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As with many things in eighth year, Draco did not quite understand how he had come to be fucking Professor Trelawney against the Persian carpet in the Divination classroom. His hips pumped wildly with an abandon he had not anticipated, and the sounds the Professor made under this bashing of the loins were a bit like the cries of a drunk eagle.
And she was still wearing her glasses.
If he hadn’t seen this coming, at least she should have.
He did not understand it at all. For one, she was not his type. She was tall and skinny, like him. He could feel her ribs and her hipbones poking through her skin, his fingers surprised by their sharpness as well as by the small pockets of fat she kept in other, unexpected places.
She was also 30 years older than him, and her breasts had the slightly stretched look of middle age, the nipples pointing more down than out. Her thighs had a scattering of dimples, as did her arse. A dried-up old leaf, she was. Or so they said.
But between her legs, to his groaning agony and his dumbfounded ecstasy, she was slick. Soaked. His fingers and tongue swam in her liquids. Wet, wet, wetter than he’d ever imagined. Wet enough to send him to the ocean floor and back.
***
Draco had always been drawn to older women. He was after all his mother’s only child, accustomed from birth to the intelligent and purposeful company of a fully formed femme. His attractions kept pace with his age. As a toddler, he was enchanted by young ladies of five and six. At five and six, he fell for his thirteen-year-old cousin. And as a first year at Hogwarts, seventh-year girls were his downfall.
He had once written a tall, beautiful Ravenclaw an anonymous lettre d'amour which she showed to her friends in the Great Hall. He was already much smaller than her, but as they wickedly tore it apart, mocking its spelling and grammar and its request for her to accompany him to Hogsmeade, he’d somehow felt even tinier and more wretched. He’d cried his heart out in the common room while the boys pleaded with him to set his eyes on girls his own age.
Since older women would not notice him, he endured being pursued by girls his age. But deep within him lay the dream of a grown woman who would love him back. Which was why, third year, as he sat in Trelawney’s classroom on Valentine’s Day and watched her make love predictions for the whole class, he did not understand what he had just heard.
The class was howling and whooping, ready to blow the roof off the North Tower. “I’m sorry, Professor?” he said. Granger was also staring with her mouth open.
Trelawney repeated herself. He and Granger were not only a love match, but would have a long and happy life together complete with children, cats, careers and productive service to society. The Inner Eye decreed it.
The commotion renewed. Granger had stormed out and dropped the class. Good riddance; if she was his lifelong love, he hoped his life would be very short. The only thing that suited him about Granger was that she was older than him by nine months.
He went for a long walk afterward and studied his own thoughts. Draco thought of himself as a fairly logical, evidence-based, cut-and-dry teenage boy with excellent taste. Things were good or they were not. Things were true or they were not. And he was not congenial to the idea that there were things about himself that he did not know.
Trelawney’s prediction made him furious for several reasons. First, Granger had legendarily horrific taste. Her Lockhart crush in second year had been the talk of the school, as his effect on her had been stronger than lobotomy. (Draco had also been annoyed that Lockhart was a grown man with a salary, Orders of Merlin, and a formidable coif against whom a 12-year-old Slytherin with one chest hair could not exactly compete.)
Anyway, he did not want to be lumped with Lockhart in any category, least of all Best Beloved of Tasteless Granger.
Secondly, people had been making predictions like this about him since he was born. It was the pureblood way; nothing felt like his own choice. Yet he was not what everyone thought he was. He kissed Theo sometimes, and he had nursed some fantasies that were not what a Malfoy boy was supposed to want. He liked exploring realms that nobody imagined for him; he was turned on by secrets and he adored a taboo. He held fast to his truth against the chants of Granger and Malfoy, sitting on a broom, tonsils, tonsils, get a room!
Fucking Granger! She should know that he had entertained thoughts about all the girls at Hogwarts. After all, most girls were well packaged, soft and squishable, with cute little lips and hair that was nice to nuzzle. That said, he was not exactly an expert; he had fumbled with only a handful of girls, including Pansy one night when they were bored. They had resumed doing their Charms homework afterward. If Draco had imagined that it was Granger instead — how her breasts would press into him, what her swotty little mouth would feel like — he never told.
Angry at what was assumed of him, he stalked the halls like an angry crane while Granger bustled the other way like an angry little beaver. Worse still was how everybody made room for them to sit next to each other. It gave him a grim pride to see how wrong Trelawney was, how much they hated each other, how much this was not going to happen.
Over the years, the prophecy continued to come blessedly untrue. He made choices that took him further away from Granger by the year, and even as they began to seem like pretty terrible choices — joining the Inquisitorial Squad, accepting the Dark Mark, repairing the Vanishing Cabinet — he clung to them because they represented HIS choices, HIS narrative, and HIS will. So he thought. It was HIS life, he sometimes repeated to himself during his panic attacks sixth year. He said it more frantically the clearer it became that nothing he was doing was a true choice.
When he returned for eighth year, he was quiet and, mostly, celibate. He and Pansy, late one night, embarked on a one-time reunion that was cold, boring and forgettable. There was so much to process from what had happened. So much black and steaming debris to shovel through inside his heart. So many choices to reflect on — or if not choices, compulsions. He kept to himself and his class choices were simple and unflashy: History of Magic, Potions, Muggle Studies, and yes, Trelawney again for Advanced Divination, the first time he’d seen her since third year. While he’d been almost as skeptical of the class as Granger had notoriously been, something about it had drawn him back: the rugs, the crystals, the sense of the unknown.
Other classes had quizzes and cut and dry answers you could study in a book. In Divination, answers, Trelawney said, came from within.
Since Draco had done such a spectacularly terrible job of finding the answers so far, he had a renewed curiosity in what he might find within.
Granger, of course, was not in the class. They were cordial, but she wasn’t exactly beating his door down for study dates, what with the whole path-badly-chosen, tortured-in-his-mansion thing. She continued to pursue and excel in the subjects that had always been strengths: Transfiguration, Arithmancy, Runes. They had few classes together and fewer opportunities to cross paths.
Trelawney’s prediction was still not going well, but instead of feeling a gloating pleasure as he had before, he just felt sad. After all, the other parts of the prophecy that didn’t include Granger had included several appealing things. Cats — he was a fan. Careers — well, of course he’d like to do something useful with himself, perhaps with these Potions skills that continued to be top of the class. And children.
In the darkest hours of the war, Draco had realized he wanted children. Not in the way others did, simply wanting small, cute puppets to parade around. He wanted to raise children, see them grow older and wiser and turn into adults, the way his mother had so carefully done with him — never letting him remain at the same level, but urging him to keep growing and developing.
He deeply missed his mother, who had been his best friend for 12 years. He wanted his children to have a mother. And he didn’t want someone picking that mother out for him, as purebloods preferred. He wanted it to be someone his heart chose. Someone who chose him back.
His heart was a lonely hunter, and he did not know what it sought. He did his homework, spent hours staring into the cauldrons for extra credit. Folded his clothes, lay down at night, masturbated — sometimes furious, sometimes languid — to anyone who had crossed his path that day. What was under their robes, what was under their skin, what lay within.
His fantasies were different now than they had been as a young teenager. Then everything had been so sensory, so basic and volatile. Set off by the silhouette of breasts under robes, or the sight of forearms on a table, or lush lips, or a bum on a broom. A stream of disconnected sensations whose sole goal was getting off.
Now, he was deeply aroused not only by bodies, but by faces. Voices. Minds. The people inside. His extra studies of Legilimency were not entirely academic. He was in love, in lust, with intelligence. With the sight of a mind whirling and problem-solving, considering and weighing, processing, inventing, generating. Trying to understand, toiling to make sense, reveling in telling a story. This was his new passion, and secondly came the body that wrapped around that consciousness.
And so he jerked off for the first time to Patil I (Parvati), whose savvy frivolity made him smile and want to fist her hair; to Luna, whose mind was a cavern he ached to open as he slid between her pale thighs; to Neville, who noticed things no others did, and whose generous adult body felt like a vessel full of kindness that he wanted to feel the weight of. His love for the minds spilled over to the bodies. Attraction felt so much richer than it had before.
Of course Granger was in his thoughts, often, nearly always. Stampeding through his mind like the wild and brilliant colt she was. When he imagined her mind and body riding right over him, arguing with him, inflaming him, that was when his hand moved the fastest, his other arm pressed to his eyes as his hips arched up, as he spurted shamelessly onto his own chest and his head fell back in heaving, humiliating bliss.
It was while navigating this strange new state of openness, receptiveness to minds and bodies he might have overlooked before, arousal by complexity, that he somehow found himself mounting and pumping himself into Trelawney like a starving dog. Here is how it happened.
He’d been out doing some field work for ornithomancy, the study of the flight of birds, and had come back to write up his findings in the classroom, which was still warm and carpeted and cozy, and where he sometimes gravitated when the library felt too lonely and cold. Trelawney was at her desk writing, occasionally consulting a large jeweled volume full of diagrams.
Draco was considering the flight patterns he'd seen, one part of his brain telling him it was just migratory, another part saying think harder, there’s something you’re missing.
“Professor,” he asked, walking over to her desk and showing her the diagrams he’d drawn of an eagle flying above the castle. “I’m not sure I’ve seen this pattern in the textbook. It looks to me like the infinity sign doubled. Does it mean…” He stumbled. Is something about to repeat itself? seemed too easy an analysis.
“Does it mean that something that was lost will be found again? Or, something that has been hidden will finally come to light?”
Professor Trelawney looked at his diagram and then up at him. “An astute observation, Mr. Malfoy,” she said, in a voice that was not at all like the addlepated voice of yore. It then dawned on him that she had not sounded like the third-year version of herself since…well…third year. The voice was similar in timbre and pitch, but where once she had seemed vacant and daft, now she simply seemed open and curious. She, too, had changed with age.
“Can you tell me more about how you arrived at this interpretation?” she asked.
She sounded a tinge like McGonagall, he realized, the skin below his navel tightening briefly. He sat down across from her and began talking about it, and then, without really intending it, segued into his whole life story, from childhood to the present. The one thing he left out was her prophecy about him and Granger. But everything else, from the loneliness of Malfoy Manor and the mission of the Vanishing Cabinet, to the sight of Granger being tortured on his floor and the death of his mother months ago in Azkaban, he spilled out.
He had never gone to a Mind Healer; he didn’t feel brave enough. He had never spun it all out at once like that to anyone: the entire story of him. It felt like a cleansing, an accounting of everything he had been and done and failed at until now: draco culpa.
Trelawney listened, and then she was silent for a long time, hands folded on the desk over a card spread she’d done for a younger class earlier that day.
“It sounds, Mr. Malfoy,” she said thoughtfully, “like your question is not really about the flights of birds. Of course, all of these divinatory methods are simply ways of illuminating and ordering the maelstroms within our own minds. In this case, I believe the eagle you have seen is a simple surrogate for a conundrum you are continuing to work out within your own mind.”
Clever Trelawney. He realized he liked hearing her say m sounds. Illuminating. Maelstrom. Conundrum. Methods. Mind. It felt like her voice was massaging his brain. He’d had similar thoughts as early as third year, though not so eloquent. He wondered whether her whole act had been for her own entertainment, or a kind of fool’s disguise against the Dark Lord.
“What I can say,” she said, sweeping together the card spread and tapping it back into deck form, “is that the much-vaunted idea of The Second Chance is an almost pathetically cramped approach to the full and fertile narrative that is human life.”
Well, that was discouraging. He realized that in exchange for sharing his past, he had wanted something from her: a future. He wanted her — if not her, anyone — to tell him what happened next. And to promise him that whatever it was, it featured something, anything, worth looking forward to.
“In my opinion, Second Chances are not bestowed by others. We need not beg or grovel for them — at any moment at all, we can choose to give ourselves another chance. To do things differently. To approach a problem differently. To — ” she looked at him with a wry grin — ”make a different impression.”
Draco was coming to the very strange conclusion that her enormous black-rimmed glasses were actually a little bit cute. And her hair was enormous and bushy but well tended, graying at the temples, with distinct little curls shimmering within its depths.
Her skin was clear and taut, the laugh lines more thoughtful accents than flaws. Her jaw and chin were slight but decisive. Her mouth was wide and lush, and Draco studied it for a moment before he realized with horror that he wanted to lick it from one corner to the other.
And underneath her robes she was definitely not wearing a bra.
“How do we — does one — give oneself another chance?” he said thickly, starting to stand and then sitting back down to conceal his raging erection.
She stood up and smoothed her robes over her unconfined breasts. His jaw hung slack.
“We begin by letting the past go, Mr. Malfoy,” she said, flicking some lint off what Draco, shivering, felt absolutely sure was her left nipple. “I have had my own disappointments and debacles, especially at my time of life. For example, although I was once married, I have not been successful in love. I harbor the same dreams as anybody does, but for me, nothing has quite materialized in the way I envisioned it once, long ago.”
“Except the cat,” she said, taking her card deck to the tall shelf behind her desk and putting it away alongside her other decks. “I do have a cat.”
He had a full view of her bum. On her tall, thin frame it was unexpectedly wide and plush. He felt a sinking desire to squash his face into it.
“I remember the prophecy I made about you and Ms. Granger,” she said, still turned away from him. “Cats, careers, cubs of your own. Will it come to pass? I see that the hour has not come. Is that my fault, as the prophetess, or is it yours, as the protagonist?”
She shut the cabinet with a click.
“I am unsuccessful in love, Mr. Malfoy,” she said, her voice suddenly rueful, “not because a curse was placed on me, not because a prophecy doomed my prospects. I am unsuccessful because I myself, deep within my Inner Eye, can see no future in which I am worthy of adoration.”
Draco stared, his mouth dry.
“There is no answer that leaves, twigs, cards, crystals, or flames can provide if the answer does not already lie within me,” she continued. “As the answer does not lie within me, I simply take my pleasures where I can. And until your own answer takes form within you, that is all you can hope to do as well.”
She turned around.
“We have now lived through two terrible wars, Mr. Malfoy,” said Sybill Trelawney, “and in their wake, we are both blessed not to grow cold in the grave, but to grow old in the world. The time we have on this earth is painfully short. If you want your second chance, for whatever you desire, it is already within your hands. Use them.”
And then she let down her hair.
It fell to her waist, a dense, shining tapestry of curling mahogany and silver and palest gold.
After that, everything happened very fast. As if launched from a slingshot, Draco vaulted over the desk and caged Trelawney against her shelf, breathing hard against her unbound breasts, fingering strands of her unbound hair.
“Professor,” he groaned, horrified, euphoric, and extremely confused as he ground his hips into hers.
“As we’re grossly violating the teacher-student relationship,” she said, in a breathier voice, “I will have to set the parameter that we can do this only once. Perhaps it will provide the clarity you need. This is it, Mr. Malfoy. Take your pleasure where you can.”
And then they were on the floor, Draco fumbling at his trousers like an inept thief picking a lock, Trelawney tossing aside her robe and baring her middle-aged breasts without comment or shame. He forced down the zipper, breaking it, and all of him sprang free. He fell on top of her and nuzzled everywhere like a dog confused about where to begin the hunt. He found her breasts and crammed them in his mouth, sucking and nipping and lapping at them, again deeply inept due to having 30 fewer years of experience.
He didn’t care about being inexperienced. He felt shameless, exhilarated, freed of every expectation. He had walked into the classroom dejected and adrift, intending to do homework and go to bed, and would instead walk out properly seduced, corrupted, and bedded. It was wrong, it was unethical, it was inappropriate, it was taboo, and Merlin knew they hadn’t even locked the door, but they were also both adults, both single, both lonely, both survivors, and he felt intoxicated not only by her irregular, aging, mysterious, marvelous body but by her majestic mind which had ensnared him long before her body had, a trap he was happy to fall down headfirst if it led him straight to the birthplace of all her thoughts and all her desires, and the moment he fell was the moment he let go of everything that had ever happened to him or hurt him and felt weightless as the air again.
She began to moan, arching under him. He slipped his hand underneath her long tie-dyed skirt and groaned at the obscene glory of her. Sopping wet. He swam in that sea cave, he dissolved in it until she came, and then he was inside her, a joyous amateur thrusting blindly and ridiculously inside his yelping Divination Professor to an impassive audience of teacups and crystal balls, and it was beyond description, it was beyond comprehension, it was beyond —
He came with a pained creak, his face flopping contentedly into her breasts.
And then he sensed someone in the room.
With a glazed look, his trousers around his ankles and his draco minor still sheathed deep inside his instructor, his face glowing red and his hair destroyed, Draco turned around.
Of course it was Granger.
And from the smirk on her face, of course she’d seen the whole thing.
“Extra credit, Draco?” she said suavely.
Draco sighed and exited Professor Trelawney, who very calmly smoothed down her skirt and retied her robes, patted Draco on the shoulder, and went to her desk.
“Miss Patil’s homework, I presume?” she said. Hermione nodded and stepped over Draco to fetch the sheaf of papers from Trelawney’s hand, trying not to touch her fingers as she did.
Trelawney then put her hair up and left the room. “Goodnight, Ms. Granger, Mr. Malfoy,” she said as she closed the door. “Give each other a chance.”
Draco stared at the ceiling. He was flat on his back and his zip was still undone. He felt tingly all over, but relaxed.
Strangely, he didn’t feel embarrassed by what had happened. It had been so filthy and pure and true that a part of him would always hold it sacred.
“I suppose you’ll hold this over me for the rest of our lives,” he said, resigned.
She sat on one of the tufted ottomans Trelawney kept around and put her chin in her hand. “I should,” she said. “It was very wrong of her to let that happen. She should be fired.”
“I suppose she should,” said Draco humbly.
“And yet,” said Hermione, “there was something about it that was…erm…well..”
She blushed. Draco glanced up. This was interesting.
“I’ve never been with anyone who did it like that,” she shrugged.
“Like what?” He sat fully up, all attention.
She blushed. “Messy…and frenzied…and ludicrous…and utterly without dignity…”
Draco thought about how he must have looked. The desperate scrambling of a praying mantis came to mind.
“But freeing,” she finished. “You looked free in a way I’ve never felt.”
She looked down and blushed. “Like all you wanted to do was live.”
It felt like forever before she said her next words.
“Like you forgot you were ever going to die.”
She looked down, unconsciously touching her scar. “I can never forget that. I wish I could.”
Draco heaved a sigh. He pulled out his wand and cleaned himself off, including his fingers and his mouth. Then he stood up, pulling his sweater down over his broken zipper.
“Hermione,” he said, “if you can forgive the things I’ve done, I’ll help you forget everything you’ve ever wanted to let go of.”
“Would it be like that?” She nodded to the spot on the rug he’d defiled with Trelawney.
He scratched his head and yawned. “It could be that, eventually. We could also just start with a conversation? Talking? Getting to know each other again?”
She agreed. As they walked down to Hogsmeade, he told her the story of the Ravenclaw who had rejected him in first year. She laughed so hard that she nearly fell down the hill. He caught her arm and felt like he’d brought the right girl on the trip, after all.
***
After the first Hogsmeade trip, they went for another. And another.
Eventually, the prophecy came true.
Hermione did hold it over him for the rest of their lives. She told it to a roaring room at her 30th birthday party, Crookshanks (still going strong thanks to his kneazly blood) holding court in her lap. On their walls hung her awards for runic translations and commendations for his role in the creation of lifesaving potions. They were planning to try for a baby once he turned 30 the following year. He’d clarified that he needed nine more months to enjoy being a baby himself.
He was 29 now, but in his eyes, she’d never aged a day past the one where she caught him with Trelawney. That was the funny thing about falling in love so young. Your first memories of the person ended up stored in the heart forever, precious and indestructible no matter who they turned into down the road. No matter how many concentric rings of recollection built up around them. Thousands of scenes and images and stories he could call up at any time. Fights and laughter and separations and forgiveness and tears and reconciliation as they found their stumbling way together.
Somehow it all just kept on feeling brand new.
“What did happen to Trelawney in the end?” asked Theo, pouring Draco another drink.
“She’s still teaching,” shrugged Draco, “and perhaps bringing together the next generation of young lovers.”
Hermione had joked about naming the baby Sybill. Draco had threatened to withhold sex forever if she did. She then suggested Aquila or Aquilus, for the eagle who'd brought them back together. He said he'd think about it.
After everyone left, he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her slowly. “Can I perchance interest you in a birthday gift from a much younger man?” he said, his hands straying inside her waistband.
Hermione considered. “Given that you’ve shown such tremendous improvement since that lesson I walked in on…yes, you may.”
And he did.
It was nice being grownups together, after all.