Title: Stars, Hide Your Fires
Author: Aristide Cauquemaire
Pairing: HP/DM
Rating: M for grown-up language, some hotness and a sh*tload of drama
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Once more, Happy New Year, y'all!
There's language in this chapter. I formally apologize in advance to all those who speak French. Please don't hesitate to correct the two quasi-French sentences you will encounter near the end of this chapter.
Oh, and some... does it qualify as violence? Anyway, this chapter ends in pain. It also concludes the first half of this story.
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-/Chapter 10/-
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"Milly, bring me- bring me the aspirin from the cabinet in the bathroom, a bottle of Firewhiskey – any bottle will do – and some cigarettes. I know Astoria had some in the drawing room, for emergencies."
His house-elf vanishes with a bow and a worried if thankfully wordless glance which Draco disregards. He hurries through his house – that big empty mausoleum of his – towards his wife's sanctuary. He isn't quite sure yet what he will do when he gets there, but he already has his wand in his hand.
The doors are locked and spelt shut, but the manor knows that he is the heir, so they can't really hold him back.
A gust of wind hits him in the face when he steps into the rooms that have been – not exactly off limits, but something similar – for almost ten years.
Astoria has spent almost two thirds of her every day here for a decade, yet she hasn't left a single trace.
The rooms are empty. The wardrobes, closets, cupboards are open and gape at him, hollow and with their drawers half-open. The bookshelves are naked. The bed is bare, there are no sheets on it. No pictures on the walls, no vases with flowers on the desk. The chair has been pushed under the table as far as it goes as if it were staunchly refusing to have anyone sit on it ever again. The windows are wide open, letting the wind and rain in. There are puddles on the sills and on the floor, dotted with leaves and dirt from outside.
He doesn't know why he is surprised. He doesn't know why he feels so lost, either, now, of all moments. Not half a day ago, his wife has stood before him and told him that she would file for divorce. Two hours ago he has learned that she has had a contract with his therapist all this time, spying on him spilling his secrets. He hadn't felt lost then. But he does now.
Maybe the sight of these rooms is the last thing he needed to actually grasp what is happening, and that it is happening to him. Seeing is believing. He is as abandoned as these quarters.
When he comes to his senses next, he is on the way to the portrait hall. He flings open the doors and the torches flare up with a whoosh to illuminate the huge room with the covered windows. A murmur rises up from the portraits he just roused from their long slumber.
"Mother!" he calls and steps toward his parents' painting. Narcissa is sitting in her decorative portrait chair with the painfully slender legs, eternally looking like a thirty-five years old porcelain doll. Lucius' hand is firmly resting on her slim shoulder as he is standing behind her, towering above in the picture as he had in life.
"Draco," she acknowledges him thinly. "How nice of you to come visit. How are you? You look tired."
"I don't have time. I need the Conubium spell."
"Oh."
The way she doesn't seem troubled or astonished by this at all tells him that Astoria has been to the portrait hall not too long ago.
"Misplaced your spouse, have you, son?" Lucius' canvas eyes flash at him coldly.
"The spell, mother. You know it is my right," he speaks through gritted teeth and firmly ignores his father. His voice cuts through the papery rustle of whispered or more overt comments from the neighbouring images that cover all the walls. "But Draco, you must understand, such a spell is not something to be trifled with. Astoria might-"
"Don't you dare use that spell-" Elvira Greengrass' high-pitched voice rings out from the next frame.
Draco doesn't even let Astoria's unbearable paternal grandmother finish, and he doesn't so much as turn his head as he hurls an incendio her way. The shrieks and gasps drown in the satisfying crackling of the flame.
"The Conubium spell, mother. Now."
Acrid smoke is rapidly fills up the hall, rising to the ceiling in a dark-grey pillar and then billowing down like angry storm clouds when he finally gets what he came for.
Milly appears just in time for him to light his cigarette on the conflagration. He knows this moment will be the last – if ultimately meaningless and empty – victory for some time to come.
The spell his mother reluctantly imparted to him is designed to summon the spouse to the caster. Since the dawn of time, every pure-blooded wizards' prenuptial agreement contained the validation of this certain spell, Draco remembers learning from his father one time. "It's a time-honoured tradition", Lucius answered his question about the reasons once, as if that explained anything. Back then, Draco hadn't called his words into question. Ever.
Draco also remembers that saying the spell backwards will yield the reverse result and connect him with his 'misplaced spouse' instantaneously, no matter where she is. This is exactly what he is going for as he incants it in exact reverse order.
/
The strength of the pull of magic is truly frightening, and then almost painful, but he knows that this is the only way. It wouldn't do to pull her onto his turf, into his manor, to face her. It would only make her close up, and he is determined to get answers. In all the chaos, he desperately needs them, as something he might hold on to.
He reappears in what he immediately recognizes as the Greengrass' summer villa in Calais. The curlicues of white marble ornamenting the window sills and ceiling had been stuck in his head since the day he and Astoria had – and isn't this just painfully ironic – signed their premarital agreements and said their formal oaths in this very bureau twelve years before.
He turns around and finds himself standing right behind his soon-to-be ex-wife who is just busy looking over some papers on the same large mahogany desk that had been there at their wedding, her bony back to him, oblivious to his presence. Yet.
"Is that the contract you made with Boothe?" he asks and watches was some gratification as Astoria flinches, screams shrilly and jumps up so quickly that her chair falls over.
"Answer me," he demands. His wand is in his hand although he doesn't remember drawing it. "Is that the contract you made with them to find a reason to divorce me? Is it?" Suddenly, he feels like yelling, and there is no one there to stop him. "Is it?!"
"Get the hell away from me!" Astoria hysterically yells back at him.
There are sounds outside the door now. Draco flicks his wand toward it backhandedly and the bolts slide shut with heavy noises.
"It was all part of the plan, wasn't it?" he hisses into the clangs of the door locking. "It was from the very beginning."
Maybe it's just the anger and adrenaline fuelling his brain. Maybe it's the dull thumps from outside telling him that time would be short and that this might be the only fifteen seconds in which he would ever have the chance to get explanations. Or perhaps he had subconsciously put it all together ever since he had woken up on that Friday evening after that nap in the back of the shop, when he could've sworn he had heard someone telling him that he wasn't worthless.
"Your sister introduced me to Boothe only for that reason. Didn't she? She and you, you had this planned all along." He remembers that day for the wonderful cake Diana made, the blue horse with the rainbow mane. He remembers Daphne telling him that Astoria had hinted at him being ill – scolds himself for not knowing right then and there – and telling him that they'll give him a rebate at Boothe's shop. He remembers Daphne saying ' They're more discreet than the other health care professionals' and 'My sister may not be the most considerate person alive' and almost wants to laugh.
"You were only ever searching for a way to break the affiance unevenly, so I would come away empty-handed. Isn't that right? Well, isn't it?!"
At some point he has stepped so close to her – to use those two inches of height he has on her, and to make her feel the wrath radiating off of him, and to make her afraid of him, oh yes, even if it is low – that she can seize the wand that isn't as securely in his hand as it should be. With that moment of surprise and the extra force she can draw from her fear and her own anger, she pulls it out of his palm and suddenly she is pointing his own wand at him. Right at his throat.
Silence falls as he staggers back half a step, shaking. There is fire in her eyes that he has never seen, even though he faintly remembers wishing he could make her look at him like that just once, long ago. But that fire also makes her strangely and unspeakably ugly, bitter, and cruel. She is panting after their short fight.
"You... you repulsive little toad," she bites off the words. Her mouth is quivering. Her face is a grimace of disgust. "As if you had any idea."
Two more thumbs at the door, and a muffled voice. A male voice calling French words. Probably Christophe, Astoria's second cousin's husband. Draco faintly wonders what he would say if he knew that he had recently burnt down his ancestors' portraits.
He wants to scream 'Then tell me! Come on!', but he knows she will do it without any more incentive. Twelve years of frustration and disappointment, neatly bottled up and stacked behind a smokescreen of the gentle spouse and perfect mother, are breaking through inevitably, he can see it.
"As if you knew what it was like to be your wife, you passionless, empty-eyed, lying piece of Death Eater scum," she finally manages through her trembling rage. The wand is still pointing at his throat. "To carry that filthy name around with me – When I married you, I thought it was worth it. Boy, was I wrong."
Ah, the Death Eater accusation. She had used it only twice before, during two fights they had just before Scorpius was born. Back then, she had blamed the hormones, and then never used the term again in ten years of matrimony.
"You lured me in with your grand mansion and the promises of security and then you never gave a damn about me, you never even looked at me after Scorpius was born. All you ever wanted was a little substitute-Draco, someone to secure your damn bloodline for you, someone you could heap all the expectations on that your fascist swine of a father dumped on you when you were young."
Draco sets his jaw and pushes the words down that boil inside of his chest. Of all the crimes she could accuse him of, being a bad father and doing wrong by his son was the one that truly hurt. And she knows it.
"I've wasted years in the tomb you forced me into, look at me, look at what you made me." Her face is shiny with perspiration and blotchy now, and she is trembling with suppressed rage. "Eternally parvenu, faded trophy wife of some miserable, half-broke wannabe potion master, seller of anti-rheumatics and cellulite tinctures. Twelve years. I was going insane," she almost grunts and actually pokes him with his own wand. "You ruined everything I could've been. Everything."
There is a shout from outside the door. Christophe has apparently started hurling spells at it to get it open.
"The only two redeeming qualities you ever had was that you severed all ties with your Death Eater friends, and that you could keep it in your pants," she suddenly pipes up and sounds like a lunatic. "So imagine my surprise when your bloody shop is reprimanded twice for dealing in shady herbs and potions to shady people – such as your good old friend Theodore Nott. Did you know he actually mentioned you in his hearing yesterday?"
He does not know. He doesn't even have a clue what this might be about. The going-ons of the outside world have been beyond his grasp for quite some time. But Astoria doesn't stop to explain.
"So that's one quality down, one to go. You see, apparently I am the object of much envy and accolades as the only woman of repute whose husband hasn't slept with every Knockturn floozy yet. Goodness gracious, how wonderful!" She swings the wand around in her hand. It trails little bursts of blood-red fireworks that die very quickly but smell intensely of sulphur.
"I wonder what they would say," she continues theatrically, "if they knew that this wonderful husband hasn't so much as touched me in a decade, but tosses off every. Single. Morning. And then leaves his spunk on his sheets for his house-elf to find, so often that that simple creature gets so worried about master's bodily functions she eventually comes to ask me about it."
Shame and irritation make an odd couple. Draco feels face go hot. He must have missed some. Too tired, too much in a hurry. "And you didn't mean for me to know about that, by that look on your face. How quaint," Astoria comments his grimace with a gleeful, condescending sneer.
He briefly considers commenting, trying to defend himself, but then sees that it is pointless. Astoria's eyes are wide and slightly mad.
"I thought you had met a woman. Some barely legal whore who had driven you into mid-life crisis," she now snarls, her lips quivering again. "Or that that slut of a counsellor would've managed to fuck you by now, like she said you would the second you got the chance, especially after you practically jumped to sign your contract with her like a trained, drooling little dog. Either would have been repugnant and pathetic enough already. And more than enough for me to get away from you, and with my son. Forever."
She lifts the wand a fraction further so that it is pointing directly at his face now.
"Instead, I have to find out that I was married all this time to a disgusting little bender who wants to be sodomized by Harry Potter, of all people."
As she starts sniggering without any joy whatsoever and explains, "I needn't have worried at all about the question of custody, they'd never let a vile pervert like you near Scorpius ever again," he lunges at her.
Suddenly all his worries about being rubbish at close combat are gone. He yanks at her hand until his wand slips from her grasp and clatters to the floor.
The other hand finds its way to her throat.
His mouth is open and his teeth are bared, to mirror her expression.
"You will not take my son away from me!" A voice that he hadn't known he had inside of him is screaming at her.
Her fingers claw at his face. Her index finger catches the thin skin under his eye and leaves a hot scratch.
Then suddenly the universe explodes in pain from multiple angles. Some sort of spell hits him in the centre of his back, and it feels as if it dislocates a pair of disks with one mighty jerk. As he petrifies in agony, Astoria uses the break and knees him in the groin. Hard.
Tears of pain are streaming sideways down his face and out of his nose. The world is askew and pulsating red and black. He is lying on the floor.
"Bon sang, qu'est-ce qui se passe?" he hears a deep voice above. "Astoria, que fais-tu? Qu'est-ce qu'il fout ici?" and her answering, "Putain de merde, ce pédé m'a assailli. Fuck!"
She keeps swearing in French for a while but the deafening roar of blood in his head and the stamping of their feet on the wooden floor so near to his ear drown out most of it.
He doesn't know how long he is lying there, or what they are talking. All he can think of is how, in two months, when the Hogwarts term is over, he will be standing at platform 9¾, not with all the other parents, but a little at the back and to the side. He will catch a short glimpse of a blond head as Scorpius jumps off the train, but although his son is taller now than he was before, he isn't nearly tall enough to not be swallowed by the crowd immediately.
When the crowd disperses, though, he is gone.
Draco imagines his son being glad, relieved that they haven't met, because now he knows, he knows. Everyone's talking about it, and Scorpius wishes he could make everyone forget his last name.
He thinks of six years worth of glimpses of blond hair and letters that become shorter, rarer and ever more estranged, until the booming quiet of his manor's empty halls reverberates deep in his stomach, until it hurts.
Christophe grabs him by the shoulder and turns him onto his back, wordlessly folds a brass-coloured candle holder into his palm and tucks his wand into his right pant pocket.
"Va te faire foutre, eh?" he says and slaps his cheek twice like an old buddy. "Salaud."
Before he can even arrange his thoughts enough to answer, the portkey in his hand activates and pulls behind his navel.
The dirty rain water from the puddle in Astoria's now empty quarters slowly soaks his shirt and his hair. The candle holder rolls out of his limp hand and over the boarded floor, out of his reach.
He lies there with his body and his heart aching for uncounted minutes and contemplates not getting up, ever.
/ TBC