Where the fuck is Harry?
You know where Draco and Hermione are. Off on a honeymoon, isn't that sweet? Who doesn't want to go to Paris and then the south of France? Drink in the cafes, sit on the beaches. So blue, that water. Azure. People tell you photographs don't do it justice, but you wouldn't know. Your grandmother isn't one to travel. British ways are best.
You might have liked a trip to the continent that year. Take some time off, see the world instead of getting all too acquainted with the stone floors of your school. Some parents did that. Took their kids and fled. Spared them. Not yours though. British ways are best, and you shouldn't complain about what it took to hone you into this.
Theo looks up from the paper. "Nice article in The Prophet," he says. "They sent a good photographer."
Of course they did.
"They get Harry?" you ask. Harry, who knows. Harry, who is an Auror. Harry, who is a complication.
"With his glass raised in a toast," Theo says. He sighs and puts the sheets down, pulls his feet off the box he's dragged in front of the chair. "How are you holding up?"
You smile. It's a ghastly thing, you know, because you don't lie to Theo. "I'm rich," you say. "Alive. That should mean something."
He snorts. "Let's bake."
It's not the sort of thing he does, and you almost scoff, but he's pulling bins of flour down, and oats, and melting a bar of chocolate and you join him. Measure. Stir. Level the salt. Pour it in. Mix. Chop. Melt. The batter goes in the pan, the pan goes in the oven, the biscuits are dipped in the chocolate.
"You're good at this," Theo says. You haven't spoken. Worked side by side in companionable silence, which he breaks as he lays one biscuit, half covered in chocolate, on the waxed paper to cool. You want to deny it. It's too much like potions. Too much like what you're not remotely good at, but the finished product doesn't lie. You bite into one, wincing when it's too hot still, but it's good.
Delicious, even.
"I learned how to cook from Potions," Theo says. He's not looking at you. Is he carefully not looking at you? How unlike Theo to be anything but direct. He's dipping another biscuit, holding it up to drip a bit back into the pan before setting it down. "I don't want to ever make another bone setting potion in my life, but all those measuring skills have to be good for something."
"He wasn't a total loss," you say. Snape, you mean.
"Shite personal hygiene though."
You laugh and a tiny bit of the despair – a tiny bit of the rage – dissipates.
But, really, where the fuck is Harry?
. . . . . . . . .
excerpt of a letter
… France is lovely. We've both been here before, of course. Malfoy more than once. His French is not very good, and he absolutely refuses to believe it isn't perfect, which is far too funny. We go into restaurants and he tries to speak French, and you can just see the staff sighing as they shift to English. I shouldn't laugh. I can't do more than ask for directions to the loo. Ou sont les toulettes. It's a handy phrase. That and thank you, which I just used when I picked up a batch of Calming Draughts. But, Harry. Please. I don't think subterfuge is one of your best skills. I know you claim that you've learned things being an Auror, but trying to infiltrate a Knights meeting is… I don't think it's going to go well. And I'm sure the Ministry isn't going to be pleased with you for going off on your own like that. We aren't in Hogwarts anymore…
. . . . . . . . . .
France was the same. France was horribly different than every other visit he'd ever made. Draco got up in the morning and stretched out the kinks and pains that worked their way under his skin thanks to sleeping on the couch of their honeymoon suite, then took a hot shower. He pretended not to see the calming draughts on the counter, sitting neatly next to Hermione's toothbrush. She showered next, and then it was breakfast. That meal, at least, they could order in. No need to look loving and happy and lost in one another over their yogurt.
Lunch was a different story. They took lunch in cafes, a different one every day. Hermione – thank God – had been to Paris before and didn't want to climb the Eiffel Tower or any other tourist thing. Draco had been dragged to every site in any guidebook by his parents because Narcissa had decided it was educational and broadening.
But Hermione turned out to be a very pleasant travelling companion. She had a bit of a tiresome yen to track down old bookstores, but most of them came with a nearby café, so it wasn't all bad. They'd apparate to a spot near The Abbey Bookshop (stifling – Draco waited outside because the books began to press in on him and it was hard to breathe) or The San Francisco Book Co. (also stifling) or Violette and Co., where they stumbled into a lecture on deportation issues. Draco wouldn't have thought Hermione's French good enough to follow the arguments – his certainly wasn't – but she insisted on staying, so he settled in next to her on an uncomfortable chair and pretended he understood what was being said. What he really did was admire her hair. She'd twisted it up into a simple knot, and several tendrils hung down around her ears, catching the light and bending it into a dozen shades of brown and wheat and gold.
When she caught him staring, she raised a nervous hand to her hair. "Did I get something caught?" she asked.
"No," he said. He reached out and tucked a single curl behind her ear. "It's fine."
He waited for her to flinch away from his touch. They came together at night in heated, furious sex that left him breathless and wrung out and unhappy in a way he hadn't known he could be, but affection was something they didn't do.
She didn't flinch, but she didn't smile either. She just turned her face back to the speaker and fastened her brown eyes on the woman's slender frame as she gesticulated and spoke passionately and quickly.
Afterward, Draco bought a copy of her book for Hermione.
Dinners were the most fraught. After a day spent wandering the streets and looking at trinkets spread out on blankets, they'd suddenly be alone again, trapped in a hotel room getting dressed for dinner. Her shoulders gleamed in the artificial light, her hands moved gracefully as she fastened jewels to her ears.
He loved her. He hated that he loved her. He was certain she despised him.
"You look beautiful," he would tell her every night. A truth.
"How convenient for you," she would reply, accioing a wrap. It got cool in the evenings.
Then dinner. The return stroll, hand in hand through some magical district. Look, it's the British Minister. So young. She's here on her honeymoon, haven't you heard. So pretty. I heard he was one of their terrorists. No, the son of one. Look at that hair. It's like silver. Love conquers everything.
I bet it's just political.
His French was good enough to follow the murmurs that followed them. The smiles that landed on Hermione. The frowns he got. And then, they'd go back to the hotel and have sex.
Her nails on his back.
His name on her lips.
Draco.
Draco.
Draco.
. . . . . . . . . .
They went to Villefranche after Paris. A little village, supported by cruise ships and fishermen and a language school. Enough tourists there were hotels. Few enough the place felt at least a little real. It was a place his mother liked, away from the peasants that clogged the streets and restaurants in Paris.
It was a place he liked, liked well enough to fall asleep, stretched out on the sofa the honeymoon suite boasted, his shuttered eyes facing the lights of the boats sitting silent and still on the deep bay.
One of the boats began to slowly pull toward the docks, the light getting larger and larger. Draco shoved his hair back over his forehead and glared at the brightness. "How am I supposed to sleep with this?" he complained. He hated to shut the curtains, but he pulled himself up to drag the heavy draperies closed and he was there. Standing on the balcony. You could have breakfast on it, the concierge had said when they checked in. It's a lovely view.
Vincent Crabbe. Standing there. His face burned, his eyes as bright as the ship on the bay. As bright as fire. "You left me," he said. "You left me and married that whore."
Draco took a step back into the room. Shadows blocked the light; Death Eater after Death Eater were flying toward him on their brooms, skimming back and forth across the light beam.
"You don't get to just quit," Vincent said. "This isn't something you can walk away from." His jaw moved, bits of burned skin and flesh breaking off and falling down, falling off the balcony, falling like Dumbledore from the Astronomy Tower, and the Death Eaters were coming on their broomsticks.
And one flying without.
Draco screamed.
And one of them was touching his face. One of them had a cool hand against his skin, and then was shaking him and calling his name, and his eyes flew open.
Hermione knelt by the couch, her curls tied back from her face with a simple scarf, worry in her brown eyes. "You were screaming," she said.
Draco looked out at the bay, not wanting to see her pity, since pity was what he was sure he would find. The steady lights of the boats sat still, none excessively large, none coming nearer. "It's fine."
Her hand, which had moved from his cheek to his shoulder, tightened. "It's clearly not," she said. "Tell me?"
The words were an invitation he hadn't expected, and Draco let out a shuddering breath. They didn't do affection. They didn't do intimacy. Only sex. Only pretending. Still, he could hardly refuse to answer her. "I have nightmares," he said. "Everyone does."
"Yeah," she agreed. She accioed one of the chairs over wandlessly, and he spared a moment to admire the magical skill behind that. She'd been practicing.
"Nice," he said. No need to pretend that wasn't impressive.
Even in the dim light that came through the window, he could tell she flushed at that. "I didn't want you to be able to do something I couldn't," she admitted. "Maybe not the best reason to learn something, but…"
He laughed. That was honest of her.
"I dream about the horcrux," she said in a low voice. "We had to wear it, you know, or thought we did." She settled onto the chair, and for a moment his shoulder felt cold and empty where her palm had been, but then she pressed her hand against him once again. "It whispered to you, all your worst fears. You can't imagine what having a piece of his soul telling you things was like."
"I can guess," Draco said grimly. He had a fairly intimate acquaintance with how mad Voldemort had been. How cruel. He wanted to fold the woman next to him into his arms. Wanted to hold her until all that fear drained away. He couldn't, of course. She'd shove him away. He settled for placing one hand oh-so-cautiously on top of hers.
"Harry seemed to do okay," Hermione went on. "It did terrible things to Ron. He couldn't bear it, he ended up—" Then she stopped.
"What?"
"He just broke for a bit," Hermione said. "That's all."
"Everyone does." Everyone, he thought, except the woman sitting next to him. "What did it tell you?" He forced what had to be a ghastly smile to his face. "That you'd only get the second highest marks in Runes?"
Her laugh wasn't the funny sort. "That people only kept me around because I was useful," she said. "That no one really liked me or wanted me there."
That was a stab in the heart. Without conscious thought, Draco grabbed the hand he was touching. "I do," he said.
That bitter laugh again. "Sure."
She moved to pull her hand away, and he held it tighter. "Look," he said. "I was a shite, and I'm sorry, but why would you want me? You can't blame me for thinking that was," he paused and searched for a word that would describe how no one could be stupid enough to want him, the failed Death Eater, the shoe licker. He settled on the wholly unsatisfactory, "unlikely," which came out in a choked whisper.
There was a long, painful pause. Pansy would have filled the gap with something pithy, if she wanted to be mean, or light, if she wanted to avoid the subject. Theo would have made a crass observation. His mother would have waited.
Draco waited.
"Well," she said at last, "I did marry you."
He leveled a long look at her, and she screwed up her face. "I could have outsmarted your mother if I'd cared too."
Draco raised his brows.
"I could have told her that you were an accessory to murder, so if they decided to take me down, I was taking you down with me."
That, Draco had to admit, was not the worst point.
"And I wore that lingerie," Hermione said, and a hint of discomfort crept into her voice. "On our wedding."
"And that bathrobe."
"I was nervous," she said, almost snapping his head off with the words before she drew back a little. "You don't think I'm so incompetent I couldn't manage to find underwear more comfortable than that was, do you?"
Draco spared a thought for the myriad of things she'd worn over the course of their honeymoon. It hadn't occurred to him until this moment, but now that she'd drawn his attention to it, he had to admit that none of them seem to have been selected with comfort as their primary objective. Little bits of silk and lace and satin that –
"Wait," he said. "Even after I – ." He'd accused her of something horrendous. Never mind he had good reasons to be scared of just that thing. Never mind he knew she was damn good at it.
She should be. He'd taught her.
He took a hand and laid it across her forehead. "Are you sure wearing that horcrux didn't do something to your brain?"
"Probably the same thing being locked up with the Carrows did to yours," she said tartly, and then, somehow, improbably, they were kissing. Her mouth was on his and this time it was sweet. This time he wasn't biting at her lip, half in a rage, half to shove away whatever sort of intimacy kissing tried to start.
They were kissing, and then they were on the bed, and Draco had a good feeling he wasn't going to wake up with a sore neck from sleeping on the couch any longer.
After he'd determined she was wearing knickers that hadn't been chosen for practicality – and duly admired them and what they contained at some length – they lay on the bed. "You're still an arse," she said.
Draco had to admit this was the case.
"And this is not going to be easy."
"God," he said. "You make it sound like having to write a four-foot essay."
"That would be easier."
"For Divination."
She hit him, but the blow wasn't very hard, and probably counted more as 'teasing' or 'exasperated.' At least Draco hoped it did. He tucked an arm around her and pulled her against him. "You're a pain in the arse," he said.
"I wonder what Harry's doing," she said, as if to prove his point.
"I don't care," he said, somewhat sourly, and they fell asleep like that. Not blissful, maybe, but not at war either.
Draco would take it.
. . . . . . . . . .
Harry, naturally, was getting into trouble. He's hard to kill, though, so it's sure to be fine.
. . . . . . . . . .
A/N - Thank you to the marvelous OlivieBlake for beta reading, and to all of you for giving me your eyes.
I keep them in a jar.
