May
tick tock tick tock
Draco tried his best to ignore the stares. They could be worse, he told himself. Theo seemed resigned. Hermione, entirely unfazed.
With six years separating them from the war, and four from his house arrest, the frequency of suspicious or hateful looks sent his way had decreased, just as his skill at ignoring them grew from practice.
However, Draco always felt more visible than usual with Theo at his side, and even more so with Hermione. Though, she'd disappeared somewhere in the antique shop as she monopolized the shopkeeper's time with an unending stream of questions about the history of each piece she found even remotely interesting.
Theo hadn't spoken for several minutes, bent over a box of antique keys, pulling what felt like every last one out for a careful, obsessive evaluation before it either went back into the box or earned a place among the others lining the floor beside him. Draco tilted his head as he watched, opting to ignore that a woman had turned the corner, eyes caught on Draco's frustratingly identifiable white-blond hair, and immediately retreated.
Draco counted another sixty seconds in his head before he gave into the impulse to crane his neck, needing a better look at Theo. With Hermione around, Theo had seemed almost normal, but now that she'd busied herself with rare wand wood antiques, he'd slipped into another mood entirely, cloud cover dulling his usual shine. He'd been off for months, since that conversation at Draco's housewarming get-together in January that—despite occasional, unsuccessful attempts on Draco's behalf to rehash—they'd never fully revisited.
Draco saw Theo's shift manifesting in subtle things: strained smiles, bags beneath his eyes, an inability (or perhaps a disinterest) in bending every room he entered to his charismatic will.
It unsettled Draco. Such a subtle shift, he doubted anyone outside of himself or Blaise had even noticed. Hermione only brought it up recently because it had started affecting her impeccable scheduling techniques.
"Hermione mentioned you haven't wanted to do any boyfriend trawling lately?"
Theo held up a huge, ornate silver key for inspection. His eyes narrowed, mouth twitched, before he dropped it back into the box.
"Not really," he said without so much as sparing Draco a second glance.
"You—you haven't done much with her recently?" It sounded like a question. Draco thought he meant it as a question. But he wasn't sure what the question actually was. Worse, he wondered if it sounded more like an accusation.
"I don't want a boyfriend right now."
Draco nodded. But as Theo continued staring at the bronze key currently under his inspection, the motion had been entirely pointless. Draco grappled for another topic, for something he could say. He didn't have the first idea what criteria Theo searched for in the antique keys he liked to turn into portkeys.
"You've been fiddling with portkeys more? Blaise used one the other month." Another question not quite question enough for its own good. He knew how to be a friend to Theo. He did. They'd been friends their entire lives in varying degrees of closeness. It ebbed and it flowed, but it still bore a constancy that could only be shared by the last remaining heirs to two Sacred Twenty-Eight families.
But this felt foreign. Good intentions stuck behind ill-placed question marks and statements that sounded like accusations. He just wanted to be sure that Theo was alright. He'd been distant, disinterested in conversation bearing any substance, ever since that conversation in January, drunk on a balcony and probably a little more honest than he'd meant to be.
"I'm getting better. They're more precise. Blaise landed in the middle of the gardens on my estate. I'd intended inside the greenhouse, but it was a very, very close thing."
Two more keys made the cut, lined up carefully amongst the others in a row on the floor by Theo's feet.
"Where else do they go?"
"Anywhere. Everywhere."
"So you need more keys?"
Hermione wound her arms around Draco's torso from behind. He stiffened immediately, nearly jumped, but settled as he recognized the hands wrapped around his waist: devious, dangerous hands that he loved. He felt her small laugh coasting through his shirt fabric and straight to his spine.
Theo looked up, eyes instantly more alert as he lobbed a smirk at her, a break in the clouds.
"Ah, too early, Granger. My selection process is rigorous; I need more time. You'll have to find another historically significant antique to learn about. If you ask nicely, I'm sure Draco will even buy it for you."
She laughed again, arms tightening around his middle. The Weaslette might enjoy making snide remarks about the pointiness of his features, but Draco could tell at exactly what angle Hermione had tilted her head to peer around his torso based on the way her own chin of not-insignificant-pointiness dug into his ribs. It didn't seem so pointy, just looking at her. But gods the woman knew how to weaponize it if she leaned into him in just the right, or perhaps wrong, way.
"I'd much rather he'd buy me books. We're going to Flourish and Blotts after this."
"And here I thought we were going to lunch together. Once we set you loose in that bookstore we won't be free until dinner, at the earliest, perhaps not even until breakfast tomorrow morning." Theo arched a brow as he spoke, weighing two keys between his hands and maintaining what looked so much like an effortless smile.
She released Draco's middle. "I'll let you take as much time as you like with your keys if I can have as long as I want with my books. Deal?"
Theo stuttered a short, disbelieving kind of laugh, the first genuine expression Draco had seen on his face the entire day.
"Wagers? From a Gryffindor? Who taught you that?" His eyes flicked to Draco. "Nevermind. I do not want to know what sorts of things you two bet about. But you have a deal."
Draco glanced down at Hermione, who had stepped into view beside him. She smiled, first at Theo, then at him. She leaned, bumping her hip into his—well, more into his mid thigh—before she left them again, presumably to find another antique to learn about.
Theo's demeanor shifted immediately, clouds rolling back overhead. Draco didn't know if he ought to take solace in the fact that Theo didn't seem to be making any effort to hide his unusual mood around him. Theo returned to his keys, more careful and methodical in his selection process than he had been with Hermione watching. When she'd been standing with them, he almost looked light-hearted, like he enjoyed the process. But now, each selection had a strange undercurrent to it, a sense of urgency, of desperation, of need to identify just the right one.
Draco hovered, failing to ask the right questions, as Theo sifted through the rest of the keys until he'd finally made his selections, concluding their time in the antique shop. Theo's strange demeanor—now focused on the bag of keys that jingled with his every step as they walked to Flourish and Blotts—resurfaced any time Hermione dipped out of sight.
Draco wondered how much energy it took to turn on whatever performance he turned on for Hermione. It had to be exorbitant, based on how it so instantly slipped as she abandoned them at the threshold to the bookstore, beelining to her favorite corner packed with works on Arithmancy and Ancient Runes.
Theo paused at an atrocious display of new releases; far too many versions of Potter's face stared back at them from the dozens of covers on display. Theo picked up a book, flipped it over, and made a thoughtful noise as he read the back. Draco found he didn't particularly want to look at Potter's unblinking face for too long and opted to gaze elsewhere, perhaps in search of a riot of chestnut colored curls.
"An unofficial biography," Theo said from beside him. "They're calling Potter the 'master of death.'" Draco snorted, glancing back at Theo.
Theo's mouth twisted into a considering frown before he shrugged, head tilting with the motion. "Seems a bit dramatic, don't you think?"
"It's Potter. Of course it's dramatic."
"Thought you two were not-friends-but-not-enemies anymore?" Theo returned the book to its kin, dozens of Potters blinking at them from behind his stupid black spectacles.
"He's fine. His wife is more tolerable than he is but—he's a bit of an inescapable entity in Hermione's life, so." Draco gestured vaguely to his person, shrugging as he did so. "I'm being civil, making—something peace-like. He throws a tolerable party."
Rather than respond to that, Theo stared at the books, brows drawn together. They'd just had an almost-lively, normal conversation. But as he stared at Potter's unofficial biography, Theo's liveliness fell away again.
"I wouldn't mind a title like that," he said, eyes narrowed as if something on the cover of the book required solving, understanding. "Perhaps I'll go for 'master of space and time.' I've already got the time turner. Working on perfecting portkeys—maybe that's the thing I can do. That I'm good at."
Draco couldn't believe what he'd just heard.
"Theo, you're good at literally almost everything you try. It's obnoxious, honestly. If you hadn't been my housemate and childhood friend I'd have called you a swot as ruthlessly as I did Hermione."
Draco fought the impulse to step between Theo and the book display; the extended eye contact with Potter's photograph had started to veer towards menacing. It didn't even appear that Theo had heard him.
"Maybe that's my curse," Theo said, finally looking up at Draco. "Constantly wondering about the 'what-ifs.' What could I have changed? Where could I have gone? But never doing any of it."
It was as if they'd used the time turner in question, stepped back in time to January, on Draco's balcony, drunk and a bit despondent. Had these thoughts been plaguing Theo for months?
"Theo. I'm—worried about you. Are you okay?"
"You asked me that before."
"And the answer was clearly no, but you walked away. And you haven't let me ask again for months. You're just—pretending."
"It's exhausting."
There was a bit of honesty, a tiny sliver of truth. Theo's eyes widened. He shook his head, and Draco got the distinct impression that he hadn't meant to reveal so much, speak with such candor.
"It's fine," Theo said, taking a half step away. "I'm handling it."
"Is this about the vault? I know it being empty was a disappointment but—maybe you could fill it? You're good at so much—your portkeys and stuff."
"It's not—it is—Draco, I'm fine. Don't worry about me. I'm just having an off couple of months."
"Theo—"
"Have a nice lunch with Granger. I've got to go."
And before Draco could object, or even blink to clear his thoughts at the suddenness of Theo's shift, he'd been left alone, standing in front of The Unofficial Biography of Harry Potter and his disconcerting stare.
"Did I just see Theo leave?" Hermione asked, sliding up beside him and tilting her head at the dozens of Potters in front of them. "Well that's unsettling," she added with a slight shiver.
"He had to go."
She frowned. "Oh," she said, posture dropping. "I'd been looking forward to lunch. Is everything alright?"
Draco didn't even consider lying to her, hiding the truth, or otherwise omitting in any way.
"I'm not sure."
Her hand found his arm, squeezing at the inside of his elbow.
"We'll have to have him over soon, check in on him?"
Draco agreed, already planning an owl to Blaise, hoping he could help.
A wild curl called to Draco, spiralling away from Hermione's face. He reached out and tucked it behind her ear before leaning to kiss her temple. Her frown persisted, but he knew that frown, knew that expression; she layered it with thinking, and concern, and a tiny dose of scheming that he found far more attractive than he would have ever thought of himself.
He could read her. He knew her.
And it struck him, absurdly in the middle of a Flourish and Blotts with Harry Potter's fucking face staring at him from a few dozen different book covers, that he could read Hermione better than he could read Theo. And he'd known Theo his entire life.
That revelation simultaneously made him want to mourn the loss of something with his best friend and celebrate the cementing of something that felt so real, so powerful with Hermione.
He offered her his hand and they walked to lunch. This time, he ignored the stares; they meant nothing, not by comparison, not by a long shot.
—
Meals with Draco's parents deteriorated. He attended purely out of obligation, out of disintegrating respect for the fact that he had very little else in the way of a relationship with them, and that realization managed to somehow both relieve and terrify him. His efforts to maintain what routines they still had, though, did not guarantee any sort of comfort. He'd almost grown accustomed to the strange, avoidant conversation his parents had been engaging him with since the beginning of the year, since he'd dropped the idea of Hermione on them over Christmas.
Now, their meals had returned to the awful, awkward quiet of the post-betrothal-explosion days, poised between not knowing how to interact and not having the energy to make the effort. It created a strange undercurrent, riptides threatening to pull him under at every crack of house elf magic and tink of silver against china.
If Draco considered the raw volume of food presented at their meal, it had dropped as steeply as their conversation topics. What had been a veritable smorgasbord of dining options in the months prior had whittled, probably out of spite, to an assortment of pastries, fruit, tea, and eggs—but only if he so fancied making a special request with Tilly.
Despite this decline in grandeur and the disquiet weaving its way across the tablecloth, a different undercurrent swept beneath them.
Draco consumed his breakfast in near-perfect silence for almost forty-five minutes before someone finally spoke. His mother cleared her throat, setting her teacup on its saucer.
"You'll be pleased to hear," she started in a perfectly normal tone and as if nothing about their morning meal had been awkward and silent and awful to endure. "After several years of no progress, your father's request to commute his sentence has been heard."
"Heard?"
"Accepted," Narcissa said, offering him a close-lipped smile before taking another sip of her tea.
His mother's words were an undertow, pulling Draco's feet from beneath him, torn from safe shallows and dragged to open sea. The entire surface of his skin tingled, pinpricks of anxiety battering him like waves. He turned to see Lucius watching him from the head of the table. When he'd decided to abandon his ever-present copy of The Daily Prophet, Draco could not say.
Draco swallowed; he could feel his Adam's apple dragging down his neck. He resisted the urge to clear his throat.
"But—the Ministry. They haven't wanted anything to do with"—he looked from his father to his mother and back again, implication mostly understood—"any of us. They bin your files every year."
Lucius lifted a brow, a dangerous, proud sort of amusement flickering across his face. Draco hadn't seen that kind of satisfaction on his father's face in years.
"We finally found the right palms to grease. The right incentive, for the right person, goes a long way."
"And they—just like that?" Draco couldn't comprehend it. His father's house arrest had felt so permanent, so immutable. That it might actually be shortened—he'd taken the Ministry's dismissal of them at face value.
"Just like that," Lucius said, the corner of his mouth lifting to a smirk. Draco knew that expression; he used it regularly himself. It only occurred to him—right then and there—where he'd learned it, who he'd fashioned it after.
"I don't—" Draco started, gaze pinging between his mother and his father. "I don't understand how."
"This is how things like this usually work," Lucius said. A supreme satisfaction seeped from his aura. "You don't get what you want. Until you finally do."
Something about seeing his mother looking at Lucius, with a pride and fondness Draco hadn't seen so overtly in so long, made it all that much worse. His father seemed more like himself, his mother seemed pleased about it, and that rapid orbit of the way things used to be couldn't possibly be sustained for long. Orbits came in two forms: stable or degrading. This one felt doomed straight for a black hole.
Draco addressed the tablecloth somewhere between his mother and father when he spoke again, "So what does all that mean?"
Narcissa answered, teeth bared in something that looked like a true, genuine smile.
"As of the end of the week, your father will have his wand back. And he will be permitted to leave the property. He will be a normal, respected member of society again."
Once upon a time, Draco might have held his tongue, might have choked on words left unspoken. But time and distance and an insistent Gryffindor had softened his reflex to hold it all in. Sometimes—in this case, the worst time—the words spilled out anyway.
"He will never be a normal, respected member of society again."
Draco sucked in a breath, surprised with himself. Cresting on that wave of surprise: invigoration. Fuck, if it didn't feel good to just say it. "Don't you see that? Money and a commuted sentence won't convince anyone to forget what this family has done. I still get looks. Theo gets them and he wasn't even marked."
It was his explosion over Hermione all over again. Was he stuck in some kind of loop? Some sort of inability to have a meal with his family that didn't include an emotional outburst involving far too much cathartic candor?
He heaved, lungs stinging from what must have been a lack of oxygen he hadn't even noticed. He powered on, poorly restrained by his parents' stunned silence.
"I don't know what kind of world you think exists outside this property, but it's not one that will welcome you. Not as you are now."
Lucius finally snapped, cane cracking against stone floors.
"I know exactly what kind of world is out there. One where my son thinks his duties to this family mean nothing. That they are optional. I raised you to respect our traditions, our history."
Draco couldn't feel his fingers, possibly not his toes, either. Whole extremities blinked out of existence as he tried to control his breathing, tried not to lose his temper. So much had already been fractured at this table. He didn't want to break anything else.
His jaw ached as he held his temper tightly. "You raised me to believe you blindly."
"Draco, stop this," Narcissa interjected from across the table. Her smile had vanished, replaced by pursed lips and wide eyes that begged him not to ruin this for them. "You should be pleased. We will finally be able to resume normal life."
"Normal life?" He couldn't help but laugh, head shaking at the absurdity of such a thought.
Then the thought more fully sank in. Normal life. What did that entail? What would that entail? Whatever their normal life looked like before had been completely obliterated and deemed illegal, fallen entirely out of favor. Normal life didn't have a place in modern life.
It occurred to Draco that his parents had been treating the past several years—this house arrest—like some kind of extended stasis charm. They waited, biding their time until they could have their version of normal again. A cold dread settled in the pit of Draco's stomach. Did that mean they had no intentions of evolving under the pressures that had changed the world around them while they paid their penance in this manor?
Neither offered any sort of response to his question, if it was really a question at all.
He locked eyes with his mother.
"This is like a horror movie." He felt enough fear and dread, at least, for it to be such a thing.
She tilted her head, a line forming between her brows.
"Movie?"
Draco blinked, air whooshing out of him. Of course. She had no idea what a movie was. Neither of them did. Movies had no part in their version of normal, in either the past or present.
He stared at the strawberries on his plate, incapable of looking at his parents' unsettling excitement. He didn't want to think about what their new version of normal looks like.
The last time they'd had normal, he'd ended up as canon fodder in a war that meant absolutely nothing.
—
Draco returned from breakfast with his parents at his usual time, having suffered through the remainder of the meal in an uncomfortable silence. Acid churned in his stomach as his parents moved onto excited conversation about the expansion of their social calendar now that Lucius would no longer be bound to the manor.
As he exited the Floo, Draco tumbled into Hermione. He looped his arms around her middle out of instinct, twisting as he took a large step over a stack of books in an attempt to avoid falling on her, falling on books, or simply falling on the floor. Her hands found his upper arms, stabilizing him.
"What is—Hermione?"
Based on his quick assessment of the space as he righted himself—claiming a tiny, open spot of floor for himself—every single book owned between the two of them had been stacked on their living room floor. Draco might have taken a step back in surprise if he'd had any room to move. But at the smallest shuffle, his dragonhide shoes bumped up against the spine of a book.
"I'm organizing."
"I—think we have different definitions of that word."
She shrugged, scanning the room with a fond smile as she tucked a curl behind her ear.
"I have to see everything that needs organizing in order to organize."
"And why, might I ask, are you reorganizing our books?"
"I keep having to buy more biographies I'm not interested in for barely recognizable public figures whose surnames begin in 'E.' So, it's a good thing you have so much space here. You might even need to buy some more shelves."
He chuckled.
"You mean we have so much space here. This is your flat, too."
Her smile didn't vanish, but it did freeze, going perfectly still in a way that said, without focus, it would have disappeared entirely; only her willpower kept it in place.
"I know."
He felt, suddenly, like she needed convincing. Which he couldn't understand.
"It is."
"I know," she said again. "I just—well, since I don't pay for anything, I don't really feel like I'm contributing."
"You don't have to."
The books caged Draco in and separated him from her, a tower of tomes between them.
She scanned the room again, this time her smile twisted towards a grimace. "It doesn't so much feel like my home, in that sense. So I decided to reorganize the books today. I thought maybe—if our collections were better integrated—"
Draco stepped over a stack, a strangling tension in his chest requiring that he close the distance between them. How many months had it been now? She'd moved in with him in the middle of January and now, in May, she'd had this realization?
He'd just assumed she shared his wild, incandescent happiness. He assumed their new arrangement worked as beautifully for her as it did for him.
He tried to close the gate to an unwelcome stampede of thoughts inside his head, but they broke through his faulty latches, barreling to the forefront of his mind.
What if she decided the flat didn't feel enough like a home?
What if she'd grown tired of feeling that way?
What if she decided this wasn't working for her anymore?
What if she left?
"How can I help?" he asked. He had to know. He needed to know. "What can I do to make it better?"
He took another step closer. If she picked up one of her hundreds of books, she could fit it between them, but just so, nothing more.
She leaned away under the guise of examining the room, searching for her answer.
"I've just—been providing for myself since, well"—her eyes glassed over and widened, a swell of tears catching her off guard—"oh, no. Why am I crying?"
He didn't know. But he'd started to panic, caught between wanting to reach out and offer her comfort and give her space to pull herself together.
"Gods," she continued, dragging a finger beneath her eye to wipe away the tear she barely even gave a chance to fall. "I guess it's been since the war? When I obliviated my parents? And we—we were on the run after that and since then, really, I've just—provided. But especially after Ron and I broke up—"
She sighed. With a halfhearted grasp, she reached out to hold his hand, fingers barely entwined with his, but a comfort nevertheless. "My little flat—I know it wasn't much, but I paid for it. Which, I know doesn't mean much the same thing to you since money just—is different for your family. But I bought my own groceries and managed my own wards and I—it was mine. None of this is mine."
She pulled her hand away, wiping a fresh well of tears with a frustrated growl. "It's not worth crying about. I don't—I don't want to cry about it."
A sinkhole opened up inside Draco's chest, a painful seizing as it swallowed his heart, his lungs, his ribs: blood, muscle, and bone all consumed by the agony that Hermione didn't feel at home with him.
She'd gone quiet, slow breathing, tears held at bay as she looked helplessly at the book-inundated room around them.
He didn't know how to help. He had so little control. Almost none. So he clung to the thing she'd said that he could control, that he could give her.
"Do you want to manage the wards? Build them from scratch yourself? I've been using a variant on my family's but—you can change them—make them yours. Ours. Gods, Hermione, I—"
He'd already drawn his wand, conjuring the flat's wards and dismantling them rune by rune. Hermione watched him work, saying nothing. "All of this is yours. You don't"—he pulled back another layer in the wards—"I don't want you to feel guilty for not having to do everything on your own, by yourself."
Draco took a half step towards the Floo, addressing the access wards directly. He'd entirely lost himself in the process, determined that Hermione should never feel that way again. "That's not—not how family works. You get support, you get help, you—"
"—is that what we are?" Hermione's question, quiet and breathless, pulled him from his fixation on the wards. He'd hardly even paid attention to his words, babbling as he worked.
"Are we—what?" His world caught up with him in an echo, finally remembering the things he'd said. His heart gave one huge, painful thump inside his chest as he swallowed.
"You said—are we a family? Is that what we are?"
Draco realized he'd gone a little agape, a little panicked. Of all things, an image of his parents' pleased faces discussing his father's impending return to society flashed behind his eyes. Draco had no idea what their return to normal life would require of him, how that future dynamic would look.
He only knew what he wanted in his dynamic with Hermione. He abandoned caution. He'd already essentially said it, anyway.
"Yes," he said. And he meant it. To him, she was family. And saying so felt brave and stupid and reckless like a certain Gryffindor he knew but, weirdly, it also exhilarated him. "Yes," he said again. "Yes, we're family? Don't you think?"
He found something very interesting about the brickwork around the fireplace: an easier thing to focus on than Hermione's face. He'd let too much out. In a lifetime spent holding in the things he really wanted to say, Hermione had the astonishing ability to break down every last wall used to keep the words back. But now that he'd started, now that the words had slipped through, he couldn't stop. So long as he kept his focus on the bricks or the grout or the mantel, he could say the things he'd yet to figure out how to say directly to her face.
"I think it, at least," he said, perhaps clarifying, perhaps digging a deeper grave. "And when we're married, I don't want you to feel like this isn't your home." A thought struck him. Finally, he tore his gaze from the fireplace. "Should we move?"
Hermione blinked, doing nothing to mask how wide her eyes had grown. She tilted her head, some of the color draining from her face.
"When we're married?" she asked.
Draco's skin felt alive, panicked and crawling. He couldn't help but see an image of his father, forcing his way between them. She must have seen a question in the way he failed to respond, his manic mood rendering him momentarily mute.
"You said—when we're married. Like it's a fact. Or an inevitability."
Draco's mania stalled; his world stopped. The earth, for that moment, ceased rotation. Time paused. How had he ended up so deep in such a conversation he hadn't even intended to have?
"It—I—it is?" He didn't know if he was asking it as a question. "You've moved in with me. That's—well that's normally not done until after marriage, but this is hardly a traditional courtship, is it?"
He couldn't ignore how she tensed at the word courtship. Like it was some kind of dirty, terrible word that offended her many and varied progressive sensibilities.
Her breath caught before she could fully speak her sentence, as if her words stuck on sticky vocal cords. He watched as something unreadable and entirely overwhelmed overtook her features.
"Is that—a proposal?" She looked legitimately terrified, voice quiet and contained. Eyes still wide, conveying every ounce the confusion that he, too, felt.
"I—" he started. He kept doing that. How did he keep doing that? Stumbling into milestones with her. First an accidental date and now what, an accidental almost-proposal? He supposed, technically, it wasn't not a proposal. But it certainly wasn't a proposal, either. He felt a little like he might be sick.
"Would you?" he asked, only belatedly realizing it had barely even been a sentence.
"Would I what?"
"If I asked you. Would you say yes? If—if this, or at some time, if there was a proposal?"
He definitely felt like he might be sick. Because if that hadn't been an accidental proposal before, this certainly was. He wanted to hop back into the Floo. He couldn't go to the manor, but Theo's place would suffice.
She'd been right, too. He had thought of marriage as a sort of inevitability, even if he'd never outright admitted it to himself. What else did people do after they lived with each other? Break up? His stomach, which already felt as if it had descended into the earth, managed to drop even further.
"Draco," she started. "Your family barely even—"
"—You're my family." If nothing else, he knew that much.
She cleared her throat. "Your parents. They've barely gotten over the shock of—"
"—My father's sentence is being commuted. He'll have his wand by the end of the week. He'll be able to leave the manor."
It felt important that she knew, even if he couldn't explain to himself why. He'd lost complete control over this conversation, over what was meant to be an attempt to help her feel at ease in their home. Instead, he'd probably made it so much worse. He might as well have just pulled out that notorious ruby necklace and tried to give that to her again.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have—why don't you see if Theo wants to build new wards with you? He much prefers building them to breaking them. And he does need to get out of his manor more."
She seemed grateful for the diversion, tension around her eyes loosening.
"That's a good idea." She spoke slow words, as if expecting an interruption, or perhaps to change her mind.
Draco nodded his assent. His whole body had tensed, sinkhole haphazardly filled with shifting sands that only masked the damage if he stood very, very still.
"Well. I have to meet Blaise—potions stuff."
"I'll see you later?" she asked, bottom lip pulled between her teeth, flesh washed out as she held her normal blood flow hostage.
"After I have dinner at the manor, yes."
She frowned. "Right. But we're still having dinner together tomorrow, aren't we?"
He nodded again, a new thought rushing him. "And I was thinking. Two meals a day—it's a lot. Perhaps I could see if, well, maybe I could stop taking breakfasts with them."
She swallowed, a small nod, a smaller smile.
"I was planning on cooking for you—tomorrow."
"I could take you out instead?"
Another idea unfurled. His parents knew—had known in some capacity—about them for months. They still spent so much of their time in muggle London out of habit, but they could go anywhere, wizarding or not. Make a scene. Be grand. And he could already see her dissent forming.
"I haven't been able to spoil you," he said.
"I don't—I don't need to be spoiled."
"Paris. I could take you to Paris?"
"For dinner?"
"Or the weekend."
"Tomorrow's Monday."
"The week, then."
"I have to work."
Draco's excitement ground to a halt.
"Right," he said.
"So I'll cook."
Draco glanced at the clock. So much time had passed and yet he barely felt like he'd blinked. He was already late to meeting Blaise, but that seemed far less important than the witch standing in front of him. He lifted his hand, cradling her cheek in his palm as he held his face near hers.
"I love you," he said, needing her to hear.
"I love you, too."
He needed to hear it as well.
