This work is complete at 31 chapters and ~127,000 words. I'll be submitting a chapter a day through March until it's all up.


Chapter 17: No Consolation

Since Draco didn't take much time to end things with Pansy, he suspected he might hear from Dagmar before four o'clock. When that came and went, he revisited the idea and figured that since both Dagmar and Blaise were talkers they might have taken the opportunity to hash everything out.

Five and then six o'clock passed. Draco started to feel on edge since Florean Fortescue's wasn't open past five. Six o'clock passing was more than enough time for Dagmar to have gotten home and sent him an owl.

What did it mean? Draco reread Dagmar's letters from earlier that day, and while she wasn't exactly looking forward to having that conversation with Blaise, she wasn't particularly in a bad mood beforehand as far as Draco could tell.

So what was taking so long? Did she still talk to Blaise? What did they even have to discuss beyond saying farewell? Did Blaise take the opportunity to try and get them back on track?

Draco tried his best not to fixate on that. Blaise was a proud person. He wouldn't take well being left the way he was, and even if he didn't have a very deep relationship with Dagmar he might still try to hold onto that. Did the delay mean that Dagmar might be entertaining the idea?

Draco and Dagmar hadn't invested much time into their relationship, but the thought of it ending so soon still left Draco queasy. He'd promised to wait until Dagmar sent him an owl. As seven o'clock passed, he came close to breaking that. He was in the middle of writing a short letter when Ulysses landed on his balcony railing.

He untied the short note:

Sorry for the late response. I don't think it went so well. We'll talk about it tomorrow?

Draco couldn't derive a whole lot from that. They were at least still on to see each other before Dagmar left for Nice.

He only wished she would elaborate more on what happened. Draco was ready to go by ten o'clock the next morning, and the two hours until he was due to head over through the fireplace passed almost slower than the entire night.

Dagmar sat on a couch in her manor's great room when Draco arrived. She rose when she saw him. It was a tight smile, but she smiled nonetheless. Draco finally felt some relief from his nerves when Dagmar kissed his cheek on the way to coming in for a hug.

"Good to see you," she said. "Let's go up to my room."

Draco had never been to the second floor at her place. He followed her through to the foyer and upstairs. She'd left one of the double doors leading into her room open, and closed it behind Draco. The bed hadn't been made yet. The attached sitting room, separated from the bedroom by a step-up, looked like about the only part of the room she'd bothered with lately. Her desk was burdened down with two piles of parchment, one fresh and the other Draco was sure were his letters.

He took a seat on the couch she invited him toward with a gesture. It didn't make him feel all that much better when she opted to sit in the chair against the other wall in the corner. She sat close enough to the window to catch the edge of the cross-breeze.

"Doing all right?" Draco asked.

Dagmar shrugged. "Feel like dragon dung, but other than that I think I'm okay."

"So what happened?"

"Not a whole lot. We talked, he got kinda angry, I suggested I just leave because our conversation clearly wasn't going to go anywhere." Dagmar played with the drawstring on her cotton shorts. "I figured that since we never really had chemistry beyond what friends would that he would be interested in staying that way, but now I'm not so sure. I feel really bad. I hurt him and now he might not want anything to do with me at all."

"Does that mean he cared more than that about you after all, or. . .?"

This wasn't good news for Draco either, who may have just lost one of his last two mates at school. The only one left from his year was Theodore, and even that was iffy.

"I don't think so." Dagmar sighed. "I don't get it. Maybe I hurt his pride more than his feelings."

"That's possible."

"I just don't feel good about it. I thought he would understand."

"He probably does," Draco reassured her. "Just give him some time. It's not like you went out of your way to hurt him, right?"

"No. Our relationship ended as passively as it began," Dagmar said. "I told him there was absolutely nothing wrong with him personally, that we just didn't have that spark, but that I would be interested in carrying on as we did before. We just wouldn't wind up married was the only difference."

Draco could see how that would hurt Blaise's pride. What Dagmar offered made complete sense, but it was also an open acknowledgement that Dagmar never saw him as a potential for a romantic partner. Blaise would take a peripheral role in Dagmar's life while she prioritized another man.

"I'd just give him some time," Draco repeated. "Maybe the summer, to mull it over."

"Ja." Dagmar leaned her head back against the chair. "That's what I was thinking. The whole point of seeing him before we headed back to Hogwarts was to make sure September wasn't awkward. So much for that."

"You did your best." Draco shrugged. "It's like when I told you about the change in arrangements. I had time to think it over and adjust, but you needed some too."

Dagmar nodded, eyeing him with pressed lips.

"I think I need time again," she said. "You wouldn't take that personally, right? It just hit me last night how much my life changed in the last month. It's really overwhelming all of a sudden."

Draco deflated inside. "How long?"

"Maybe just while I'm gone to Nice?" Dagmar replied. "We'll be gone until the sixteenth or seventeenth."

"So no contact or anything? Not even letters?"

"Hold on."

Dagmar got up from her chair and headed over to the sitting room. She came back with a bound notebook and dropped down beside him.

"I bought a pair of these in Diagon Alley yesterday," she explained. "They're messengers. You write something in one copy and it appears instantaneously in the other. I thought they'd be handy while I was away so that we didn't have to push our poor owls to their limit. Plus, no delays. And we could use them when we go back to school too."

Draco flipped through the pages. "How do they work?"

"I'll show you."

This at least seemed to cheer Dagmar up. She headed back over to her desk and took a seat, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. It turned white in the sunshine. Draco stared, blinking when she looked back over at him.

"See, now look at your first page," she said.

Draco opened the notebook again. He couldn't help but smile at the little heart she'd drawn. Dagmar headed back over with her quill, ink well, and notebook in hand.

"I was playing with them a bit this morning," she told him. "You can save messages, and the messages will stick around anyway until you dismiss them." Dagmar drew a second heart in her notebook, which appeared in Draco's after she underlined it. "That passes it along. Put a line through it to erase—" the first heart disappeared, "and circle to save."

Dagmar showed Draco where it had been redirected to the bottom of the very last page.

"Brilliant," Draco said. "Distance doesn't affect it?"

"The ad didn't say anything about that. They weren't cheap so it better not." Dagmar chuckled. "We'll find out when I get to Nice. Once I get settled in there, I'll send you a test message. If you don't hear from me by the end of the day, you'll know it can't reach that far. I'll know too if you don't reply."

"Right." Draco hesitated to bring them back around to the conversation they'd been having. "This all depends too on how much contact you want."

Dagmar's careless expression indeed flickered back toward the stress she'd shown when Draco first arrived. "I'll probably be busy most of the day, going out and about. I definitely don't want to go the entire three weeks without talking to you."

"That doesn't really narrow it down."

"I don't know, we could aim for the evenings?"

Draco wished he didn't feel annoyed by this. The last thing Dagmar probably needed after her conversation with Blaise yesterday was for him to get on her case too. Draco couldn't just ignore that he was being shut out, though. Dagmar had to understand that. She'd gone quiet, running her fingers mindlessly over the edge of her notebook.

"I don't really get what's going on," Draco said. "I don't know you well enough yet to put in the guesswork either. I'd appreciate it if you were a little more forthcoming than this."

Dagmar shrugged. "I'm just feeling really overwhelmed by everything and I want some time to think."

"Think about what?"

"I don't know, just everything." Dagmar threw a hand up in the air. "Like I said, everything just hit me last night. All of this is new, and ending things with Blaise made it real."

"You mean us?" That was what Draco feared, and he didn't like that it took so much work to drag an answer out. "You're not rethinking it, are you?"

"No," Dagmar answered. To Draco's relief, she finally met his gaze. "It's all just a lot at once. You and I are getting on way better than I ever thought we could, and that's been overwhelming enough all on its own. It's new to me. I've never experienced that, certainly not with Blaise, which should've been the ideal circumstance for it to happen. I wanted it to happen with him for five years, and suddenly that's gone. I have to say goodbye to that, to everything that we had planned, and it doesn't really seem to matter that I'm just as excited about everything you and I have talked about. It's just a weird place to be, and I have a lot of weird feelings because of it. This is real. We're really doing this."

Draco idly nodded, for he wasn't exactly sure what to say. He hadn't even done anything to make her feel like this, at least not directly. It didn't leave him feeling too optimistic that he could do anything to fix it either.

"I just need time to really absorb it," Dagmar said. "It's nothing against you and it's not like I'm thinking about going back on everything. We've had a good chance to see how this would work out between us, and for all I've felt and experienced in three weeks to amount to more than five years with someone else is just mental. I didn't know it could be like this."

The ghost of a smirk pulled at Draco's cheek as he studied her. "So it's so good I'm scaring you off?"

"No." Dagmar's gaze darted off again though, and she pursed her lips. "Well, maybe."

How absolutely frazzled she was endeared Draco. He took her hand, not surprised it was clammy. Dagmar chuckled, embarrassed, and removed it long enough from his grasp so that she could wipe it on her shorts. She took the opportunity to shift closer to him on the couch.

"I'm sorry I'm such a mess," she said. "I'm probably not making a lot of sense either because my thoughts are everywhere. You get I'm not having doubts, right?"

"I think so." Draco still wasn't entirely sure how he felt. "I don't really want to be away from you at all, so I'm having a hard time imagining wanting space."

"I was too until last night," Dagmar replied. "I would like some time to properly. . .well, mourn might be a strong word, but I don't think I can focus as well on this when I'm still getting over everything with Blaise. Have you really had much of a chance to do that about Pansy?"

"Sort of." Draco shrugged. "I have been since the beginning of summer. Haven't you, ever since you found out?"

"Not really, I'm realizing." Dagmar played with Draco's fingers. "Doesn't it feel different since you properly ended things?"

"Yeah," Draco easily admitted. "Definitely like there's no going back now."

"Doesn't that scare you a little?" Dagmar asked. "I mean, really look at me and think about who we were to each other a month ago. Was I anything at all to you?"

Draco freshly studied her, from the way her wavy hair fell back over her shoulders, to the eyelash sitting on the side of her nose, to the faint freckles that showed up now that she'd gotten some sun this summer. She was hard to reconcile to that obscure girl that happened to share a dorm with Pansy. Draco never understood her, why she was even a Slytherin when she would probably fit better in any other Hogwarts house. She used to annoy Draco with her lenience toward non-purebloods for friends.

"I guess not really," he said. "I didn't get you at all, and I didn't have any reason to even try to."

Rather than offended, Dagmar looked relieved that he could follow her line of thinking.

"Isn't it just a little mental how quickly things can change?" she asked. "Do you trust that change?"

"I'd like to think I do," Draco replied.

"I'd like to think that too," Dagmar said. "It's all been well and good, but we don't have time to back it up. We just went through a very intense period of getting to know each other. We could stand to let things settle for a while and then see how we feel. Right? I think it's hard to tell what's real when things are that sudden and intense. I was also in a weird headspace at the beginning of summer because of our manor being raided and now that that's over, I want a chance to feel for myself what's going on."

Draco tilted his head as he considered her. "Are you sure you're not having doubts?"

"Not about the arrangement."

"Still sounds like you have doubts about me, though." Draco's stomach sunk to have finally brought what Dagmar was trying to say out into the light.

"I don't know." Dagmar was having a hard time meeting his gaze again. "But that's the thing, I want to be sure. I've really enjoyed this time with you. Something happened here that made it plain to me I was waiting for something from Blaise I was never going to get. This is what I want. It scares me a little how vulnerable that makes me with someone that was a near-stranger just a month ago."

"Me too," Draco said. "But I wouldn't think space is the answer."

"I have more reasons than just that to take a step back for a little while," Dagmar replied. "If I wanted complete space, I wouldn't have given you your messenger until I got back. I still want to talk to you."

This conversation had gone in so many circles and taken so many leaps around that Draco was having a hard time keeping it all straight. Dagmar didn't lie when she said that her thoughts were everywhere.

There was only one thing Draco could really say: "Okay."

He couldn't bring himself to squeeze back when Dagmar's hand tightened on his. Looking at her grew difficult too, but at least she'd stopped talking.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Draco nodded.

She didn't have anything to go off from that, so the bedroom fell into silence. Some parchment fluttered on Dagmar's desk as the breeze coming through picked up.

"Maybe I'll go home, then," Draco said. "I think you've made your point and I'd hate to impose."

"You don't have to—"

"I'd rather."

Dagmar stood up after him, tailing Draco toward her bedroom door. "I'll at least show you to the fireplace—"

Draco stopped and turned in his step. Dagmar almost walked into him. "I know where it is."

Through his annoyance and stinging pride, Draco still managed to feel bad when Dagmar's eyes started to glisten. With it came exasperation.

"Why are you even upset?" he asked. "Isn't this what you just spent the last hour telling me you want?"

"I don't even really know what I want."

"Believe me, you've made that right clear."

Her lip quivered.

"Have your space," Draco told her. "I wouldn't mind some either at the moment, come to think."

Draco couldn't look back at her when he left the room. He wouldn't be strong enough to walk away if he saw the hurt again in those big blue eyes. At this point it was pretty much a matter of principle. Draco had his limits too, and if Dagmar didn't know what she wanted then Draco wouldn't tolerate being yanked around like that. They'd promised to keep honest through all this. Dagmar wasn't holding her end up on it. Was that really her fault, though? She came off as confused, but either didn't or couldn't explicitly say that was the problem.

Coming away from that, Draco could see the benefits of Dagmar taking space. She definitely needed to sort herself out. There remained a sting of fear in the back of his mind that Dagmar might decide she couldn't do this after all. How could Draco trust her to speak the truth about that when she could turn so quickly from happy to unbalanced?