September
tick tock tick tock
"I can't remember if we said we were meeting out in the square or inside the museum."
Draco knew Hermione spoke mostly to herself, but he couldn't resist the impulse to respond, an attempt at problem solving. Anything, really, to accelerate his departure from the extremely crowded square in the middle of muggle London where they stood, potentially waiting in the wrong place to meet Hermione's parents.
"Did you not write it down in your planner?"
She huffed an annoyed breath, clearly a no.
He tried a different approach.
"Well, if we don't see them here, perhaps we could try the museum? It is—very crowded here."
"It's a bit of a tourist destination and we're"—she blew out a breath, shifting her weight as she craned her head around—"well, we're in a very central area. Oh—I see them across—yes, they're headed into the museum—"
She grabbed his hand and pulled him through the crowds, across crosswalks—which felt a bit like narrowly cheating death—and towards the art museum where Hermione wanted to spend her birthday afternoon with her parents.
Muggle spaces didn't disorient Draco nearly as much as they used to, but there were occasions—like this one—where the sheer quantity of people crammed into a public space seemed impossible, or at least improbable. It reminded him of his first few days at Hogwarts; no amount of knowledge he'd had before going to the school could truly prepare him for all the intricacies of shifting staircases, trick doors, and labyrinthian architectural choices.
Navigating through the sheer number of bodies in muggle London felt a bit like that. Put Draco in a crowded ballroom on a sacred twenty-eight estate and he knew which stairs might have false bottoms, which portraits hid secret passages. He knew no such secrets about how the muggle world worked.
With the mystery of where to meet Hermione's parents settled, and the din from the square fading behind them, Draco could admit that Hermione's choice of afternoon entertainment wasn't without its merit.
He liked art well enough. Malfoy Manor had plenty of it decorating its walls and corridors. Though, he decided he liked watching Hermione enjoy art more than he liked the art itself. She did a lot of gasping, little noises escaping her lips as something very literally stole her breath. She didn't even realize she did it; the first time he'd brought it up she simply swatted his arm and told him he wasn't allowed to make fun of her on her birthday.
Draco spent a good portion of his afternoon walking with Mrs. Granger as they trailed behind Hermione and her father.
"Art isn't your preference?" Draco asked as they watched their respective Grangers taking in a particularly vibrant installation.
"I enjoy it as much as the average person, I assume." She nodded towards Hermione and Mr. Granger. "Those two, though, everything interests them. Haven't found the limit yet to what they want to learn or how much they can love."
Mrs. Granger glanced at a statue looming nearby. Draco assumed it had been sculpted with exceptional skill, that it bore qualities of fine art, objectively speaking. He just didn't see much worth marveling at beyond an initial look.
"I'm more the sort of person who has one thing that I love, and I love it very fiercely"—she looked away from the sculpture—"I don't love art."
Draco found he couldn't quite tear his focus from Hermione's face as she chatted animatedly with her father, some wild analysis of the painting in front of them, to be sure.
"Neither do I," he said.
Mrs. Granger smiled, and it felt like an entirely different, completely silent conversation had passed between them. One wherein art had nothing to do with anything being said.
—
Only a lifetime of etiquette tutors prevented Draco from spitting his drink back into his cup.
"You don't like it?" Hermione looked up at him with a face of genuine disappointment. Her choice of tiny sandwich shop for their lunch after the museum had seemed decently promising, but now, Draco had new doubts about how much he would enjoy his meal.
"It's carbonated. Like a beer."
"Yes, I told you that. This is a fizzy drink."
"It's sweet. Sweeter than pumpkin juice. Gods, Hermione, how can you stand this?"
Across the table from them, both Hermione's parents laughed.
"Well, you're earning excellent goodwill from my parents, talking like that."
He lifted his brows, "Oh?"
"It's horrid for your teeth," Mrs. Granger said.
Draco twisted towards Hermione.
"You subject yourself to this tooth-destroying nightmare because…?"
"I was only ever allowed one on my birthday. I figured while we were here, I might as well indulge. I don't have them normally—"
"A smart choice, dear," Mr. Granger cut in. He switched his attention to Draco. "Did you enjoy the exhibit?"
From his periphery, Draco could have sworn he saw Mrs. Granger's mouth quirk—just a touch—towards a smile.
"The—quantity of art was certainly impressive. To have so much of it in one place—where does it all come from?" he asked.
Several shrugs rotated around the table.
"Donations, I think," Hermione supplied. "Willed from estates, wars. Stuff like that."
"I can't imagine most old wizarding families would want to give their precious art away. How unusual."
Hermione jumped in, head tilting, mouth turned to a thoughtful smile as she picked up the threads of his thought and continued with them. "I suppose now that I think on it, most old estates are their own sorts of museums. Malfoy Manor certainly is."
It wasn't necessarily that anyone said anything, or that there was a sharp intake of breath, or any other typical indications of surprise. But Draco saw the posture at the table shift, only just, as Hermione's parents heard, understood, and reacted to what she'd just said.
Draco glanced across the table to find Mr. Granger's brows lifted above his glasses frames. "Manor?" he asked, something of a teasing smile on his face. "Your family has a manor—an estate?"
Draco cleared his throat. He'd never, in all his life, felt uncomfortable about that fact before. The closest he'd ever come were the times when he and Hermione had struggled to balance her want to financially contribute to their living situation with his complete disinterest in taking money from her—he'd always had plenty of his own. But something about their less-than-spacious booth in a crowded restaurant in the middle of muggle London made that status, that inextricable part of who he was, feel—judged.
"Ah—yes. We do. We are a very old wizarding family as you may"—he glanced at Hermione, who shifted her head just enough that he knew she intended it as a shake to the negative—"or may not know." He tried to suppress the tension in his chest, torn between an impulse to brag that he could probably buy the whole bloody restaurant if he wanted to, and shouting that he couldn't help it, he couldn't. He'd been born to the family he'd been born to.
The money felt like both a gift and a burden, depending on the day.
Hermione's mother released a short laugh. "I suppose that explains the manners—"
"—and the posture," Mr. Granger added.
Draco blinked away the sensation of being under inspection.
"I—the what?"
"Well you are very posh, aren't you?"
"I—yes?"
They wouldn't know it, based on Draco's sudden inability to speak a sentence without stumbling over his words.
Hermione just nodded in agreement, giggling into her disgustingly sweet, fizzing drink. The tension in Draco's chest morphed, a transfiguration from judgment to joke.
"We're just kidding with you, darling," Mrs. Granger said. For a moment, she sounded just like Narcissa—the same term of endearment and everything. But from brown eyes and olive skin and chestnut hair, the whole sentence colored differently. "It isn't as if Hermione hasn't had a comfortable life, herself."
"We've done well for ourselves," Mr. Granger said. "Not manor well, but she's not had to want for anything."
Draco wasn't sure when Hermione's hand had found his beneath the table, but she squeezed it so tightly he started to worry she might break a bone. It took him several seconds to understand why, as he watched her parents smiling, unaware, across the table from them.
She'd wanted for plenty in her time spent without them. He wondered if they knew, if they had any idea what her life had looked like when she'd literally foraged for her meals while fighting a fucking war. He swallowed, throat tight in rising anger that had no real target.
He knew one thing with certainty: he'd just taken charge of the conversation. Hermione would need a minute.
"I see," he said, offering a pulse of pressure to Hermione's hand beneath the table. "I think I prefer those sorts of jokes over the threats to use your tools on me—those drills and such. I can never quite tell if you truly mean those in jest."
Mr. Granger laughed a big laugh, a hearty laugh, the sort of laugh that caught the attention of strangers from its sudden volume. Mrs. Granger made a meager attempt to rein him in.
"Don't worry, son," he said, spearing Draco with his own use of an endearment, one with implications that latched like vines onto Draco's skin, then burrowed into his bones. "That's the sort of thing we'd only ask of family." Mr. Granger's laughter had abated, replaced instead with a casual, but pointed lift of his brows, just enough to sway his statement towards a question if one chose to read it in that way.
Draco thought of the ring he'd once again pulled from his family vault. Of the portkey he'd had Theo create that would lead to a weekend in Italy to celebrate Hermione's birthday. And then hopefully, to celebrate so much more.
Hermione's hand had loosened enough that Draco could feel his fingertips again. She didn't look at any of them though, suddenly quite interested in her drink.
"One day, then," Draco said.
Mrs. Granger smiled, her husband said very little, and Hermione continued her fascination with her drink.
After they'd eaten, stumbling their way through adoration of the exhibits they'd seen and casual conversation about their respective plans for the evening, they said their goodbyes on the busy footpath outside the restaurant.
"You should consider getting a cell phone, dear. It would make coordination so much easier," Mrs. Granger suggested on the tail end of a hug with Hermione.
Hermione's face lit up, more excited than she'd looked for much of their meal.
"I should—yes. I can get one for Draco, too."
He didn't understand why he would need one, and he expressed as much, as they walked to their apparation point.
"Well, it would be nice not to have to send a Patronus if I need to contact you quickly."
"But it's a thing? That I'd have to carry with me?" His brows furrowed, trying to make sense of why on earth she would think carrying a little muggle technology box would achieve for him anything his wand could not.
She smiled as he steered them into an alleyway and towards the apparation point. When they stopped, she lifted onto the tips of her toes and kissed his cheek.
"I'm probably going to get you one anyway."
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. She'd said it as if that settled that.
"I had a nice time today," he said. "Did you enjoy your birthday afternoon with your parents?"
She bit her lip, but nodded. "It was nice, overall. Every day is a little better, you know? This whole afternoon seemed very normal."
"And that part during lunch?" He twined his fingers with hers, a reminder of the attack she'd launched on his phalanges.
"They don't know."
"Will they ever?"
She shook her head.
He apparated for them. She managed so much, he could handle the magic.
—
The Malfoy eagle owl came in the middle of the night. It was the first official day of autumn, hours before Draco's surprise Portkey to take Hermione to Italy activated. Draco had spent the evening before brewing several standard potions to build up a stock for the shop that he and Blaise may or may not end up leasing at the edge of Knockturn Alley. Draco had been almost certain he'd finally convinced Blaise that an owl-order business model could work, right up until Blaise walked into his office with a lease agreement and an unspoken reminder about who of them had the more successful business track record.
Hermione sat with him while he brewed, reading an herbology periodical that included work Longbottom had been doing with dittany. She orated the more interesting passages and absently scratched behind Crookshanks's ears while Draco chopped, diced, crushed, and mixed his ingredients.
Later, with his potions under a stasis charm, he crowed her against one of the workbenches, bodies sealed together from head to toe. She pretended to be concerned about jostling his potions just like he'd pretended to care about the latest and greatest discoveries in plant grafting.
He fucked her on the tabletop, wooden edges biting into the back of her thighs that he healed with a salve he'd brewed mere hours before. She left scratches down the back of his neck, blunt nails digging into his nape; those, he didn't heal.
So, hours later, when the owl arrived long after he'd found peaceful sleep, Draco woke with his heart knocking behind his ribs, in rhythm with the tapping at his bedroom window. Confusion clouded his brain, a searing series of questions of what and why and who and where as his thoughts spun, pulled from unconsciousness too quickly.
Hermione's ice-cold toes, the only part of her that ran cold as she slept, dug into his lower back, pushing him towards the edge of the bed, forcing him up, awake, to address the rapping at their window. He might have laughed at how adorably sleep-addled she looked, shoving him out of the bed while mostly asleep herself, but his stomach dropped when the situation coalesced in his sleep-fogged brain.
A Malfoy eagle owl waited at their window, bringing with it an immediate sense of foreboding.
Draco jumped to his feet, sheets catching between his legs, causing him to stumble as he tried to throw them off. Hermione sat up, alertness finding her at his sudden movement. He opened the window, and goosebumps erupted across his bare chest from the slight autumnal chill in the air. He barely registered Hermione's arrival at his side, closing the window behind the owl that perched on one of their bed posts, clearly awaiting payment or a response.
"What is it?" Hermione asked, holding her wand over the parchment, offering him a lumos. He'd been so caught in the cold worry cascading down his spine that he'd intended to struggle against the darkness to read. She followed her lumos with a tempus, alerting him to the exact time he'd been sent whatever this letter was: half two in the morning.
Tiny, vicious spines prodded the underside of his skin, pricks of fear that registered pain.
"My father," Draco said. He forced a swallow through the rising lump in the back of his throat. He tried to elaborate, say more, but his throat closed, words wrung out, liquid and slipping to his stomach where they curdled.
Hermione took the letter from his hands, scanning it quickly. She released a heavy breath, sending a curl floating in between them for a moment. He watched as it rose, propelled by her breath and then fell again, across her face. He met her gaze.
"Let's get dressed," she said.
And they did.
Last month, he'd visited St. Mungo's for a wonderful reason: a birth, life, genesis.
Now, he visited not knowing if his father had already met his end.
—
The lift to the spell damage ward nearly broke Draco of his barely cobbled composure. His nerves racheted higher and higher as the lift stopped at nearly every fucking floor on the way up.
"Why did mother wait so long to owl?" Draco asked to the brass grate drawn across the lift doors. "If it happened after dinner…" he trailed off, pulling out his pocket watch: nearly three in the morning now.
Hermione didn't answer; she couldn't. But her hand found the space between his shoulder blades, brushing slow, calming strokes up and down. He knew it should have relaxed him, provided comfort, but he only found himself growing irritated.
She must have felt the tension: on him, around him, become him.
"Maybe there was a lot going on—or they couldn't reach you, or—"
"Stop," he snapped. "If I'd been at the manor—"
"—that's not productive thinking—"
"—what the fuck does productivity matter if it's true?" He stepped closer to the lift grate, out of her touch.
"If it happened while they were out at dinner, you living at the manor wouldn't have made a difference. I don't know why that's the first thing you'd think—"
"You're not helping."
He breathed in. He held his breath. He let it out.
He heard Hermione behind him. Her voice wavered, sounding confused. "I—I know."
"I'm sorry." He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"I know."
The lift opened, released them.
Draco let Hermione speak to the nurse, asking after his father's room. Guilt had taken his tongue hostage, battered his heart, become an inexplicable, unidentified intruder in his home. Why did he feel so guilty for a thing he'd had no part in? The fear, he understood. The concern, the worry, the chilly, prickling anticipation. But the guilt consumed all the rest, crowding out his ability to feel anything else.
They stopped in front of his father's door. A new rush of tingling anxiety washed over his skin; Draco looked to Hermione.
She offered him a tight, weary smile.
"I'll be out here." She nodded towards a waiting area crammed with uncomfortable looking chairs with fraying, stained upholstery.
"I don't know how long I'll be—"
"I'll be here as long as it takes."
She'd been holding his hand. He hadn't even realized. She squeezed once and turned to the waiting area.
Draco found his mother at his father's side, perched unnaturally straight in a chair beside his bed, hand clasped in his. She had several wisps of hair breaking free of her bun, shadows just beginning to form beneath her eyes, and a spot of something that looked an awful lot like dried blood just above her neckline, creeping up her neck.
The guilt inside Draco's chest doubled when she looked up, eyes widening, rushing him and offering the most open, genuine sort of hug they'd shared in years. He knew how to play this part though, he'd learned it so recently. Comforting his mother instead of being comforted.
Draco watched his father over the top of Narcissa's head. He slept, so pale his skin nearly matched his hair—Draco's hair—with a thin, scratchy looking blanket covering him to his chest.
"They're keeping him unconscious," his mother said against his torso before finally stepping away, returning to her vigil. Draco stood at the foot of the bed, feeling too out of place to find a seat.
"It was a nasty curse," she said, stroking a line down Lucius's wrist, the length of his thumb, before wrapping her hand in his. "Did terrible things to his"—she paused, stared at Lucius's torso, tried again—"to his insides. But he's mostly squared away now, just resting, preventing complications."
Her thoughts disconnected at the end, fragments of meaning Draco assumed made sense in her head, but that were lost somewhere between creation and delivery.
Guilt reared its head again.
Lucius looked so frustratingly human, lying there. Infallible persona nullified by a threadbare blanket.
Narcissa must have seen something in Draco's assessment.
"I've already tried to secure a room in a private ward—as if they've forgotten that we've made sizable donations to these facilities in the past—"
"Mother, it's—do you know why someone cursed him?"
She stopped listing the several specific donations the Malfoy estate had made to the hospital over what seemed like that last twenty years.
"We were at dinner. Walking to an apparation point, darling." A distant, dark look stole her prettiness, warping her features in the space of a blink. "I doubt there was any reason other than hatred for us. The Aurors have opened an investigation. I suspect they'll put as much effort into this case as the Wizengamot did Lucius's appeals."
She kept her eyes trained on her husband, expression crossed between distress and adoration. Draco felt like an unfortunate voyeur.
And despite it all, despite the threats, the ultimatums, the general feelings of worthlessness, the truth remained. Draco's father was still his father: lying unconscious in a hospital bed, having narrowly escaped death.
This wasn't the first time Draco had worried he might lose his father. And it didn't feel any different than it had before.
Was there something so wrong with wanting Lucius to be healthy? Alive? Despite all the rest?
With a sigh settling like resignation, Draco sank into a chair in the corner of the room and waited.
Guilt burned him up, sweating him out. Desperate, Draco occluded. It had been a long time, over a year, at least, since he'd turned to this mental magic. It greeted him in coldness, but with the warmth of an old friend, a reliable way to cope.
What else could he do? Draco stared at his father, a huge part of this tiny family, as he lay in a hospital bed. He looked so breakable, so human. And Draco didn't know how to handle that. Not something that big, that small.
Perhaps that was where the guilt came from. After trying so hard to convince himself he didn't, Draco couldn't exactly deny that all he wanted—even as ice flooded his veins and he chipped it all away—was to love his father and be loved in return.
Lifelong dreams like that didn't die overnight. They died in pieces. In hospital rooms. At dining tables. Over marriage contracts. In war. And if they didn't die completely, even the tiniest shards left beneath the skin, they festered.
—
Draco hadn't planned on taking any more meals at Malfoy Manor for at least another week, but he couldn't stomach the idea of his mother sitting in that obscenely huge home, eating by herself. Hermione insisted he go. Always so gracious and kind, she insisted he needn't keep apologizing for having snapped at her when he was upset. Or for making her wait nearly three hours as he sat with his mother, wondering if he stayed just one more minute, perhaps Lucius might wake up and see him there, the devoted son he was always meant to be.
But Lucius didn't wake up, nor was he discharged the next day.
Slight complications with the Skele-gro on his ribs.
Nothing Draco should worry about, according to Narcissa. It just meant that they kept him unconscious longer than planned, in the hospital longer than expected. Narcissa only returned to the manor for a meal with Draco when the healers insisted that Lucius would not awake until the next morning, after a new round of Skele-gro, and that she should leave and take care of herself. Draco knew this because he'd been there, lingering in a hospital corridor instead of whisking Hermione away to Italy with intentions to propose.
While Lucius lay unconscious, Narcissa hovered at his side. Draco loitered, and Hermione waited nearby. It all had a strange backwardness to it that made him wonder how they'd all gotten there, game pieces in the wrong squares, not properly playing their parts.
Draco dined with his mother in the smaller dining room that evening, a table that only sat six, at maximum. The menu had been reduced to three courses, and only Tilly cracked in and out, delivering food and clearing it away. It was still a fine meal, limited though the service may have been. Draco's lingering guilt, and fear, and confusion, soured his taste buds, rendering what might have been an otherwise lovely autumn soup into something more closely resembling bile.
"I'm having Topsy clear out one of the spare rooms in our wing," Narcissa said, eyes on her wine glass. "It has better morning-facing sun—good for Lucius's convalescence."
Draco cleared his throat, swallowed his discomfort, pushed his soup bowl away.
"And how long do the healers think that will be?"
"Not long. But I'd like to make it as enjoyable as possible. Lucius does prefer mornings, so a bit of morning light—I'm having the windows moved to ensure optimal sun."
"Moving the windows—of course."
Narcissa's hand, which had been resting flat against the tablecloth, slid off the edge, disappearing out of sight. Based on the way her arms and shoulders moved, Draco got the sense that his mother had closed her hands together in her lap: a careful, measured motion whenever she had something to say but didn't want to let too much out.
"I bring this up to tell you that I've found a few things I thought you might like to have"—a pause, a flicker from the sconces that shadowed nearly as much light as they produced—"now that you've decided to live on your own."
Draco genuinely could not tell if she meant her wording to intentionally exclude Hermione from his living situation, or simply to emphasize that he no longer lived with them at the manor. In light of Narcissa's recent stress, painted in blue-ish shadows beneath her eyes, Draco opted to give her the benefit of the doubt.
"What sorts of things?" he asked carefully, suspicion taking hold.
"Photos, mostly. Of your childhood."
"Oh—thank you. That would be nice to have."
Narcissa smiled, closed lips stretching her face, brows turned down as her expressions fought against each other. She hummed an acknowledgement and sipped her wine, pretty painted nails tapping on the crystal in an absent moment as she set her glass down. Her eyes darted to the sound as if only then realizing she'd done it.
Her hand retreated beneath the tabletop again.
"I'll have Topsy send them over?"
Draco shook his head, probably too quickly, to decline the offer. "I'll bring them with me, if you don't mind." He couldn't avoid the confused tilt to Narcissa's head. "I have new wards. They—aren't set up to allow for elves. We—well, we haven't been using Topsy the past few months."
He watched as Narcissa's confusion sank into a frown, disappointment.
"New wards?" she asked.
"Yes. Hermione set them up with Theo."
In the quiet moment that followed, at a table meant for six, in a dim, rarely-used dining room, Draco wondered if that was the first time he'd directly mentioned Hermione by name. He genuinely couldn't recall. All the things he was meant to say about her, ask for her, tell them about her, had been muddled and jumbled in the graves of good intentions he kept digging with his bad decisions.
Narcissa didn't say anything about it. Her hand appeared again, reached for her wine, sipped, returned the glass to the table, and disappeared. Draco couldn't help but feel like she'd considered and dismissed several potential responses in the space of that single, smooth action.
"I went to Gringotts earlier this month," she said, startling him with a conversation topic he hadn't expected in the slightest. "With our Hallowe'en gala approaching, I wanted to select from a few lesser-used jewels in the family collection."
Draco found himself reaching for his own wine, delay and distraction all in one.
"The goblins mentioned that you've been to visit the heirloom vaults more than once this year."
She didn't quite look at him, instead staring at his left ear, or just above his left shoulder. He watched as her jaw tensed, mouth sealed shut as she pulled a breath through her nose. He didn't know what to say.
"Did you?" she asked, and it could have meant several things. He took it to mean the smallest thing. Did he visit the vault?
"Yes, Mother. I did."
Her eyes travelled the short distance from the space just next to his head to find his eyes. Light from the dining room fireplace reflected in hers, obscuring her blue with a watery orange. He wasn't sure what he would do if his mother started crying.
"Do you have"—her voice slipped, a crack in a facade for just a moment—"anything important you might want to share with me?"
Had he asked Hermione to marry him and not told her about it, she meant.
"Not yet, Mother."
She almost looked relieved, and it was a most terrible conversation to be stuck inside of. He'd honestly thought it might be better, not having Lucius looming and silent at the end of the table. Draco had been weirdly, guiltily optimistic, that a meal shared with just his mother might yield something a little more relaxed, a little less fraught.
He almost didn't hear her when she asked her next question.
"Are you happy?"
Draco looked up from where he'd been seriously considering whether or not he could discern the tablecloth's thread count with the naked eye. It struck him that he couldn't reliably say if she'd ever directly asked him that question in his adult life.
If he really thought about it—she'd asked him in school, though not quite as directly. Are you enjoying your classes? Are you making friends? Are you having fun with Quidditch? All ways to ask after his happiness without ever actually doing so, he supposed. But this, it was direct. And it looked honest. Genuine.
So he answered as plainly as he'd been asked.
"More than I ever have been. I think one day you may need to decide how much that means to you."
