Disclaimer- I do not own Harry Potter© or any of the concepts derived from the book series. The book series is the soul property of J.K. Rowling.
Mercy, Mercy
Part Two
(embracing the second shard of irony)
For Christmas, Hermione spent two months finagling two limited edition Nimbus 2050s from the Department of Magical Transportation (before their international scheduled release, mind you) for Harry and Ron.
Harry and Ron spent two days filling out paperwork to grant Hermione security clearance to the Ministry's private archives.
Hermione had had clearance for the past two years.
But she thanked her boys any ways and told them she went everyday.
conversion
Hermione dreamt of godly apparitions storming across the balcony that night.
But when she stumbled gracelessly out of the bed and lurched for the balcony, the locked French doors reverberated against her and she staggered backwards over the moonlight that had spilled across the ivory carpet. She woke up in the morning for breakfast with her body splayed ragdoll-like across the blue armchair, wondering where the time had gone.
The rest of the morning carried along quickly. Despite being in Wiltshire at the end of August, there was a remarkable chill about the manor that boded well for Hermione's hair as humidity often turned it into a tumbly and weedy sort of mess. She had just finished straightening it when she heard Morgan jiggle the door handle, call her name, then burst in.
"Good morning," he greeted as he slid into the bathroom, "I thought I would find you in here."
"Just a few more minutes," she replied, not bothering to look at him as she unsuccessfully tried pinning her hair back. Though breakfast had started ten minutes ago, she had spent every one of those ten minutes determining whether to wear her hair half pinned back, or fully pinned back. This decision was of course, absolutely not imperative. Normally, she would have cringed at the prospect of being late to a Ministry meeting, but the itinerary had tagged breakfast as "casual", and as this was a retreat, Hermione had taken the liberty of assuming that the expectations for things such as punctuality and attendance were much more lenient.
In actuality, these were all very awful excuses for the real reason Hermione was stifling her proclivity for punctuality—that reason being her strong abhorrence for (or fear of?) that waxen-eyed ghost that had spent the night slipping in and out of her head.
She decided to forego the clip altogether, succumbing to Morgan's impatient foot-tapping warning. Sensing her submission, Morgan tugged her out of the bathroom by the sleeve of her sweater and into the hallway. Already, they could hear laughter floating up from the dining room.
"How was your night?" Morgan asked as he pulled her by the hand towards the grand staircase.
Hermione didn't have the energy to elaborate on her dreams, or the energy to try to remember them for that matter. She bit out a, "Fine," and concerned herself with the crinkled receipts buried in her clutch.
As they descended the steps, a sharp peal of laughter broke their conversation. Morgan, clearly disgruntled that he had to forego any sort of Ministry-relevant joke or short story, pulled her along so roughly that she began jogging to keep up. He skidded to a halt inches away from the archway entrance to the dining room, but Hermione had no intention of stopping so the two stumbled breathlessly into the room much to Hermione's chagrin.
Hardly a head turned at the sound of their arrival. Hardly.
It would have been too easy for Hermione and Morgan to slide into their seats and into the conversation without the least bit of friction. From the way things had been going, from the way she'd been wrangled into these awkward interactions with him, Hermione had surrendered to the notion that her life at Malfoy Manor would proceed under Draco's monitor. Thus, though it filled her head with spinning and tumbling and wildly nauseating pains, she was not at all surprised when she looked up from the table, from the only seat that had been open upon her late arrival, and observed Draco, with his fingers all steepled and his lips drawn in a tight line, staring at her. She grimaced. He smirked. This was all getting so wildly redundant.
It did not help the mood when in all his carelessness, Morgan wrapped his hand about hers, mistaking her silence for some sort of nausea.
"Are you feeling alright?" he whispered with his mouth by her ear in the concerned manner that close friends often take upon themselves when caring for their sickly counterparts. The problem was that Hermione was neither sick nor very appreciative of his hand tangled about hers like bed sheets, and though she rolled her eyes and nodded at Morgan in that sarcastic way of hers, she could tell Draco had already made several assumptions of his own.
When Morgan turned his head back towards the conversation, Hermione glanced at Draco. His smirk had been replaced by that firmly unexcitable line again. She normally would have treated this moment with complete disregard, as Draco's happiness had never troubled her before, but again that feeling of impatience rode down upon her back and she found herself looking to her plate for a distraction.
"Granger," Draco suddenly said, followed by an obtrusively loud clearing of his throat, "if you don't mind me asking, why couldn't Potter and Weasley join us for the retreat?"
Her fingers unconsciously wrapped around her butter knife as half of the dining table turned in unconcealed curiosity to hear Hermione's response. Just why was only one third of the Goldern Trio traipsing about Malfoy Manor without the mildest concern for her complements? Certainly, Draco already knew why they couldn't make it. He had been standing outside of the room like a little fucking idiot as nuclear war had waged inside with Ron's head threatening to pop off and Harry spouting off such awfully true facts that Hermione had been reduced to tears. And surely, even if he had not heard their conversation in the conference room, he had been working alongside them in the same department for the past week, and good God if they didn't talk about marathon battles such as these, then what the hell else did they piddle around talking about?
She swallowed her anger and released the butter knife.
"Ron wasn't feeling well and Harry had an urgent case to work on," she said, oh-so-matter-of-factly that a chorus of credulous 'oohs' and 'ahhs' rippled across the table.
Draco raised a brow and was about to press her further when—
"Ah yes, Potter—we better leave him to it then, because we all certainly remember the last time he had an urgent case…" Morgan said, half jokingly half seriously.
Hermione wasn't sure if Morgan had sensed her discomfort and had thrown that remark in to save her, or was legitimately referencing something that she'd unfortunately had no recollection of ever happening. Still, despite her look of confusion, he nudged her as if she would complete his thought, as if they were some sort of odd couple with ESP.
"Oh come on, Hermione, don't you remember the Christmas Party at the Ministry? Harry popped in halfway during Shacklebolt's speech just to apologize for not being able to stay longer…"
She shrugged and looked at Morgan as though he was crazy. She vaguely remembered seeing Christmas trees lining the Ministry's atrium, strings of lights wrapped around columns, bubbling hot cider and punch, but she could not remember ever having seen Harry that night.
"I asked you to dance and you thought it would be brilliant to hide beneath the mistletoe…" he continued pressing.
By this point, the rest of the officials had returned to their other conversation, their loud dialogue nearly drowning out Morgan's words.
"I must have left early," Hermione finally said, not wanting to perpetuate their discussion any further, "Or you must have had too many drinks."
Morgan laughed and shook his head, then gently squeezed Hermione's arm.
"Whatever you say Hermione, whatever you say," he trailed off as he turned to join the rest of the guests.
Hermione turned to look down at her plate and began furiously racking her brain for any memory with the slightest resemblance to what Morgan had just described. Maybe she had been far more intoxicated than she'd remembered. But the problem was that she didn't even remember drinking that night. For the most part, she didn't remember the night at all. God, she must have been really sloshed.
When she turned back up again, tired of looking at the scrambled eggs and toast swimming about her plate, she very expectedly and very obnoxiously found herself staring at Draco again with her anxieties reading all across her brow in that furrowed and wrinkled way. He stared back, eerily cool, eerily un-anything with his fingers still steepled in front of his face as if fearful that the smallest movement of his body would blow both of them away.
xXx
The Department of Magical Transportation's presentation at the business-lunch went smoothly, save for the first five minutes that passed in uncomfortable silence as the Magical Transportation representatives struggled to control the Nimbus 2050 prototype while it hurtled about the dining room. Having already experienced the brutality of the 2050's stiff bristle beatings, as Hermione'd had to wrap not one, but two of them, in neon red and green wrapping paper the previous Christmas, Hermione took care to avoid engaging the Magical Transportation representatives in any thorny conversations. They had probably been through enough, forced to keep the 2050 in submission (as the new model had a sixth sense for space and once shipped one hundred miles outside of London to the Wiltshire countryside, undoubtedly went ballistic boxed up inside) that they certainly didn't need any further reasons to regret having spent their time here.
Standing on her balcony with Morgan, splitting the rest of her wine before dinner, Hermione thought that she had finally found peace. But thinking and knowing are fairly different in nature, and thus it would have been dishonest of her to say that she knew she'd found peace. Because she hadn't. Not in the least.
Technically, she'd been telling the truth when she'd said that lunch had gone smoothly. So smoothly in fact, that she hadn't so much as received a glance from Draco, despite their close proximity across the table from one another and despite the many brilliant and witty remarks she'd made after the presentation. Not for his satisfaction. No, absolutely not for his satisfaction.
Yet, hours after lunch had finished, Hermione was still bothered that Draco had ignored her because prior to this lunch, he had seemed so keen on harassing her whenever their paths crossed.
This was perhaps not the best way to describe Draco's behavior because she was not the type of girl that took pleasure out of harassment (as was the case with her sudden pangs of longing for his attention).
At first, she tried to tell herself that it was the lack of attention that bothered her, as it was natural for a girl to covet the occasional remark so long as it was an indication that someone other than herself was taking care to note her existence. Maybe Draco fulfilled that human desire to possess all those things that cannot be had.
Having had hours to mull over this strange feeling of absence in her gut, she began to realize that she hated Draco for many inane reasons. Reasons like his relationship with Harry and Ron, his family's poor treatment of house elves, and even for trivial outdated reasons like—that one time at Hogwarts when he'd told the Slytherin first-years that her name was "Hermaphrodite". Of course, that didn't change the fact that Draco had at one point in his life, pledged himself to Voldemort or the fact that he still had a scar on his arm as a souvenir from darker, more Death-Eater-y times. Perhaps she did not hate him so much as she did not trust him.
And thus, this conundrum between hate and distrust had lead her here, to this point, to this particular question posed with the intention of unraveling other conundrums leading to other questions, and so on and so forth.
Swirling her wine about her glass, Hermione casually leaned back against the French doors and stared hard at Morgan.
"Do you remember at breakfast—when you mentioned Harry showing up at the Christmas party?" she asked.
Morgan pushed his glasses up his nose, raised his brow.
"Well, Harry didn't stay too long but yes, I remember. What about it?" he replied.
In her head, all these strangely shaped pieces she'd conjured up from fragmented memories fit together rather nicely. Though she was slow to remember certain Ministry events, a la the Christmas Party, she remembered quite vividly the twenty-four hour lockdown the Ministry underwent several months ago. It had been the first attempted security infiltration in years, which was perhaps why it resonated so prominently in her head. She remembered everything about that day, from the large bold black script on the red airplanes declaring the Ministry had been broken into, to the squeal the door had made when she'd magically sealed it shut.
Ministry officials on duty were required to seal themselves into their rooms, to place anti-apparation charms on their offices and to stay put until otherwise notified. Shortly after receiving this message, Percy had burst into her office with a flustered Morgan in tow, shouting something about a break-in and how he'd been forced to reschedule three meetings already. She offered up her office as a headquarters of sorts, knowing very well how Morgan and Percy were both very extroverted gregarious folk and would accomplish nothing if barred in their rooms alone. For twenty-four hours, the three of them played cards, ate the stale rations provided by the Ministry for these lockdown situations, and filed so much paperwork that for days following, they were at a lack of things to do.
When the lockdown passed, the door opened of its own volition and Morgan stumbled into the hallway shouting hallelujah until his throat went hoarse.
She had always wondered what had happened that day. And having been reminded (or told for the very first time, which ever you prefer) of Harry's absence at the Christmas Party just months before the lockdown, Hermione was apt to conclude that the two events were related, as they were both equally anomalous in nature. If anyone knew anything about the technical workings and confounding gears and pulleys of the Ministry, it was Morgan who took care of the Ministry's legal logistics.
"That was why we had the lockdown, wasn't it?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" he asked, coyly smiling and just reveling in the uncommon phenomenon in which he knew more than Hermione.
"Don't play dumb with me," she frowned, boxing him in the shoulder, "Harry was working on something important the night of the Christmas Party, wasn't he?"
Morgan scoffed, "Clearly."
"Stuff it, you know what I mean," she groaned, "What happened during the lockdown? You must know…"
"Oh, must I?" he burbled into his glass as he took a long drink. But catching sight of Hermione's furrowed brow, he sighed and rested his glass on the balcony's railing.
"This is confidential information, Hermione," he iterated.
"Morgan, you can trust me."
"I know that," he rolled his eyes, "Just a precaution so that when you go running to The Daily Snitch, I can tell Percy you seduced me, and that I didn't just tell you like it was nothing."
He waggled his eyebrows, so Hermione boxed him in the shoulder again.
"Geez, all right She-Hulk, no need to get violent," Morgan chided, nursing his wounded arm. He took one more drink from his glass, emptying it, then set it down on the ground.
"I only know what I read from the incident report, and what little Draco was able to tell me from his hospital bed."
Hermione tilted her head, "His hospital bed?"
"Hermione—who is telling the story here?"
She quickly shut her mouth and busied herself with her wine glass.
"Even if he hadn't been paralyzed, I don't think he would have told me much different. He's very private about his personal affairs," Morgan continued.
Draco, paralyzed and in a hospital bed? Draco was the last person she would have thought to have been involved in a Ministry lockdown, as she had assumed that he'd maintained a spotless reputation all these years as compensation for his highly suspicious past dealings and such. When, in her brief deliberations of this event, she imagined what had happened on level two of the Ministry that day, she'd always pictured Harry as the sole opponent of whatever manifestation of dark magic had weaseled its way in. She had never bothered to ask Harry about it in their brief and sparse interactions over the months. In passing, it wasn't particularly the most appropriate topic to bring up. Oh, by the way, I heard you got into some epic battle again that shut the Ministry down for a day. How was that?
"We had incorrect intel about Adolphus Lestrange's whereabouts," Morgan explained, leaning against the railing, "In our records, we had him listed as deceased, you know, exploded to death or hit in the face with an Unforgivable. But those bastards just don't stay down. The night of the Christmas Party, the Law Enforcement Department got hit up, right when we were all upstairs drinking to prosperity and what not. Some files went missing and one of the cleaning staff said they saw Adolphus, so Harry stayed in the Department to keep an eye on things, do a little inventory and check what went missing."
He sighed and knelt down to pick up his glass and pour himself more wine.
"Whatever it was, it had to do with Draco because Adolphus broke into Draco's office a few months later and tortured him for hours. Draco never elaborated on how long he was under the Cruciatus Curse, but I guess you wouldn't really want to remember that kind of stuff…" he mulled over this for a moment before taking a drink, "Any ways, however many hours later, someone finally walked in on it and everything went to shit. The Ministry went into lockdown. People thought this was some neo-Death Eater movement. Whatever Adolphus wanted, only Draco and Shacklebolt know. Harry's probably got a clue, but he never said anything to me about it while I was working on Draco's case..."
Hermione poured the rest of the wine into her glass and turned to look across the courtyard at Draco's empty balcony. She would never have believed a story like this had anyone but Morgan told it to her. Did a man as despicable as Draco deserve a punishment like that? Did she even find Draco despicable anymore after what Morgan had relayed to her? Clearly, she did not, if this tumbling, despairing, knotting sensation in her stomach was any indication of her sympathies.
"That's so… tragic," she finally said, turning back to look at Morgan, wishing that at times like these, she could at least appear more articulate.
"I know—I felt pretty stupid after breakfast. I shouldn't have brought it up. Who knows what kinds of shitty things those memories must stir up," Morgan replied, "He spent a month recovering at St. Mungo's. I don't know how he stayed sane."
"Merlin, I had no idea he'd gone through all of that," she muttered.
"That's why I told you to give him a second chance. He's really not a bad guy, Hermione. Even after all that, he didn't want to push for the maximum sentence for Adolphus—the man's still alive and kicking in Azkaban."
Tendrils of suspicion began weaving their way through Hermione's head. The notion that Draco would show mercy towards his uncle was not so farfetched. She had always been one to rely on her intuition, as it often proved correct, and despite the stories Morgan was telling her about Draco, there was still something off about Draco's character. Maybe Draco and Adolphus were still in league with one another, maybe Adolphus had come to retrieve his debts.
Suddenly, she wasn't so sad for Draco anymore. But that didn't mean she was happy about what had happened to him either.
"Draco's a good man, Hermione. I know you think he's trying to buy all these officials off, but he's not. He didn't offer up his house as some sort of luxury resort for us, you know," Morgan said with a shrug, "Shacklebolt asked Draco himself. I think the big boys up there just figured it would be safer to hold it somewhere familiar—no log cabins on muggle campsites. Draco's just being a good host."
Okay, she got the picture. It was one thing to defend a man, but another thing to sell him like some slutty man prostitute. Hermione scoffed, "Jesus Morgan, why don't you just fucking marry him already?"
Morgan laughed and patted Hermione on the back.
"Alright, alright, I can see that you're not impressed. Forget I said anything," he said, picking up the empty bottle and his empty glass, "Let's go get dinner. Then maybe you'll be able to see for yourself how excellent of a host he is…"
Hermione groaned and roughly brushed past him, storming off her balcony just as the curtains rippled across the courtyard.
xXx
The courtyard was already loud and crowded when Hermione and Morgan arrived for dinner. It seemed that hardly a minute went by in the Manor where guests weren't drinking or on their way to get a drink—which would explain the inexhaustible discussions composed of inebriated conversationalists shouting at one another while under the impression that they were whispering. She gestured towards the bar and Morgan waved her away, perfectly content with the beer he had somehow wheedled from the Head of Magical Transportation.
Weaving her way through the crowds, Hermione was dismayed to find Draco already sitting quietly at the bar, staring into the reflecting pool with his hands wrapped tightly around his drink. He looked so pitifully wretched in his argyle sweater and chino shorts, musing about nothing, staring off into space. After what Morgan had told her, she wondered if Draco had simply become one of those broken people. Like Luna or Neville who after the war had lost their voracity for life and now hovered back and forth between St. Mungo's and the Ministry, looking for some sort of balance to get by on.
She wondered if he was thinking about it now. Thinking about the exact moment his body had given in after convulsing for hours as Adolphus screamed over and over in the background, Crucio crucio crucio! until he was nothing but a shell of a man with waxen skin and hair.
After stewing in her reflections, after hearing all Morgan had to tell her, she came to the spontaneous conclusion that Draco deserved a little more concern from her than she'd been exhibiting since her arrival. But she didn't want to appear too involved too quickly. So she awkwardly hovered at the edge of the crowd with her arms folded across her chest and stared mindlessly at the small orchestra.
"Granger?" she heard him finally say.
She turned slowly and feigning a sort of… inquisitive surprise, walked towards him. He looked so very very tired.
"I was beginning to think you would never show up," he said, setting his drink down on the counter.
She shrugged and took the stool beside him. No need reciprocating his sarcasm. She supposed that on some level, she deserved it.
"Well, here I am," she said very coolly, then turned towards the bartender, "Just water, please."
Draco looked at his drink, smiling, and boyishly bounced the glass on the counter.
"Not drinking tonight?" he asked.
She shook her head, "Morgan and I had some wine before coming down." Then, rethinking her remark, she quickly corrected herself. "And now he might be just drunk enough to ask Glennis from Magical Creatures to dinner."
He laughed, a genuine gut-wrenching laugh that split the crow's feet at his eyes.
"Glennis? Dragon-wrangling Glennis with the goggles and sherpa hat?" he asked, smiling at her.
Merlin, Draco made the woman sound like Sasquatch. Hermione choked down a smile and thinking her morsel of information could somehow preserve Glennis' sanctity, corrected Draco with a, "Well… sometimes she wears the dragonhide rugby cap."
Glennis was a good woman. Really. But God, that wasn't enough to keep Hermione from keeling over in laughter when she caught sight of Draco trying to prevent his own laughter by furiously chugging his drink.
Why had she thought it would have made Glennis look better by bringing up the rugby cap? She didn't know, but it had turned out much more amusing than she'd intended, and for the first time in a long time, she had said something to Draco without really concerning herself with its repercussions.
She found herself slipping into lazy solace with him.
"Don't tell me you haven't felt the chemistry between them?" she quipped.
Draco shook his head, "Ah—I'm afraid I must have confused it for Glennis' wonderfully natural musk."
Again, Hermione felt her gut twisting and her face contorting and before she knew it, she was laughing again, and Draco was laughing with her.
This was okay. Everything was okay.
When their laughter died, she angled her body towards him. He had turned his attention back to his drink that was now almost empty, swirling it about in the glass as if that would make it slide down any easier. She'd never really let herself acknowledge this, but Draco always appeared so incredibly pained. When not engaged in conversations with other people, he slipped into withering silences. She'd noticed this over breakfast, then lunch, and now at dinner.
He really had been broken.
She calmly noted, "You look tired, Draco."
His face grew serious.
"I am," he bluntly replied, "I haven't been sleeping very well."
His openness surprised her. She wondered if nightmares of Adolphus had been keeping him awake. She considered reaching out and touching his knee in that affectionate way that friends do, but thought better of it. They were still immersed in gray pulp. She didn't know what to label this. She could only manage an "oh" in response, not sure what kind of remark would be most appropriate. But, despite her confusion, instead of steering the conversation away from his personal problems, as normal people would have done to spare themselves the discomfiture, Hermione yielded to her curiosity (as she had recently begun showing qualities of being very unnormal in her own frame of reference) because she was certain that philosophical and delicate conversations such as these were a rarity with Malfoys.
"What keeps you up at night?" she asked.
He quickly glanced up at her and without the least hesitation, replied, "The past."
Without thinking, Hermione uttered, "Adolphus?"
As soon as she realized she'd spoken aloud, she sucked in a breath of air. He jerked her head to the side to look at her, his brow knit in concern.
"What?"
Was she not supposed to know these things? She began racking her head for a plausible lie, wondering if Morgan's warning had been more serious than she'd taken it to be, praying she had not just lost Morgan his job by blurting nonsensical musings out without the slightest amount of concern.
But then she remembered that this was Draco, and as much as she found herself enjoying his company, she was not under any obligation to impress or comfort him. After all of her commiseration, he was still Draco and she was still Hermione.
"I asked Morgan about it," she finally said.
The urgency in his face slipped away.
"Oh, I suppose I should have expected as much," he replied.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You two seem close," he shrugged.
She nearly spewed water across the counter.
Draco had just violated several of the unwritten rules of their pathetically fickle relationship—firstly, it was hardly any of his business whether she and Morgan were anything resembling what he had just assumed and secondly, even if they were, good God didn't he have any conversation etiquette? She'd mentioned less than ten minutes ago that Morgan was currently on the market, and though Glennis wasn't exactly the most fetching of mates, the implication had been that Morgan and her were very much unattached. This conversation was so very Hogwarts-esque. This was the type of business that had kept her up for nights with Ginny, giggling madly while they etched stupid things like "Ginny + Harry 4Ever" and "Mione Loves Krum" into their headboards.
"We're just friends," she groaned.
"I didn't say you two weren't," he smirked, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the bar.
The two slipped into an easy silence.
"Draco," Hermione said, her curiosity still unfed. It was undoubtedly the wine she'd shared with Morgan earlier that was giving her the reckless courage to ask a man she'd once thought she'd hated for answers she did not intend on using against him.
"Mhm?" he mumbled as he fidgeted about with his coaster on the bar counter.
"If you don't mind me asking… what was Adolphus looking for?"
Other less vindictive people might have regretted asking a question like this, but Hermione had already come to the realization that she had nothing to lose. Maybe he would stop looking at her all the time across the dining table, making her body temperature rise and fall so rapidly, making her feel so goddamn impatient all the time.
Fortunately, Draco wasn't offended. He didn't remark on her nosiness, or throw his drink across the bar in insult, or leave her alone at the bar, which she realized, as he turned to look at her, would have hurt the most.
"Why do you want to know?" he asked.
It was mainly curiosity, but curiosity wasn't really a viable reason for anything these days. She wondered if she was seeing things when she looked across the counter at his hands, restlessly spinning the coaster. They were shaking with such trepidation that she felt the slightest mingling of guilt and sympathy in her gut. In a tentatively slow crawl, Hermione took the coaster and flattened it on the counter, then rested a hand atop his own, her brow raised in a way that acknowledged—I would have been scared, too.
When he said nothing in protest of this interaction, she opened her mouth to respond, "To know if it was worth it."
Draco shook his head. They sat in silence as he mulled this over.
"It was certainly worth the try," he concluded.
She didn't know how to feel about the ease with which he recanted his own torture. So she said nothing and slowly pulled her hand away from his and settled it into her lap. Draco appeared unfazed by this, and continued.
"Adolphus did what men caught in the most extreme throes of his position do," he paused as he dropped off into thought, then coolly finished, "He was looking for one last requiem for Bellatrix."
Hermione's brow furrowed.
Molly had killed Bellatrix, not Draco. Why would Adolphus concern himself with the affairs of Malfoys, especially now that Narcissa and Lucius were dead, when the entire Weasley family was wrapped up in the Ministry's machinery? There was a forty-three percent chance that, just by randomly smashing the elevator's buttons, one could find a Weasley working on any given day. A fifty-seven percent chance on those days that Charlie came by to speak to officials from the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures as the representative for the Dragon Keepers Union of Romania.
Why did Adolphus target Draco when, in her most guilt-ridden of revelations, the Weasleys were so much more accessible? Draco must have done something decidedly generous that day.
Despite the countless amount of half-assed theories and assumptions that had been drawn up about him, Draco would presumably keep quiet on the subject for quite some while as every man is assured some level of privacy, and certain demons once released cannot be quelled. So she let him drink in silence while a slow waltz wafted in between them.
It was getting late and the courtyard was beginning to empty. Just as Draco turned towards her with his glass raised, a man from Draco's department cut in between them with a manila folder in one arm and a roll of parchment in the other.
"There are some things I wanted to double-check with you on the presentation…" he began as Draco slowly turned his attention towards him.
She smiled and raised her glass to him anyways.
Apparently, their time was up.
As she slipped off the stool, she felt a tug on her sleeve. Before she even turned to look, she knew that it was Draco on the other end. Not necessarily because she felt any sort of tension. Mostly because, based on her calculations, there had only been two people at the bar; Draco, and his tubby co-worker with the horn-rimmed glasses, and Hermione was fairly certain that if the fat man had touched her, she would have walloped him across the face for sexual harassment.
Self-admittedly, she'd felt some tension.
Whatever it was, she knew it was Draco tugging her sleeve before she turned, so when she finally did turn, in that bone-creaking muscle-stretching slow-as-shit way, she made sure she was smiling. Smiling at him as though they were friends. As if they did this sort of thing—this talking sort of thing—on the regular.
And when he met her gaze, he sort of hiccupped with his words, apparently as caught off guard by her sincerity as she was by his.
"Good night, Granger," he said.
If the fat man had not been there, and if Hermione had drank any more alcohol, she might have said something along these lines: Try to sleep well, Draco. Hopefully you'll dream of something other than Adolphus staring down at you while he cruciates your brains out. I am glad we are kind of friends now.
But instead, she nodded and replied calmly, "You too."
Then, hearing Morgan calling her name, she turned and left the bar.
xXx
Depending on how you interpreted Draco's parting words, Hermione's night was either incredibly good or incredibly bad.
She dreamt again of Draco, of him pacing across her balcony with his shadow pasted across the spilled moonlight. She dreamt of walking through those stubborn French doors, of seeing him leaning across the railing and staring sadly into the reflecting pool. She dreamt of seeing an indescribable despondency in his eyes, and for an instant, thought this was real.
When she sat up in bed and realized that the French doors were still locked and the moon covered by clouds so that hardly any light fell across the carpet, she realized that it had all been in her head.
So, only because Hermione had gotten by for so many years imagining Draco to be a horrible man, she thought to herself that this dream must have been a nightmare and was resigned to tell Morgan, if he asked, that her night had been particularly bad.
But Draco was not actually this horrible. And she knew this now. She considered herself lucky if she was not kept up by visions of Adolphus Lestrange torturing her until her limbs gave out.
So, more importantly, she resigned to tell Draco, if he asked, that her night had been particularly good.
Author's Note: I never know what to say in these things, other than—I hope you are enjoying it so far. After charting the story all out, it is going to be quite a haul, but I'm definitely planning on finishing it before the end of August. Hopefully I'll have the next part posted in the coming week. This shouldn't really be more than five parts, but if I get really attached to it, it might go a little over. Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed the first chapter. I know how annoying it must be to only have one part of a story up, but I hope the second part gives the story a lot more uh… meat? Also, if any of you have read This and Here, you'll probably recognize the Hermaphrodite reference. GOD I love that joke.
Any ways, keep reading, I love and thank you and appreciate the reviews!
