Story: some things slide by so carelessly
Summary: We lost track of the time. / "You don't have to pretend to despise me," he says for lack of anything else. "We hardly know each other, it's understandable."
Notes: Weird way to come back to this fandom. Vaguely appropriate, I suppose, considering my tendency to ship Hermione with unsuitable men. I am still unsure as to where this came from, except it started with the cigarette.
She is smoking a fag a little nervously at a corner café when he sees her; at first it is just the mass of hair, bushily recognizable in a way that rings hollow, as though its purpose has been forgotten. Perhaps it has; he doesn't feel up to bothering her about it anymore, even though it still looks just as much as though a small animal has crawled up and died on her head as it had back in school.
He decides to keep walking, after a momentary slowing of limbs. He doesn't know what he was thinking, pausing, as though there was anything they would have to say to one another. It has been three years, since he last saw her, and they haven't spoken once, although he'd heard through a departmental crane that she'd started a new subdivision at the Ministry.
Once he is closer, the smell of her cigarette creeps towards him and overwhelms him in how utterly mundane it is; he's a bit of a connoisseur, unsurprisingly, and he can tell immediately that she isn't smoking a wizarding brand, and she probably isn't smoking a particularly good Muggle brand either.
He slows again, almost without his consent, and his hand goes to his breast pocket. Before he can even really think it through, he pulls out a silver case and lights her one of his cigarettes, and with a sort of short snapping motion, offers it to her over her shoulder.
She startles abruptly, so violently that she actually drops her hideous Muggle sub-par brand of nicotine into her cup of coffee, and whirls to look at him suspiciously. The hair—it is a creature entirely separate from the brain to which is it nebulously attached, like a Fantastic Beast of its very own, presumably with a triple (at least; maybe quadruple during exam season) X rating—follows after her at a more leisurely pace, parts of it curling downward like little moues of unhappiness.
Her mouth makes the shape, but her voice is unable to lend it noise, so she stares at him for a moment, an "Oh!" on the tip of her tongue, and then she swallows the word whole and peers at him, perhaps suspiciously, although he never could read any emotions from her other than Seering Hatred and Withering Disdain, which were his best of friends through most of school.
"Hullo," she says after a moment. "Is this for me, then?" She doesn't even look at the cigarette, which, having not yet been activated by her lips, is glowing only very faintly at the tip, not yet leaving a shell of ash. He is maybe caught by her expression, although that would imply that there is something compelling to her features, which is not something he is willing to admit to himself, rather like he will not put a name to her in his thoughts, not until she takes the cigarette from his fingers.
"Yes," he says. Part of him is already opening its mouth, adding, I could smell that roll of shite half a block away, it's a hazard, sneering at her and her huge, unhappily frowning hair, but he cannot, for some strange reason, collect himself to say it, and by the time he has managed to gather himself together enough for such a delivery, the moment has passed, and it would be an awkward insertion.
"Thank you," she says, primly, and she takes it from him, their fingers careful not to touch. He realizes then that it hasn't been half as long as he thought it had been; his comment would have still been timely, would have been accepted with a bristling her of sleek Grangerness, and perhaps she would have shouted at him, which is the sort of thing he occasionally misses, as it implies someone is paying attention to him.
"Would you like a cup of coffee?" she asks, after her first suspicious drag. He does not know if she expected him to poison it, this spur-of-the-moment bout of generosity, but the assumption does not wound him so much as serve as a balm of familiarity. It has been ages since he has been properly suspected of something, and rather like the naughty boy he was not quite free enough to be, he misses being an object of fear and apprehension and also concern.
He looks at her table, small and tilting into one corner, iron framework and a pockmarked ceramic top. It is amusingly mundane, absurdly Muggle, the sort of thing he wouldn't let within twelve meters of his house without a few Reparos and a new coat of glaze, and he hops over the fence to the opposite side of it quickly, almost without thought. She is looking at him, almost blankly, at he settles into the chair. She flags down a waitress without looking, still pulling at his cigarette with angry, nervous lips.
"How have you been, Malfoy?" she asks, finally, when he has finished ordering them both a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits. Her voice is raspy from her Muggle cigarette—his are too expensive to produce such an effect—and he hasn't heard anything like it in a long time, since his grandmother was alive and he would spend his afternoons in short robes, playing with an absurdly expensive set of self-driving trains at her feet in her study.
"Wonderful, Granger," he says, and pauses to let the short waitress, stubby and Irish-looking, place down their coffees and the biscuits. "We work in the same building now, don't we?"
"Except you are masterfully signing documents and I do actual labor, yes," she says, smirking around a mouthful of blue smoke, "yes, we are neighbors in the Ministry building." Her insult is off-hand, a little lackluster, and possibly recycled from a conversation with Potter or Weasley, he would guess.
"You don't have to pretend to despise me," he says for lack of anything else. "We hardly know each other, it's understandable."
She is sipping from her coffee as he says it—when she blows to cool the top, her breath is tinged silver from the cigarette, blueish grey in the very middle—and she pauses, looking at him in an almost considering fashion. He still cannot interpret her full expression, but he tries as he eats a biscuit. They are dry and crumbly and taste faintly of orange; he is used to the wizard sort, tasty in a way that makes eating one akin to taking your life into your own hands, but he supposes the blandness of them would appeal to some.
Granger's hair, stalwartly standing firm against a sudden breeze, does not indicate that its possessor is fond of blandness; the way she smokes his cigarette, lips puckered slightly even when she is not breathing, fingers haphazardly pulling at a piece of paper caught on the bottom curve of her lip, is full of something that he still cannot fully name, or even recognize. She looks like a mirrored reflection of herself; it takes him a while to realize she has parted her hair on the opposite side, drawing attention to her left eye, which is slightly larger than the right.
Or perhaps that is the effect of her hair; he cannot tell, cannot distinguish between the truth of her features and what is presented to him by her appearance—which, he realizes a moment later, is much better suited to Muggle London than his own, although he'd thought his jumper and slacks to be acceptable earlier that morning.
These thoughts pass through his head easily, quickly, and it hasn't been more than two or three seconds when she replies, "I appear to be out of practice at it. I apologize," with a faintly puzzled tone. Everything about her is distracted, as she taps a nail against the side of her cup. "I will try harder at the next Ministry function, work up a real bad temper."
"I'll try to help," he says politely, "I will even insult your hair, if it would be of assistance." With anyone else—the female Weasley, for instance, whose name he is always forgetting, although she seems to be everywhere, on the arm of Potter—this would have taken on a joking sort of tone, a Ha Ha reverence for their old school rivalry, but she is on edge and not fully able to devote herself to the satire.
The smoke has begun to turn a lavender around her lips, the very edges of the cloud around her hair still blue. She looks washed behind the color, the beige of her coat and the white of her scarf relegated to sad greys against her skin, which is an almost deathly purple-grey at her cheeks. "Thank you," she says, and it is hollow. There is very little of his cigarette left now, only a scant quarter before the filter, and her mouth is starting to bleed red, a little. When she speaks the word, it pushes it towards him, and he is reminded a little of the last time he saw her, bloody and her hair more nest than coiffure, from where he was clutched between the frantic bodies of his parents.
She turns then, suddenly, and her hair pushes the smoke so that, when she returns her eyes to him, her face is clear of the palate of color and she is cream and rose and pinched brown eyes. "For the cigarette," she finally clarifies, and there is significance in how she emphasizes this, and only this. With a final drag, she stubs it out on an ashtray between them, decorated to look like the Arc de Triumph, and takes a quick sip of her coffee. "I've got to run, Malfoy."
"Nice chat," he says as she stands and places some pound coins on the table, "we should do this again some time when you aren't an Imperi."
She looks at him, through him, and opens her mouth. Instead of words, there is a final burst of smoke, a bright, almost garish orange-red, and because she is looking down it billows with the wind towards him around him, until all he can see is her hair, red like Weasley's in the light, and she smiles at him faintly and leaves.
A week later, at a Ministry function celebrating the promotion of a So-and-So in whom he is only vaguely interested, he sees her again. She is wearing dress robes that look as though she bought them two years ago in a sensible way, the sort that are not in fashion ever and thus never out of style. She is with Weasley, and they appear to be engaged, from the buzzing that is drowning the other guests.
He still does not understand the interest in Granger and Weasley, when neither of them are Harry Potter or even have interesting jobs, but there are toasts made every twelve seconds from some head or another, wishing them the best. It is a bit like when Potter and the female Weasley did the same thing the year before, except it is not so melancholic. Events featuring Potter prominently are always melancholic, as though no one can celebrate his presence without remembering the dead, and he approves of this.
"When did he propose?" asks his date, Melange Wathingtom, when they have circled close enough to the pair. He supposes Melange and Granger know each other, as she asks this question without being treated to Granger's usual stare of haughty disapproval when greeted with the overly familiar.
"Last week," says Granger, in an almost monotone, although Melange looks properly excited, so perhaps it is just him, projecting onto her blankness. He remembers her face, through the red smoke, and her hair, reaching towards the clouds and the waitress and perhaps him, all of it always creating those downward curves, sad faces.
"Congratulations," he says, because he was not raised in a Quidditch shed, and Weasley looks faintly surprised. She does not, when he shakes her hand. She is using her left hand tonight, and so he feels the coldness of the band against his palm. Her hair sometimes tricks him into thinking she is bigger than she actually is, perhaps also because of her tendency to never shut up, and so he is more startled than he should be that her entire hand fits in his.
"Also," he adds, a bit reckless, because he still cannot see anything behind the smooth porcelain of her eyes, "your hair looks a marvelous mess tonight."
She laughs, startled, reminded, and it is a terrifying cackle; he can hear someone coming unhinged behind it, hysteria beginning to uncurl and seep through her edges, and Weasley, the dolt, stands there, vaguely confused, as she giggles hard enough to let tears leak from her eyes, clutching her hand and her engagement ring against her stomach, the ties of her sensible black dress robes.
"You should get some air," he says, to her and mostly to Weasley, who guides her away, still spouting giggles, towards a set of doors that open into a courtyard festooned in floating candles and hovering crystal bowls of hemlock blossoms. He can hear her, even as she vanishes, coming undone in the middle of the ballroom, and he wonders briefly, amongst other things, what their children will look like, whether she will crack like an egg (his Aunt Bella) in the next six months, and why she bothers to pin her hair up when it's just going to explode midway through the evening anyway.
"They're lovely couple," says Melange approvingly after they've left. "I hadn't realized you and Hermione Granger were on good terms." The way she says good terms implies that he had in recent memory done something unseemly like skinned her kneazle or Sectumsempra'd her in a corridor on the seventh floor of the Ministry building.
"We aren't," he replies, hoping that his usual disdainful tone is in place. It is getting harder and harder to keep up appearances; his facsimile of not caring has extended to the point where he doesn't, really, not even enough to monitor his facial expressions so his trademark sneer is fixed at the corner of his lips. School seems eons past, and sometimes he wonders how it will seem in fifty years; will he even remember much of his years at Hogwarts, spent torturing small, weeping Hufflepuffs in dark corners?
He fears that, in an attempt to recognize his father's faults and counteract them, he has eradicated all traces of his personality, leaving behind a budding chain smoker and a Ministry man with a fondness for silk cravats. The idea of being that sort—stuck at his desk come seven, with a harried elderly secretary and a tendency to send out cranes at all hours of the night—used to make his skin crawl, back at Hogwarts. He was always much better at spending money than making it, at any rate, unless making it involved intimidation or blackmail, and so the realization that he is moderately successful at his job without his last name as a crutch is shocking, to say the least.
But it is not shocking enough to make him more fit for human interaction, and while he appreciates Melange Wathingtom and her rather glorious connections through the various international Ministries, she is tiring to be around. They'd met right after the war, when he was sent out of the country so his parents could barter out the legal ramifications of their choice of permanent marks without him underfoot, and he'd been much brighter then, surlier but also hugely bitter about the world, which made him vocal.
As they continue to make their rounds through the Ministry ballroom, pausing sporadically to say hello to Melange's acquaintances from a handful of the foreign ministries, he catches a few glimpses of Weasley and Granger out in the courtyard, underneath a herd of the crystal bowls of hemlock blossoms. Occasionally one of the floating candles come closer as he approaches a window, Melange's hand tucked into his elbow, and he can see features; he thinks, at one point, her hair gets caught on one of the bowls, and they spend a few heated minutes disengaging her.
It is amusing and also pathetic; for a moment, his interest picks up, and he develops a few scathing remarks, glad to know that someone here can distinguish trash when it sees it, or Weasley, restrain your kneazle, it appears to have finished eating Granger and is now trying for the ornaments, but he can't use them because he is tethered to Melange and her rotating circle of ambassadors and old friends.
She is the daughter of a diplomat, the child of two years at Beauxbatons, three at Durmstrang, and two at that odd school in Canada that doesn't make their students take OWLS. Despite this constant upheaval, almost unheard of in wizarding schooling, she is still on remarkably good terms with all of her school friends. He knows that, probably in a year or so, they are going to get married. None of it is official yet, but his mother is quietly putting together wedding plans and he's stopped taking Daphne Greengrass to Ministry events, so it's only a matter of time.
The only thing keeping him from throwing a fit is that she isn't Pansy; she doesn't seem aware that a marriage is on their horizon, she doesn't pester him about wedding plans or changing his flat or paying more attention to her. That could change, he supposes, but he suspects that Melange will turn out quite a bit like his mother, and that's really all he could hope for, considering that he came out of the war clean only by the skin of his teeth. He is hardly a respectable match for anyone in the current Minister's good graces, and that Melange is willing to go through this for her own indecipherable reasons make him a bit grateful.
Five years ago, he would have rather stomached five Crucios and a trial in front of the Wizengamot than not protest marrying someone to whom he will be indebted for the favor, but he appears to have misplaced his pride, along with the rest of his personality, at some point in the intervening years. He almost thinks he misses it, but there are always aspects—the looks of undisguised loathing he sometimes gets in the lift, going to the Leaky Cauldron on a Friday night and seeing a drunkenly cheery group of Order veterans in the corner, the absence of an expression on his father's face when he gets his portfolio back from the goblins—that make him think he is glad he no longer has much of an ego to protect.
In contrast, all his father has left is ego, and he wields it expertly. Draco would feel like a failure, except that there are no more afternoons spent playing his chess, no more dinner conversations carefully weighted with expectations. He would term the sensation being cut adrift, maybe even lost, but those would imply some degree of consideration going into his state when really, the only one who cares about his mental status is his mother.
As he and Melange pause for some canapes, he realizes that there is a semi-familiar itching under his breastbone. Caught within him is a desire to know, everything, about Granger. He hasn't wanted something quite so badly—excepting, perhaps, respectability and a good take-out curry place within walking distance of the Ministry—since he was a school boy, and it is incredibly seductive, that tug of curiosity and impudence. He realizes that he is in no position to demand anything of her, but even knowing that he still wants to, and he hasn't wanted something for ages, not with proper conceit and the belief that he can get it.
Without even being fully aware of it, he drifts with Melange and her plate of small, brightly colored pasties towards where Zabini is holding court with a cluster of rich Italian investors, and, as expected, Melange knows half of them and her father the rest, so he leaves her there and vanishes after making vague noises about punch. It's a bit of a gamble; even if she is still outside, she is likely with Weasley, but he circles the room and exits into a clump of enthusiastically growing spicklewart bushes, which shade him. He skulks along the wall for a bit, towards the main section, before realizing what this looks like to anyone with a fancy of peering out the windows, so he cuts through a heavily forested section and lurks behind a gently vibrating willow.
It is too young to be truly dangerous yet, so its ineffectual attempts to bash him in the head can be mostly ignored. Feeling slightly ridiculous and also about fourteen, he peers through some of the lower branches and sees Granger and Weasley, the former no longer connected to the crystal bowl of hemlock blossoms. Weasley is speaking, trying to get her laugh, judging by the constipated expression on his face, and she is valiantly attempting to reward him. Eventually, Weasley moves closer and wraps his hand around the back of her neck, says something, and kisses her. She murmurs something back, her hands resting lightly, trembling like the willow Draco is hiding behind, on his waist, and Weasley sighs and kisses her forehead and goes back inside.
"You can come out," she says, hand on her hip, looking to the willow. "Please tell me you have a fag I can bum."
There is again the pressing reminder, a ghosting thing against his voice box, which hints that there is something cutting and nasty he should be saying. As he reaches into the front breast pocket of his robes and pulls out the cigarette case, heavy and silver and framed, in the bottom corner, by a delicately masculine M, he instead wonders if she plays chess.
His father is in not much of a position to play anymore; he'd ceased once Draco had shown the potential to win their Sunday matches, and his mind is not the same as it once was, when Draco had been young and impressionable enough. Watching Granger remove a cigarette and light it with a particularly low-floating candle, nervously—he isn't sure how he knows she is nervous, as her hands are steady and her eyes are fixed on the patchy, twitching boughs of the baby willow, but she is, he is sure of it more than he's been sure of much, as of late—he thinks perhaps she is not in the best condition to play chess with him on Sundays, either.
"Ron doesn't like me smoking," she tells him, exhaling a thin line of greenish-grey smoke to the left of his face. "I suspect it is too masculine." This is not the first time he has heard her criticize Weasley (he has ears, after all), but now that they are betrothed, it sounds odd in his ears. He is used to resentful wives made the Slytherin way, with their vicious tongues and lengthy, exacerbating patience, and over it all that veneer of accommodation, of devotion. His Aunt Bella was particularly good at this sort of charade.
But to hear it coming from one half of the Great Wizarding Love Story makes him itchy; he is well aware that there is no such creature as a happy, or even particularly content, marriage, but Granger had always been good at burying her misery under her snottish exterior. She was always the most difficult one to get a rise out of, at least personally. There had been a brief spurt, third year, when he'd devoted a moderate amount of effort to baiting her particularly, but he'd never gotten a conclusion other than the flat of her palm against his cheek.
He'd always held the faintest suspicion that, secretly, he was bad at being terrible; he lacked a certain knack for the personal that others, like Theodore, possessed, a wittiness born of intensely perceptive cruelty. There was an element of the common about his insults, when he thought there was nothing else common about him. Perhaps realizing this, she had never given him the attention that Potter and Weasley had surrendered so easily. The youngest Weasley (was it Gigi? Something faintly inspid) was much more satisfying to taunt, as she was small enough not to physically threatening, but she still snapped at the smallest push. If he were a better person—more of a person—he would have an opinion about himself and the fact that he spent years torturing the female Weasley but he cannot remember her name.
When Granger finishes, she drops the filter into one of the bowls of hemlock and lets the water extinguish the last bit of glow, turning towards him so the skirt of her dress robes sway. He can see the toes of her shoes, which are black and look eminently sensible, and also faintly hideous.
She opens her mouth, and he see that she is ready to ask why he is here, but she seems to decide better of it. "How do you know Melange?" The way she says this is free of implication, but he can imagine plenty of it for her; Melange is pretty and friendly and, had she been at Hogwarts, one of those Slytherins who would've been a Hufflepuff if it weren't for her family lineage.
"I met her while I was traveling on the Continent," he says. She raises an eyebrow at the ensuing pause, waiting for him to gather his thoughts and form a properly amusing anecdote relating their first encounter, but he cannot pull himself together enough to make something bright and shallow, suited to the Ministry ballroom.
"Were you very mad?" asks Granger. It is an odd question, one no one would think to ask in his usual social circle, but his usual social circle, in the years since the war, has been infiltrated by half-bloods and no-bloods and ugly people rubbish at being polite.
"As a box of toads," he says. "I've mostly stopped, now." This is a debatable truth, but he is not getting into a game of semantics with Granger in the garden of the Ministry ballroom; there are some lows to which even Draco Malfoy, Ministry drone, will not sink.
"That is lucky for you," she says, perhaps hinting that others have not.
"Were you very upset when he asked?" Granger shrugs, turning her head to the brightness of the windows of the ballroom. The shrubbery and the baby willow mostly hide them from view; the light that filters through them dash across her face in speckles, darkening and leached in turn by the floating candles.
"I feel as though things are falling away from me," she finally says, absently. "Winning the war was perhaps the last thing I will win." It is absurdly maudlin, even for Granger; he would expect it from a brooding, pouting Potter, whinging about how the world doesn't understand his tragedy. In Draco's world, people do not complain about their lot. He wants to tell her something to this effect, but it is difficult to speak the words, in the face of her expression.
He recognizes it. She looks like his mother.
A bit like Luna Lovegood, she drifts away from him without even a good-bye, haphazard and strictly formal. In four, three, two seconds, she has moved past the willow, and back to the ballroom, flooded with light, where her fiancee is waiting.
If Draco were to think of Hermione Granger in the interim months—which he doesn't, really, except when Melange leaves for Hungary ("Hermione recommended I see Budapest; and really, is there something worth me staying for, darling?" Her eyes aren't cruel, simply assessing)—he would probably theorize that she was steadily degenerating into madness, the slow decline he'd seen in his Aunt Bella and was beginning to pick out of his father's moods.
But he does not think of Hermione Granger, and does his job before returning to the manor at night, to eat dinner with his mother and studiously ignore his father's empty chair, and some nights he works late, sending cranes at odd hours with incriminating time stamps. He begins to take Astoria Greengrass to Ministry events, as she is the proper height in dress shoes to stand next to him and likes talking about recent advances in potion-making.
Perhaps he does consider her once or twice; once, upon picking up Astoria, he runs into Daphne, who is stepping out with Theodore Nott last he heard, and she has a very assessing expression, a set tightness to her mouth. He remembers Granger's absent, loose, things are falling away from me, the hollows of her cheeks cut sharply by the refracted light from the crystal bowls. Daphne looks as though she is grasping firmly to that which would fall away; Draco doesn't think he would know how to.
"Hullo, Daphne," he says. "How are you?"
The tightness in the corners of her mouth deepens, pulling the lips into a smile. "I'm wonderful, Draco, lots of running about to do, what with the wedding. How are you? Astoria told me about your trip to Diagon Alley last weekend."
He hadn't realized she and Nott were engaged; it feels like Potter and the female Weasley getting hitched has been a frantic signal to the rest of his classmates to marry, immediately, as soon as possible, before everyone abandoned the portkey. He knows that Pansy is marrying that wealthy, ridiculously older wizard from Poland within the month; Blaise is on his third wife, maybe looking to exceed his mother's record of thirteen husbands.
"Congratulations, again," he says, because he is sure that his mother has already sent a note. "I'm looking forward to it."
Astoria comes down then, dressed impeccably, with the exception of a smudge of charcoal under her ear. She fiddles with potions, he knows, for lack of a proper (unseemly) vocation, and if he had the capacity to besottedly find something charming, he thinks it would be her. "Let's go," she says, "I don't want to be late. Daphne, give my love to Teddy."
The smile has faded from Daphne's face, and she nods, once, at Astoria, and then turns her eyes to Draco. He has a moment to realize that, to anyone else, her unhappiness would be well-hidden, shut behind her well-bred exterior, and then he too is being gently ushered out of her mind, eyes shuttered behind him, and she lifts a hand to wave them off genteelly.
Draco receives an invitation to the Granger-Weasley wedding. If he had a smidgen of self-respect, he imagines he would send a polite refusal with a tasteful gift, but he knows that there will be a cluster of Ministry folk he can lurk around, and he wants, a bit dreadfully, to see if it is the ceremony itself that makes her crack like a dragon egg, the charred remains drifting sootily away on a spring breeze.
Between Astoria and his mother, he arrives early, and they filter amongst former Gryffindors and heaps of Weasleys and a handful of confused-looking Muggles, probably close enough family to be let in on the secret. Someone who looks like Granger's grandmother is thumping about on a cane, wearing a hideous purple contraption, hitting people in the shins and demanding an alcoholic beverage that won't literally set her throat on fire.
Because he is not completely inept, he maneuvers himself and Astoria into seats far away from the presiding wizard—Kingsley Shacklebolt, of course, he seems to spend more time performing weddings for war heroes than actually serving as Minister of Magic—and the Weasley family, which is in a clump of magenta and orange.
Granger looks bloodless and dry as she drifts down the middle aisle on her father's arm; Draco might be projecting onto her, but she seems as pale as her dress, which is the least sensible thing he has ever seen her wear, and thus the most flattering. Her hair looks like the insipid female Weasley attacked her with half of a garden; there is a collection of goldenblossom, for good luck, leaking out from behind her ear, artfully draped across her neck. It is doing nothing to bring color back into her cheeks.
There is no appearance of instability throughout the ceremony itself, but when Weasley clutches her hand, firmly, her wrist disappears underneath his fingers, and as Shacklebolt asks if Ronald Bilius Weasley takes Hermione Jane Granger to be his wife under the eyes of the law of the Ministry and in acknowledgment of the vows ordained by Merlin himself, her lips tighten. Draco has heard that Muggle ceremonies address both the husband and the bride; there's no need for that in a wizarding ceremony.
Weasley answers for both of him with his yes, and Shacklebolt declares them bonded for life. The stars that fall from the tip of his wand are so bright they look like they will burn as they tumble down over Weasley and Granger's clasped hands. Everyone begins applauding, riotously, Potter standing up and thundering, a shock of black amongst the sea of Weasley red, and even Astoria is smiling as Wealsey and Granger turn to face their audience. There is nothing behind Granger's smile, blank cheeriness, hiding nothing. She appears to have gone away.
Shocking everyone, including himself, he gets to dance with her at the reception afterwards. He isn't really sure how she maneuvers it, but she does so quite adeptly, sliding a young Ministry buck between him and Astoria and appropriating him immediately. "I need a fag," she tells him once he has gathered her with a hand on the small of her back, "lead me towards that arbor, behind Great-Aunt Muriel." He does so, slowly, and once they are hidden by the great swath of the aunt, she rips the goldenblossom out of her hair and drops it into someone's goblet on an abandoned table. They duck under the arbor, out into the woods behind the tottering Weasley house, and she turns on him.
He is close enough now to see that she has tricked color into her lips with magic; it is beginning to wear off, and the circles beneath her eyes are pressing upwards. "Please tell me you haven't quit," she says. The words should indicate some frenetic motive, but she appears to have selected the words most appropriate to the situation without actually joining them to emotions.
"Here," he says, and reaches into his breast pocket for his case. "You look horrendous, Granger." She takes the cigarette and holds it out for him to light.
"Haven't got my wand on me," she says, and he reaches for his own. "And you're not supposed to tell me I look terrible, Malfoy, you used to be better at lying." There is no tonal quality to her words anymore.
"You're an absolute idiot, Granger. You didn't have to marry him. You're a war hero." Draco realizes he is still holding his cigarette case outstreched in his non-wand hand, the polish showcasing swirls of scarlet from her reflection. He looks at it for a moment, the part on her hair returned to its proper side; she looks younger that way, even tinted red and jerkily plucking at her lip with her thumb and ring finger.
"No," she says, "I'm a girl whose friends are war heroes." She is pulling at the cigarette furiously, and the smoke surrouning her head is blazing, furious red, diluting her into a torrid picture in shades of grey. "Now I'm a woman whose husband is a war hero."
"Do you mind?" he asks, which is foolish. She wouldn't look like rubbish if she didn't care.
"A little," she says. "I imagine it'll go away."
She is probably right.