Rosemary for Rememberance
By Lady Cailin
Summary: Lucius Malfoy had sent Hermione Granger flowers. Short fic written for a Shiv5468 prompt-meme. My Prompt: A bouquet using the language of flowers - what does it say? This is what came of that. Not DH compliant, set after the Department of Mysteries.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and related materials are copyright J.K. Rowlings, Warner Bros. and subsequent companies. This Fan Fiction was not produced, and is not intended to be reproduced, for profit. No infringement of said copyrights is intended by the author. Thank You.
Lucius Malfoy had sent Hermione Granger flowers.
Had anyone who heard this interesting bit of information had even a passing acquaintance with the above mentioned pair, they would have resolutely refused to believe such an outrageous lie. Hermione Granger would have been the first to agree with them, had the proof not been sitting on her bedroom nightstand at that very moment.
Lucius Malfoy was currently serving a life sentence without possibility of either formal trial or parole. Since prisoners in Azkaban weren't permitted any contact with the outside world, it seemed highly unlikely he'd actually been the one to send the flowers.
Although, had any man been able to accomplish the feat, it was sure to be Lucius Malfoy.
The question remained as to why a Malfoy, any Malfoy at all, would send flowers to a muggleborn witch and friend to Harry Potter. A particularly lovely display, at that.
A large, brilliant yellow narcissus was the center of the arrangement. The orange-red tubes of aloe flowers stood on thick stalks behind the bud. Green sprays of cypress framed the lone narcissus, the need-like leaves of a young seedling brushing against the sunset petals of the marigolds positioned beneath. The distinctive coconut sent of gorse mixed with the spicy aroma of the marigolds to tempt a casual observer closer. Bird's foot trefoil had been woven amongst the leaves and buds of the gorse, its sunny yellow flowers standing out against the darker yellow buds of the blooming gorse. The full foliage of the two edged the bottom of the arrangement, but here and there oval leaves surrounding a lone purple-red berry peaked out to tempt her.
It was elegant, but the slightly unruly charm of the wild flowers gave the display a distinctly un-Malfoy like edge. Words such as brilliant, sunny, and bright might have been reasonably applied to the arrangement. Hermione, had she ever contemplated the type of flowers that a Malfoy would send her, would have assumed something along the lines of deadly, poisonous, and rotting. A graceful and well-design message of "We hope you eat dirt and die painfully."
It took her two days to realize that the flowers she had received in place of those imagined thorns and rotting petals had a meaning of their own. It was a message, wrapped in a test, a challenge to see how clever Hermione Granger really was. Perhaps that was what intrigued her.
And perhaps that was exactly what it was intended to do.
The bright yellow narcissus, so clearly the center of the piece, had been the hardest to decipher, not because of the flower's meaning in this old language. It was the flower of egotism and self love, but its placement in the arrangement did not make sense in the context of the other flowers. It had been the Black Family Tree which had given up the secret of the flower, its feminine form engraved elegantly there above a newly added date of death. Grief was a backdrop to the flower, and painful mourning surrounded it. Anger and revenge were woven together bellow those central figures.
Peaking out temptingly from between, was treason.