Author Note: Dramione one-shot where Draco Malfoy's memory is injured in a magical accident, setting his mind back to when he was 18, forgetting everything about how he came to be happily married to Hermione Granger. This is the gender-flip of my novel-length fic, "Always Something," where Hermione is the one with memory damage. She may need a whole novel to figure herself out, but Draco trusts his instincts and get things done quick.

Hermione dropped to her knees beside her husband, pulling him to sit against her as the rest of the employees at the Granger-Malfoy Institute for Magical Memory Research stood gaping.

"Which machine was it?" Hermione was asking them. "Which one went off and hurt him?" Someone pointed to the hunk of metal and crystal still hot and smoking on a worktable.

She took Draco's face in her hands. His skin was warm but his eyes were closed, the muscles of his neck loose, his head lolling against her. "No, Draco. Come on..."

On the portico of St. Mungo's Hospital, she and an unconscious Draco appeared with the noisy, crackling racket of an urgent apparation. It took hours before Draco was finally admitted to a bed on the critical injury neurological ward where he remained in a sleep-like stupor. While they waited, Hermione sent for their teenaged son, Pollux, to fetch important documents from home. Draco's current passport, their marriage certificate, the children's birth certificates, baby photos, the news item on the opening of the institute - she wanted all of it at the hospital to show Draco to confirm whatever he might have forgotten in the accident. Necessary or not, she wanted to be prepared. This is how she handled stress and tragedy, with work.

A doctor had come to consult. "Well, I don't know much about the particular memory apparatus that misfired on him. You'd be the expert there, of course," she told Hermione.

"Yes." Hermione nodded. "I just need to hear it from someone else. Draco is who I usually consult with but - and anyways, my judgment is all shot through with panic right now."

"Of course," the doctor agreed. "Whatever happened, I'm confident the best course at this moment is rest and quiet. They've given him a sleeping draught to keep him in a state of deep, healing silence." She glanced at the timepiece hung around her neck. "When he's awake we'll see whether there's anything to all this fuss and commotion. It's possible he could wake up with no ill effects at all. Or, he could have some short-term memory loss — missing all or part of the past few weeks, that sort of thing. Or, well, it's not impossible that, that…"

"That he has long-term losses, and he may come round with no memory of me or the children at all," Hermione said, deflating in a single breath.

The doctor nodded. "That is a remote possibility. But remember that even if it comes to pass, we will still have reason to hope for his full recovery."

She took her leave, turning down the lights in the hospital room, leaving Hermione alone for a night-long vigil at her husband's bedside.

Pollux came with the papers his mother wanted, but then she sent him back home. If Draco did have long-term memory damage, it would be best if the first thing he saw upon waking wasn't a man-sized child of his. That wasn't how she explained it to Pollux. She told him she needed him to be with his sister. At a time like this, Hermione had no idea what to do for her children but let them spend what might be one last night of peace in their own beds.

For herself, Hermione sat in a chair pushed to the edge of Draco's hospital bed, watching him over the top of a classic book on memory accidents that she couldn't force herself to read again. In his sleep, he looked perfect, always perfect. If he woke up unable to remember her, this might be the last time she watched him like this — possibly forever. She would read and read until she found something to fix him.

That's what she told herself, but maybe tonight was too soon. Everything was too hard, too tense. Closing the book over her finger, she reached for his limp white hand, and pressed it to her lips.

As the night went on, she held his hand as she nodded in and out of sleep. Just for a few minutes, she told herself, as she'd laid her head on the mattress beside him. There were still hours left in the sleeping draught. She didn't want to startle him awake with a woman he might not remember resting on his bed, but there would be no harm in sleeping like this for a few minutes. She pressed his hand to her cheek and lowered her head, her face nestled against his warm flesh, the scent of his skin filling her senses, her heart thudding with adoration and with the fear that's inseparable from it. Just a few minutes…

Draco's eyes stung as he opened them, as if a hundred flash bulbs had flared from a hundred cameras all at once. He was in a small room where the air smelled strange, like the whiff that came with a scourgify spell, only it never faded. Once the stinging in his retinas passed, the light was dim and yellow.

There was warm pressure on his hand, someone's grip. When he propped himself up on his elbows to see whose, he saw a head of dark, bushy hair resting against his arm. He knew that hair. He'd see the back of this head a thousand times, sitting at desks in front of him, one hand always stretched straight up, waving at the teacher to be called on to give a perfect answer.

But it couldn't be her, not here. Unless she was standing guard. That would explain her grip on his hand. Maybe underneath her hair they were cuffed together. He looked down the length of his own body. Someone had dressed him in a smock and loose trousers stamped with the logo of St. Mungo's hospital. His wand, of course, was gone.

Slowly, he rose to sitting, trying hard not to move his pinned hand. He leaned forward to see his captor's face, and how they were connected. Her eyes were closed but still, her face did look like Granger's, only like an older sister of hers. Did she have a sister? A Muggle, maybe, like her parents?

If she was supposed to be guarding him, she was doing a bad job of it. There didn't seem to be any cuffs or manacles between them, and her grip was loose and sleepy. Without much resistance, he could have slid his hand free of hers. But maybe the connection was magically alarmed. He looked around the room. St. Mungo's - that must mean his psychiatric sentence was underway, the one the courts had given him instead of hard time since, at every turn, he'd acted as an exploited child soldier, spurred on mercilessly by death threats against himself and his family. Yes, he was now a prisoner here, and Granger's older Muggle sister, or whoever this was, had been left here as his jailer.

Fair enough.

He lay back against the hospital pillow, wandless, waiting in the quiet for his punishment to start. His left arm was free and he raised it to inspect it in the low light. The mark had been fading for months but when he looked at it today, it was completely gone. There wasn't a stain, a scratch of it left. The nightmare that had begun his second year of school was over, truly over. He let out a huge breath as he let his unmarked arm fall against his chest.

The sound and motion was enough to cause the sleeping woman to stir. Her head rolled against the sheets and she sat up, blinking.

"Draco!"

He didn't know what to say but, "Yes."

It wasn't right somehow, he could tell from her face.

"Are you - are you alright?"

He shrugged. "Sure, I guess. I mean, considering…" He waved his free hand at the room around them.

She laughed, clearly relieved at something and smoothed her cheek against the back of his hand. "Yes, we're in the hospital."

He jumped at the touch of her face. Maybe it was some kind of test. "Right," he said. "For the next two years."

"Two years?" she echoed. her expression didn't change but somehow he sensed that all the happiness had drained from her face anyway. She laid his hand on the sheet and stood up, turning so he couldn't see her face anymore.

He sat up as well, shifting his legs over the side of the bed, sitting politely at attention, not knowing what he'd done to disappoint her but wanting to make up for it by showing his willingness to be a model prisoner.

She glanced at him over her shoulder. "Stay here. I'll call the doctor."

"Sure." He let her lead, not insisting on an introduction or explanation.

"Draco," she said after speaking indistinctly into a speaker on the wall for a moment. "Do you know me?"

He narrowed his eyes. "You look like someone I know. But she's younger - my age."

She flinched at this. "And what age is that?"

He looked around the room like someone who'd napped through dinner and wasn't sure if it was a new day or not. "I'm," he began, "I'm eighteen. And the war is over and I'm beginning my psychiatric sentence here at St. Mungo's and you're here to…"

"No," she said when his voice trailed off. "No, it's not right and you know it. Listen. There's been an accident, with your memory. You're not a prisoner here, and you're not eighteen anymore. None of us is. I'm Hermione Granger-Mal - " She interrupted herself. "Anyway — the doctor is coming to help me tell you the rest."

His polite facade cracked as he laughed at her. "Granger? What've you done to yourself, Granger?"

She frowned, batting his arm. "Nothing. I'm just older, same as you. Look, check the date. There's a newspaper on the table there."

He scoffed as he pulled yesterday's Daily Prophet toward himself. His face was dark for just a moment before he laughed again. "How hard is it to conjure a fake newspaper?" The date was indeed close to twenty years later than he thought it ought to be, but what truly gave him pause was the state of his own hands holding the newspaper. They were not boy's hands, but a man's — not wizened old hands, but weathered by years of work and washing. And on his left hand was a platinum ring, not an ostentatious signet like he wore at school, but a plain band.

From across the room, he saw the woman who called herself Hermione Granger twisting a platinum band on her own finger, hers decorated by a single emerald sunk into the metal. He knew that ring.

He stood and moved to face the mirror over the sink, leaning close to see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, and between his brows. What he saw made him frown, deepening the effect. He pulled the skin taut. "My face…"

"It's fine. We're not old yet. But we're not kids anymore either," she said, still twisting her ring, her eyes clenched shut. "In fact — "

"What's this 'we'?" he interrupted. "And who," he went on, though it was all starting to come together, "who gave you that ring?"

She let out a noisy breath. "My husband's mother gave it to him to give to me, soon after we were married, while we were expecting our first child. I've been wearing it for seventeen years."

She heard him inhale as he prepared for what he had to ask next. "That husband — he can't be…" he couldn't bring himself to finish.

"Yes," she said. "That husband is you. This 'we' is you and me, our family."

He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. "No. It's not possible. You hate me. And if you don't, you should."

"I certainly do not," she said. "Look."

She had slapped open her folder of documents on the bed beside him. He leafed through them, quiet and cold, finally breaking into a reaction at the sight of Pollux and Castora's birth certificates.

"Kids?!"

"Yes. Two, a boy and a girl, ages sixteen and fourteen. Look," she said, forcing baby photos into his hand.

He blinked at them. "Those are yours?"

"They're ours, Draco. Look at them. They're you and me. Look at your angles in their faces, but with my brown eyes."

"Kids - wait. So you and me, we…?"

"Yes. A lot."

He almost smirked, then seemed to remember himself, snapping his head away from the photos, refusing to look. "Oh, I get it. You're trying to get with me to provide for some kids."

"No," she said, her voice rising. "I got with you ages ago, before any kids. We're together for our own sakes. You and I — we're — I — " She couldn't do it. She couldn't tell him she loved him while he was like this, like a petulant teenager. She couldn't have him hear her confession and then refuse to look at her, the way he'd done with the photos of the children.

She would, however, show him their wedding photo. There was just one, taken of the two of them standing arm-in-arm in a parking lot of a government registry office in Canada, barely in their twenties, newly married.

He squinted at it. "That's us? For real?"

"Yes. My dad took it."

"Your parents know about this?"

"About my husband? Yes, of course. We met here in the hospital while you were finishing your sentence. I was all crazy with latent rage at Ronald Weasley for not stopping me from charming my parents' memories, so I brought you with me instead of him to find them and fix them."

"Oh," he said. "And that was that?"

"No, actually. It look months and it was difficult and terrifying, but you were brilliant and it was so beautiful we ended up together in the end."

He peered more closely at the wedding photo. "We look strange."

She smiled. "I never claimed we weren't."

All at once, he flipped the folder closed, crossed his arms across his chest. "Nice try, but anything in here, all of it, it could have been conjured out of nothing - faked. Even you - your face, Granger - how hard would it be to enchant yourself so you looked twenty years older. It's not even that good of a job. You hardly look different at all. Same with me. Shouldn't I be bald, or something? No - it could all be faked."

"But it's not. Just wait, the doctor is coming and so are your parents."

"My parents?"

"Yes, they've been out of jail for years. They're coming later this morning to see you, to reassure you. And in the afternoon, the children - "

"Stop!" he said. "I can't listen to this anymore."

"What do you want then?" she demanded. "I can't let you meet the children until you promise not to upset them. Tell me what you need to see to believe me, before they come up here and have their hearts broken, because this is AWFUL, Draco. Just awful."

At the sight of tears welling in her eyes, he winced and turned away. But perhaps there was nothing to this story that could be more easily faked than a bit of crying. He inhaled a deep breath, and faced her again.

"Alright," he said, "I've thought of something I could accept as proof. If this is a hoax, and if you are actually Granger, you will definitely refuse it."

She sighed. His sense of drama had survived the accident intact. "Just tell me."

He stepped toward her. "Well, there's one kind of proof you can give me, here with just the two of us, alone." He was now sauntering toward her, eyes on the floor. "If you've been my wife, the mother of my children, for seventeen years, then you should have no problem with it."

She understood him, and the realization set her stumbling backward, glancing at the door.

He nodded. "Mmhm, that's what I thought."

She shouted an incredulous laugh. "What? You want to do THAT here in the hospital? We're in a public place, Draco Malfoy. The doctor and your parents are on their way, about to come through that door any minute."

He shrugged. "If you're really Granger, you should have no problem at all charming a door locked."

She scoffed. "You've forgotten everything you once knew about St. Mungo's psychiatric facilities. For safety reasons, that's not how the doors work here."

He was close enough now to pull one of her curls straight and let it spring back. "Excuses, weak excuses. The flimsy diversion tactics of a Ministry operative about to fail in her mission. Whoever your boss is, just tell them I'm a useless kid resigned to his sentence and not to waste a decent agent on an assignment to play house with me."

"I am not an agent for the Ministry, Draco. And you are not a prisoner here - not anymore. You're free to go, but please don't. Please wait with me, Draco."

He shook his head. "Calling me Draco over and over isn't going to do it either, Granger. If you're my wife, I need you to give me - tangible proof." He traced the line of her jaw with one finger. "The kind of proof a fake wife, especially one of your storied integrity, could never bring herself to provide."

She clucked her tongue, her mouth sliding sideways, into a grin. "You think I'm scared of you."

He grinned in return. "Still haven't proved you aren't. Go ahead, Granger. Jump me. I'm sure the Ministry will leap in and save your honour just in time. Can you trust them? Their judgment hasn't worked out so far. I mean, maybe they were hoping by making you look a bit older I might be put off in this - "

She stepped back, laughing louder than ever.

He followed her, towering over her, speaking over her mirthless laughter. "But I am not at all put off," he went on. "Not in the least. I blame Hogwarts. We never had a lady professor fit enough for us young blokes to fancy at school. So I've still got plenty of unmoored hot-for-teacher fantasies to pin somewhere. And even back in school, I wouldn't have said 'no' to a bit of hate-snogging and whatever might follow with golden Granger. May as well stick all my school fantasies on you now, whoever you really are."

She stepped close enough for her crossed arms to touch his torso. "Draco Malfoy, you think I'm intimidated by you and your body and your strength and your mistaken youth and that tone of voice and everything else after all this time. Look at you. You're just like a," she took her own advice and looked at him from his feet to his forehead, "just like a cocky barely-legal boy who thinks he's the stars' gift to repressed good girls and older women."

He bent his head to bring their faces almost close enough to touch "Offensive, yeah?"

"Yeah," she said, "and hot."

With both hands against his chest, she pushed him toward the chair where she'd spent the night.

He stumbled backward, reaching for her to keep himself from falling.

She closed her fists on the fabric of his hospital smock, still rushing at him. "Sit down, Malfoy. Sit down before I bind you with a hex to that chair." She was pushing him to sit, straddling his lap, falling onto him. Her thighs on either side of his hips, she let go of his smock and took him by the face, tipping his jaw and crashing her mouth against his.

In shock, he held his hands away, not touching her, fighting to keep pace with her mouth as she ravished his. She tasted - like himself, her hands still held him by the face, as if he'd try to flee if she let him. No chance of that, not even when she let go to find his hands, bringing each of his palms to brace themselves against her hips, showing him how and where to push and move her. His fingers held her as close as he could get her.

She broke away for a moment, laughing at him as he gasped. "Hm, Malfoy, you are eighteen again." She was mewing and purring as she kissed down his neck. "Mm, my sweet young husband is back. Can't wait to show him everything I've learned."

He couldn't speak, breathless, his hands sliding beneath her shirt, against the warm, smooth skin of her back. At the touch, his bloodstream was flooded with something like magic - a sense of well-being which was both comfort and desire. All of him raged with a sense of possession. This woman, whoever she was, wherever and whenever she came from - she was his, and he was hers.

And low but loud, a bassline beneath the lust, was a feeling he didn't remember but couldn't ignore. It was like the sense and muscle memories that knew this woman even without knowing the story that might have made some sense of her being here, after everything he'd done. It was the feeling of being in love, of being loved, and it was crashing over him, unformed and unlooked for, like a storm.

Behind them, the door of the hospital room banged open. Over the smooth dome of Hermione's shoulder - the one he'd tugged free of her shirt - Draco saw his parents and a woman in a healer's uniform standing between the jambs.

"Right," the doctor said. "Looks like everything here is going as well as can be expected."

Flushed or blushing - no one could tell which - Hermione was struggling to disentangle herself from both the chair and her amorous amnesiac husband.

"Not yet," he said, turning her around to sit on his lap but not letting her go. He leaned his forehead against her bared shoulder, whispering, "Sorry. I need a minute."

"So, Mr. Malfoy, may we take it you're feeling better, remembering everything?" the doctor asked. "Your children? Your wife?"

He cleared his throat. "Unfortunately, no," he said. "I remember nothing of them at all."

Behind the doctor, Lucius Malfoy's grave expression cracked, and he snickered into his hand.

Draco nodded at his parents. "Mother, Father."

Narcissa may have rolled her eyes in relief. "A devastating injury, they said, but leave this pair alone as strangers for just a few hours..." she tutted. "Yes, you are indeed your father's son, Draco. It's not all bad, being a Malfoy. What do you say, Hermione?"

Hermione managed to stand, beginning her report, her detailed explanation of all the holes she'd noticed in Draco's memory that morning, expressing her earnest concerns, but also her hope for his recovery.

Beside her, Draco listened. She was right about him. There was a lot of fix, a lot to find. Yet somehow, he wasn't afraid. He didn't want her to be scared either, and as she spoke, Draco reached from where he sat, and took her hand in his.