Welcome Back, Hermione

Chapter Six: On Dinner, House Elves, Bonds, Wandless Magic, and Shattered Glass

Disclaimer: Nya-nya—not mine, I know. Blah, blah, blah.

A/N: Um—I don't normally post things until I'm all done, but I'm not sure whether I should continue it, so please review and tell me! And the "so glad to know you're disgusted, love" line came from "While You Were Sleeping."

"Hermione? It's time for dinner," he called in a carefully neutral tone.

After their mini-fight which was mostly one-sided, he had holed himself up in his study and not come out again. His heightened awareness of her had told him that she had spent that time, first curled upon the sofa, then wandering the house.

He would not have come out again except that his bond with her had also strongly suggested that he go make something for her, because she was awfully hungry.

Normally he would have simply called their house-elf Kira, but he wanted to conjure something up for her. It was one thing he could do for her, at least, and besides, he needed something to occupy his mind. Also, he was superb at conjuring.

Determined to forget Hermione, he had worked extraordinarily hard on the dinner, and results had paid off. Roast beef. Bouillabaisse, which he remembered she liked. Oriental noodles. It was, all in all, a very odd combination of dishes, especially when you combined that with an exotic Indian drink she enjoyed but he could never remember the name of…it started with ch, or maybe a t.

But then, she had always been odd. It was one of the things he loved about her.

She stood in the doorway, her coppery brown curls framing her peaky face. She looked exhausted, he thought, and made a mental note to give her some Dreamless Sleep potion if he had to.

Her eyes lit up as she took in the sight of the veritable feast in front of her, and she looked incredulously at Draco. "How did you know—I mean—how did you—this—this is everything I like!"

Ah. So her culinary tastes hadn't changed much since her Hogwarts days.

"I'm married to you, remember?" he said, his tone deliberately dry and light; he didn't think he could bear it if he made it serious, or worse, gentle.

Oh. Now the memory hits her. Her face contorts slightly in a moue of disgust before she remembers and hides it. Great. But even if her facial expression is masked—more or less, Slytherin that he is he can still see the faint trembling of her upper lip—he can feel the waves of resent and annoyance and disgust rolling off her through their bond.

"So glad to know you're disgusted, love," he muttered.

Her eyes widened. "How did you—?"

"Later," he said. "Eat. The food will get cold."

Dazedly, she sat down, and he followed suit. She started eating immediately, and he decided not to tell her that she normally prayed beforehand. She'd had enough shocks for one day.

When the meal was over, he clapped his hand, and Kira appeared, holding a bottle of wine and two glass cups. Immediately, Hermione's face fired up.

"You have a house elf?" she cried, dismay, outrage, and curiosity warring for predominance on her face.

Oh, yeah, right, she'd been all fanatic about freeing house elves in her Hogwarts days, some nonsense about VO.M.I.T. or P.U.K.E. or something like that anyway. Luckily, once she'd seen how much the house elves suffered when he freed them, she'd given it up—at least mostly. She'd been campaigning for laws of better treatment of house elves when she'd had that accident, and she had insisted that the one house elf they did have was not overworked.

"You agreed to it, as long as I treated her—her name's Kira—well and she got paid a Galleon a month."

She still looked mutinous, but subsided, probably so she could hear about how he had known her feelings. Unhurriedly—he loved her, but that didn't mean he couldn't tease her from time to time—he uncorked the bottle of wine, pausing to appreciate the wonderful smell that wafted from it. It was vintage champagne—only the best for a Malfoy—and he poured it gently into the glasses, then handed one to Hermione. She took it with a sour expression and leaned back into an attitude that clearly proclaimed, I'm waiting.

He took a sip and paused yet again, this time to savor the exquisite taste. Then, and only then, when she was near stamping with impatience, did he speak.

"Wizarding marriages are—different—from Muggle marriages," he finally said. From the corner of his eye, he saw her bristle as though it were an insult to her heritage, and really, from the way he had treated her at Hogwarts, who could blame her?

He continued, however, as though he had not seen it. "There are varying degrees of the strength of the bond that is formed when a wizard and a witch marries. We chose the strongest."

Yet again he felt a wave of disgust, and he forced his face to stay relaxed, though he dearly wished to just curl up and hide in a corner.

You are used to this, he reminded himself. This is what you face everyday at your work. The disgust of the Wizarding world over the name of Malfoy had not yet dissipated, despite the fact that Hermione Granger had married him and all the dedicated work he had done, both as an Auror and a Healer. Not to mention the fact that he was the youngest Potions Master in Britain for over a century.

The money given back had mainly been the work of Potter, and the Minister Shacklebolt, whom Potter had under his thumb.

But still, despite the taunts of those who had been the victims of his father, and the glares of those who believed he had Hermione under some sort of spell, it didn't really hurt that much—as long as he had Hermione's support.

Hermione's support.

Hermione's love. The one thing he had thought would never change, no matter what.

Go on, he told himself mentally. She's not herself. Get a damn grip!

"It created a sort of soul bond between us. I can sense whenever you are in danger, immediately and urgently. Over time, it coalesced and also grew. It climaxes when we—when we have sex," here she blushed, and he was pretty sure that under his mask, he was too, "and now I also have this vague undercurrent of where you are, what you're doing, and most importantly and most strongly, what you're feeling. I can't feel exactly what you're thinking per se, but I have a sort of emotion that emanates from you all the time. The more I concentrate, the more I can see."

When he finished his lecture, he could feel the disbelief, the outrage, the resentment, the panic, and, as always, the disgust, stronger than ever.

"Why can't I feel your emotions?" came the immediate demand.

"It is possible to block someone off," he said. "But I am not doing it," he hurried to add, as her eyes narrowed. "It is possible that since your amnesia has destroyed your love for me—" he was proud of himself as he managed to say it with a relatively steady tone—"the soul bond has blocked you off. Or perhaps you simply haven't noticed it yet. Try it, right now," he suggested. "Reach into yourself and do the normal procedure you do for controlling wandless magic."

"What?"

Right. She wouldn't have covered this in the sixth year of Hogwarts.

"Wandless magic is very imprecise and borderline uncontrolled," he said, thinking for one hilarious moment how much he sounded like Severus, "but can be, to some extent, tamed. You have to reach into yourself to find it, and delve into your inner core—"

He was interrupted by a snort. "You sound like Trelawney," she said derisively.

He closed his eyes and ran his hand through his hair. "It's not my fault," he said defensively. "I didn't make this up."

Her expression showed him that she clearly thought him capable of doing just that, just to be mean.

"Anyway, try clearing your mind of everything and trying to curl in on yourself. It helps if you breathe deeply. The technique's similar to that of Occlumency. Once you have control, however tenuous, over your wandless magic, then you can will something, say something to channel that power, and it should turn out more or less like that. It's rather unpredictable, though, so most people prefer to use wands. It's a lot stronger than the wand magic, so I prefer to use it more often. It's really a matter of willpower and choice."

He was straying off topic here.

"Anyway, try doing that and see if you can still contact the bond."

Her eyes fluttered shut, and her breathing slowed and evened. He waited patiently as her expression neutralized into the impossibly serene look of a person practicing Occlumency or wandless magic study.

He waited and waited and waited and waited, until he wondered whether she had fallen asleep. Just then, her eyes flew open, and she exclaimed, "I've done it!"

Her voice was filled with triumph and exultation, the happy satisfaction of a job well done, and he smiled at this the classic Hermione.

Then she gave a startled gasp as his emotions came pouring in. Draco cursed as he tried to pull back, but it was much too late. The flood of all his repressed love, frustration, pain, and unresolved tension came crushing in on her all at once, and she stood there with a dazed, incredulous look on her face.

The sound of his curse brought her back to herself, and after one amazed look, she fled.

"Shite!" the windows rattled as his magic lashed out at everything and anything. Before he could incinerate a portrait the way he had done last time he had lost control over his magic, or worse, burn the house down or something equally stupid, he chose the lesser evil and hurled the first thing that was handy—his half-empty wine glass—hard against the wall.

The glass shattered, drops of red flying in a half arc through the air as it made contact with the black and silver wall, shards of glass dropping to the carpet with stains of red, a noise like bells, and ironically, one of the more beautiful sounds he had heard that day, pervaded the air, as, as if in slow motion, the destruction proceeded. Draco thought it was one of the most delicate things he had ever seen, and, abstractedly, he marveled on the exquisiteness of it.

Then he lost all control and incinerated a portrait anyway.