning, Padma said, "No further questions," and the Chief Warlock said, "The witness may step down," and Hermione felt it happen.
The fishhook behind her breastbone simply let go.
It was like putting down a heavy bag she'd forgotten she was carrying. Warmth flooded through her chest, then vanished. She looked down at her wrist. The silver line was fading, thinner and thinner, like breath on a mirror, until there was nothing there at all but her own skin.
On the floor of the court, Draco was looking at his own wrist. Then he looked up, straight up to the back row of the gallery, and found her.
The Wizengamot took less than an hour to vote. Selwyn got life in Azkaban. Hermione heard about it from Padma afterwards, in the corridor outside the courtroom, along with a fierce hug and the words "Never do that to me again," and then Padma went off to deal with the Prophet, and the corridor emptied, and Hermione found herself standing alone at one end of it.
He was standing at the other.
Ninety feet. The third torch. She'd measured it herself. They looked at each other down the length of the long stone corridor, and nothing tugged, and nothing burned. There was nothing between them at all but flagstones and torchlight and air.
"Well," said Draco. His voice echoed slightly. "That's that, then."
"That's that," Hermione agreed.
"You don't have to keep me within reach any more."
"No."
"I can go anywhere I like. France. Australia. The Muggle bus."
"You hate the Muggle bus."
"I do. I really do." He hadn't moved. "Granger. I need to know something, and I need you to tell me the truth, because I'll know if you don't."
She almost laughed. "That's my line."
"I'm borrowing it." He took a breath. "Without the Vow. Without the case, without the fifty feet, without any reason at all. Do you want me in reach?"
Hermione looked at him down the long corridor. At the man who'd carried something terrible once and had spent his whole adult life trying to put it down. Who'd stood up in front of the Wizengamot for people he'd never met. Who'd let her build a wall in his bed and then waited, without a word of complaint, until she was ready to tear it down herself.
She started walking.
She didn't hurry. She wanted him to watch her come. Forty feet. Thirty. Twenty. She saw his face change as she came, the guard sliding away, the uncertainty, the hope. Eight. Three. She stopped right in front of him, close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, and looked up.
"I want you within arm's length," she said. "Permanently. I've done the survey."
He made a sound that was half laugh and half something much rawer, and then his hands were in her hair and his mouth was on hers, and she was pressed back against the cold stone wall of the corridor in the dungeons of the Ministry of Magic, kissing Draco Malfoy as though there was no rule in the world against it.
There wasn't, any more. She'd recused herself.
They went to her flat, for the first time. Neither of them could have said why. Perhaps because it was hers, and the choice was hers, and there was no Vow dragging her there.
He stood in the middle of her small, book-crammed sitting room and looked at the lumpy Victorian sofa with frank horror.
"You said nobody could sleep on that."
"Nobody can."
"I'm not planning to sleep," said Draco, and pulled her down onto it.
The sofa groaned. She laughed into his mouth. They got her robes off, then his, then everything else, clumsy and urgent and stupid with relief, his hands everywhere at once, hers dragging at his shirt until a button pinged off and rolled under the bookcase. When he finally had her naked under him on the horrible old horsehair cushions, he stopped, and braced himself above her, and simply looked.
"What?" she whispered.
"Nothing's making me do this," he said. His voice was rough. "I keep checking. There's nothing on my wrist. Nobody's sneezed. It's just me, and I want you so much I can't think."
"Then stop thinking." She pulled him down. "Come here."
He kissed her slowly. He touched her slowly, as if he had all the time in the world now, as if he were taking an inventory: the hollow of her throat, the curve of her breast, the soft skin inside her thigh. She was wet and aching when his fingers finally slid between her legs, and she arched into his hand with a cry she didn't bother to muffle. He worked her slowly, his thumb circling her clit while two fingers moved inside her, watching her face, until she was gasping and pulling at his shoulders.
"Draco. Please. I want you inside me."
"Say it again."
"I want you inside me," she said, and he pushed into her in one long, slow thrust, and she wrapped her legs around him and held him there.
It was different, this time. No Vow humming at their wrists, no glow, no magic but the ordinary kind. Just his weight on her, and the stretch and fullness of him, and his breath against her neck. He moved slowly, deeply, rolling his hips into her until she was trembling, and then, when she begged, harder, until the old sofa creaked like a ship in a storm and she didn't care. She came with his name on her lips and her nails in his back, and he followed with a low groan, his face buried in her curls, holding her as if he would never let go.
They lay tangled on the ruined sofa in the dusk, sweaty and laughing, her head on his chest.
"I love you," he said, into her hair. "I think I should say that, without anything binding me to say it. I love you. I have for weeks. You were very annoying about the adverbs."
She lifted her head and looked at him: tousled, flushed, entirely without armour.
"I love you too," she said. "Freely. Under no compulsion. Witnessed by nobody."
He smiled, slow and real.
Then he shifted on the lumpy cushions, winced, and said, with great dignity, "Move over, Granger."