December
tick tock tick tock
Draco orbited, lost in Hermione's gravitational pull all evening. He enjoyed the party, enjoyed celebrating his accomplishment, enjoyed having a business that belonged to him. But whenever he looked up, his eyes cut through the crowd of his distinguished guests, finding her in a matter of seconds. His grand opening soirée had been a glittering success, even by Blaise's impossibly high standards—if the clap on Draco's shoulder and the slightly intoxicated, "Great work," were any indication.
The crowd thinned and Draco's skin buzzed pleasantly with champagne and success. It felt good. He felt good, like he'd achieved, accomplished, proven himself, even if it was only a silly little potions shop at the edge of Knockturn Alley. If the elegant cocktail tables, floating champagne service, sparkling artificial snow, and din of laughter, conversation, and congratulations counted for anything, this could be enough. The party had been magical, and he could feel that magic swimming in his veins as the guests began to disperse, conversation waning.
His eyes found Hermione again, standing at a cocktail table, fingers wrapped around the stem of a champagne flute as she smiled—tight and disingenuously—at the person across from her. Draco tilted his head and stepped around an ice sculpture, curious to know who dared bore Hermione Granger. Draco didn't recognize the witch, but he did recognize the tension crinkling at the corners of Hermione's eyes, tightness she could never quite relax when impatience crept its way up her spine.
Her eyes flickered to him, catching him watching her. Her companion gestured; Hermione nodded, then looked at Draco again. He watched as a brightness sparked to life in her eyes as she lifted her champagne glass barely an inch off the table, brought it back down: did it again, and once more. Three taps. A signal.
A smirk pulled at his lips, entirely independent of conscious effort. He wasted no time, navigating through the lingering crowd and finding himself at her side, making excuses for them, and bidding farewell to the last of their guests.
"Did I see Pansy Parkinson here earlier?" Hermione asked as Draco cast a locking charm on the door once the shop had finally emptied of friends and future patrons. The hour had long past the time when clocks ticked over to begin counting a new day.
Draco's grip on his wand tightened as he lowered it. "I don't know. I didn't see her. I—haven't talked to Pansy in years."
"I thought I saw her pop in and talk to Theo for a minute. But it could have been someone else." Hermione shrugged it off, spelling the various empty champagne flutes and hors d'oeuvres plates to begin collecting themselves.
"If she was here, she didn't say anything to me."
Hermione stole a maraschino cherry from a large crystal bowl. "You know, I don't think Pansy Parkinson has ever said a single thing to me that wasn't outright nasty."
Draco sighed. "To be fair, until not so long ago the same could probably have been said for me." He cast a spell, magic swelling with a gust, pulling tablecloths from the tables and folding them. "Theo wanted her to furnish this place, tried to convince me to hire her."
"Pansy?"
He nodded. He could feel the tension around his eyes, noticed the way his lips sealed shut as his mouth pulled into a forced smile.
Hermione brought her hand to his wrist, lowering his wand, halting his spells.
"We'll worry about cleaning up tomorrow. You—seem like you might have more to say about that?" Her voice lifted at the end of her sentence, matching her brows as she looked up at him.
"She was—a big part of my life for a long time." His jaw tightened, trying to hold back a verbal rockslide. He could say so much about his long, complicated history with Pansy Parkinson. In holding it all in, what eventually slipped out sounded bitter. "She fucked off to France with Daphne Greengrass after the war. Something about cutting out bad influences."
"That's not fair to you."
Of all the things she could have said, Hermione picked the thing that bore straight through the emotional debris trying to make a mess of his new shop. She watched him as he swallowed, then spoke before he could gather his thoughts.
"You did an excellent job furnishing this place without her," she said, smiling, sliding her arms around his waist. "It's very orderly. Very you. And once you finish filling it with stock, hire a clerk, perhaps, it'll be a real shop."
It sounded remarkably simple coming from her lips like that.
"It will be. And it's mine."
"I'm proud of you."
Pride. A slippery, finicky thing. A question skittered through his thoughts, chasing the rush of contentment. What mattered more: the pride or the person he'd earned it from? He'd once contorted himself to earn his father's pride, only his father's. Later, he would have been grateful to earn it from anyone, validation for work he'd done to better himself, behave differently. But now, he couldn't imagine wanting to earn anyone's pride more than he wanted Hermione's. He couldn't decide if that was a dangerous thing or not.
He didn't mind a little danger. He'd lived with—survived—much worse. This danger felt like excitement, like a thrill that reminded him of his own mortality. Gods, he loved her.
He needed to make another trip to the Malfoy vaults. Perhaps trying to wait for Italy or the perfect moment was a fantasy. Maybe he'd been waiting for the right moment to propose in the same way he'd been waiting for the right moment with his parents. He could make his own moments, engineer their rightness for himself.
He disentangled her arms from his waist, pulling her towards the shop's backroom.
"What will you keep back here?" Hermione asked as she let her fingers trail down his arm, stepping away, examining the space.
"I'll put up some shelves. I'll keep books, periodicals, ingredients. Cover the walls." He turned on his heel, finding her watching as he appraised the room. "I won't have to turn our spare room into a brewer's dungeon any longer."
Hermione made a show of examining the bare walls, taking several careful steps in an arc, orbiting him this time. She pivoted, slow.
"But I like watching you brew."
"Do you?"
Hermione pursed her lips before a light laugh escaped, the first indication that she'd had a couple of drinks throughout the evening. He'd had some, too. The room felt warm, full despite its complete barrenness. His love, her pride, his heart, her head; they ate up all the free space.
She didn't answer immediately. She continued her arc: careful steps, slowly moving closer. A spiral, a degrading orbit, a destination.
"Why do you like watching me brew, love?" He had to ask, he couldn't stop himself.
"You're so focused." Another step closer, spiraling. "When you brew, it's your whole world. And you pour everything you have into it." She stepped again, glancing him, a sideswipe. "All your brain power, your dexterity, your creativity, your time." Another step, a turn, objects colliding.
"That doesn't sound all that compelling," he teased, hands skating up her sides as she came to a halt, chest to chest with him.
"Sometimes you look at me like that, too."
"I'd wager more than sometimes." He fisted her curls, hand disappearing in the softest bramble imaginable. A noise spilled from her throat, high pitched, almost whimpered. She dragged her fingertips up his left thigh, over his hip, coming to rest on his belt.
"How am I looking at you right now, Hermione?"
—
Draco tried not to fidget as he watched Hermione decide between dresses in fuschia and ivory. She adamantly refused to consider any fabrics even remotely resembling Hogwarts house colors, determined to present herself as neutral as possible.
This was Draco's third Christmas with her—if he counted the one in 2002 when they didn't technically spend Christmas together but so much had happened that it felt worth counting. He tried to hold onto that thought, the pleasantness of another holiday with her. He armed himself with it, battling his nerves.
Draco, nervous in a bad, unproductive way.
Hermione, nervous in a buzzing, frantic way.
Neither fully prepared for a meal with his parents, if Draco had to guess.
He swallowed, watching her debate her options as she stood casually, debilitatingly beautiful, in her bra and knickers.
On any other day it would have been a criminally distracting offense, but Draco forced himself to focus.
This dinner with his parents was his chance, and he would only have one opportunity to get it right. He'd already come too close to losing them, constantly teetering on the edge. His father had nearly died.
The relief Draco felt when they'd agreed to dine with him and Hermione had settled his resolve. Resolve wrapped in nervousness, in trepidation, but in determination, too.
He would do anything to make this work. He'd already failed his father once, a family account he'd let flounder and fail and then had ripped from his grip when he'd said too much, at the wrong time, offending. Enough time had passed—a year, in fact—for Draco to show his parents that he could still be a proper, if modern, heir to the Malfoy Estate.
Draco stood as Hermione slipped the fuschia dress over her head. He began buttoning his shirt, pleased he'd opted for charcoal trousers and that her final choice didn't necessitate he change. He stepped up behind her, fastening his cufflinks as she examined herself in the dresser mirror.
With tremendous effort, he did not look at the valet box resting atop the dresser. He'd intentionally pulled his cufflinks from it while Hermione had been in the closet selecting dresses. If he looked, she would look. And if she looked, she'd find the ring he pulled from his family vault—again. And hopefully, for the last time.
Keeping it in the flat already posed a risk, what with how nosy and prone to reorganization Hermione could be. A part of him wanted to reach for it, right there. It was Christmas day, after all. It could be her gift. Maybe this could be his moment in the making.
She turned before he did something impulsive, her back to the dresser, her chest to his. She placed a hand on his, stopping his action as he pushed metal through cotton.
"You don't have to."
She looked down at his cuffs, brows drawn together. When she finally looked back up at him, she wore a face of concern, but determination. She'd spent the whole day in a sort of nervous flutter; seeing this level of resolve felt important, monumental, in a way.
"Wear cufflinks?"
If he'd know what she intended, he might have stopped her. But she caught him off guard, nimble fingers rolling his sleeve, dropping his cufflink on the dresser. Before he had the wherewithal to react, she'd exposed his left forearm, a dark shadow staring at them from beneath his concealment charms.
He stared at her, staring at it. Even obscured and nothing but a shadow, knowing it was there was the worst part. It took him one slow blink to come to his senses. He tried to pull away.
"You don't have to hide it. I know it's there."
Against his better judgment, his arm went limp in her hands. Perhaps this was a fight he'd been waiting to lose.
"You could remove it, too, if you don't like looking at it. Instead of just glamouring it everyday."
Tendons flexed in his arm but he did not pull back.
"You know I can't."
Hermione sighed. She lifted her hand. Carefully, as if approaching a wounded animal, she pressed two fingers to the inside of his elbow, a light touch with her fingertips. Lighter still, slowly, she let her fingers trail down his arm, over the glamour and the brand beneath it, to his wrist, and back to his hand, where she anchored him in place.
"You punish yourself over it every day." She sounded so sad.
"I do not."
"Then remove it. Your potion could do it." Hermione didn't often raise her voice, didn't often snap. But her tone sharpened, cut with precision. "Either remove it or wear it like it doesn't own you. But this? Long sleeves, a blurred brand? I'm not—ashamed of you. You know that right?"
He couldn't place why he made the connection, couldn't quite rationalize why, of all the things that could come to mind standing there with her, a memory of Azkaban swallowed him up. No longer standing with her in their bedroom, but sitting in a cell: one hundred and five days in isolation. He shivered, damp stone walls and stinging salt air clinging to him, even now, years later.
"I know you're not ashamed of me," he said, seeking his anchor in her hand. "Are you going to Gryffindor me right now?" He tried to smile, or smirk, or otherwise twist his lips to form a shape that wasn't a frown or a grimace of the echo of a scream.
The smile she returned barely qualified as such, an equally failed attempt at avoiding frowns.
"I think so," she said, lifting her wand. "May I?"
He inhaled, determined not to feel the sting of salt. He had no choice, not really. He'd never been capable of denying her. Never wanted to. He dipped his chin, a verisimilitude of a nod.
Before he could blink, she'd cast a finite incantatem on his concealment charms. Barely pausing, she shifted to his other arm, unhooking the cufflink, depositing it on the dresser, and rolling his sleeve to the elbow. She stepped back in the scant space between her back and the dresser, pressing against it, examining her work.
His forearms felt foreign, exposed, a part of him he'd hidden away for years. She placed a palm flat against his chest, drawing his attention away from the prickling unease of exposure.
"I'm optimistic," she said. "I am. I think this dinner has the potential to be really, really good for us. But as much as I believe this dinner can go well"—she looked down at his Dark Mark and his eyes followed hers, really looking at it for the first time in a very long time—"I also think they should have to face the consequences of their actions. You don't have to make the terrible thing they put you through easy on them."
He opened his mouth.
"And I swear to Merlin, Draco Malfoy, if you try and tell me one more time how you wanted to be branded at the time I will hex you, dinner be damned."
He closed his mouth.
Then opened it again. "Are—are you weaponizing me?"
She clearly hadn't expected that, breath whooshing out of her.
"Maybe. Or perhaps I'm liberating you." She cast a glance around the room, focus catching in several places before she finally found his face again, contrition seeping in, overtaking that confident determination she'd worn mere moments before. "Your relationship with your parents and with your past and—all that. It's complicated, I know. And I've realized that I pushed, probably more than I should have. It feels so much like an impossible situation. I'm just—I'm trying to figure out what's possible. I want to help and I don't think I know how."
What could he say to that? Her effort might be misplaced, but then again, it might not. How could either of them know, really?
She cracked a tiny smile that shined light through the shadows cast between them.
"Besides—you look quite attractive like that." Her smile cooled, twisting to a smirk, something sly. "I like your arms."
That, of all things, such a light and ridiculous thing to say on the heels of what they'd just been wading through together, snapped him out of the weighted melancholy trying to smother him. He lifted his arms, braced them on the dresser, on either side of her frame. He leaned closer.
"Is that so?"
She tried to laugh, but it caught in her throat. "Don't look so smug. You know you're distractingly attractive. This isn't news. Especially not after two years."
He failed. His eyes flicked towards the valet box. The ring was right there and Hermione was right here.
"Two years is a long time," he said, voice low, almost croaking.
Urgency seized him. They were about to throw themselves off a cliff, descend into a valley and prostrate themselves at his parents' feet. It could go terribly. Monumentally terribly. He could make this moment before all that theirs. In their bedroom, living their lives, overcoming the littles things that took up so much space.
Hermione swallowed. "It is a long time."
"Twice what I had with Astoria."
"One less than what I had with Ron."
"Hermione—"
"I found it earlier." Her eyes darted to the left and it was an unmistakable motion, even though the valet box sat out of her line of sight. "I didn't open—I didn't look—but I saw—"
"Hermione—"
"Ask me after."
Draco blinked.
"After?"
"After we've done this. After we've had a civil meal with your parents." Her chest expanded, a resolved breath. "Ask me after."
—
Topsy greeted them at the Floo when they arrived at Malfoy Manor, a friendly welcome. Hermione seemed unfazed, or perhaps unaware.
"You seem tense—well, more tense," she said as they followed Topsy to the dining room.
"We weren't greeted by the master of the estate. We're being escorted by an elf—"
"Don't demean Topsy—"
"—That's not what I mean, Hermione. It's a social custom. He's—they're—flouting it."
Hermione frowned, pace faltering for a half step.
"That doesn't necessarily mean anything," she said, optimism soaking every word. He would call her naive if he didn't know her so well. He knew when she forced something, when she intended to manifest it into existence by her sheer, outstanding willpower.
He reached for her hand, cooling the heat in his chest with a fresh gulp of air.
"You know what's strange?" he asked. "You spend more time here than I do, these days."
Her hand pulsed in his: a silent acknowledgement.
There was no ceremony when they reached the dining room doors. Topsy simply cracked them open with her elf magic and led them inside. Draco might have preferred another moment to collect himself, to prepare himself to cross the boundary between before this meal and during it, leading soon to after. He clung to the idea of after.
Lucius and Narcissa sat at the formal dining table, sipping wine from crystal goblets. Draco's gaze caught on the hors d'oeuvres service already presented on the table.
The dining room itself looked lovely; a fifteen foot fir sat where the buffet table normally lived. Garland stretched between archways. Charmed snow floated and swirled at the ceiling. Candles flickered everywhere, on every possible surface. The fireplace roared with a warm, orange glow. The whole scene felt bright, warm and sparkling. It was quite ruined by the dread that trickled down Draco's back.
Narcissa stood, smiling her perfect society smile in greeting.
Draco saw the exact moment her gaze landed on his attire, on his rolled sleeves: first his right, then an immediate switch to his left. He couldn't recall a time when he'd ever let his mother see his mark, not since the war. He tried not to flinch, not to squirm, not the reach over and shove his sleeve down.
She blinked away the tension that formed between her brows, one hand resting carefully on the back of her chair. He watched her grip loosen, a conscious uncoiling of whatever emotion had just seized her.
Lucius remained seated, but his eyes tracked from Draco, to Hermione, and back again. Slowly, and with a stiff sort of motion, he nodded a greeting.
"Son," he said, jaw barely moving. "Ministry Representative Granger."
Hermione's hand clenched in his before it dropped as she inhaled.
"Hello," she said, only the tiniest waver poking through her armor. "You may call me Hermione. The formality is hardly necessary." She pivoted her gaze from Lucius to Narcissa. "Your dining room looks lovely."
Narcissa's smile shifted, closer to genuine than forced. "Thank you. Please, sit."
Draco pulled a seat out for Hermione across from his mother, where he usually sat. He then took his place at the head of the table, opposite Lucius at the other end. He resisted the temptation to comment on the fact that his parents had not waited for their arrival to take their own seats. That could be a slight Hermione need not know about if she didn't recognize it.
Hermione said something about decorative charms. Narcissa responded in kind. Their voices seemed to roll around the hollow spaces between crystal and china. The distance between Draco's seat at one end of the table and Lucius's seat at the other felt comically large, divided by an obstacle course composed of serving platters and silver.
Outside of his unintended half-meal spent with them in November when he asked for this dinner, it occurred to Draco that he had not dined with his parents for nearly two months.
Tilly cracked into the room beside him, delivering his soup service.
"Thank you, Tilly," he said. "Milly sends her wishes for the holiday season."
Draco ignored the scrape of a fork against a salad plate, looking instead at Hermione, who offered him a small, warm smile. He watched as her forefinger bobbed up and down, not quite tapping the table, but a close, considering thing. Then she spoke.
"Is there anything we can convey to Milly for you the next time we're at the Nott Estate?" Hermione asked.
Draco's chest flooded with pride. Even in a pit of snakes, she refused to be anyone but herself. Gods, did he love her for it. He used that sensation, swirling in his chest, to buoy him through several uninspired courses.
His parents served them a fine meal, lovely on a normal day, but hardly something he would have expected for a special occasion. Particularly not after having been subjected to so many extravagant meals with them in the last year—blatant attempts to curry his favor. He'd not warned Hermione to expect opulence, uncertain how the evening would fare, and he felt grateful for that decision.
He hoped above all else that she did not know or notice the unspoken insult presented with Cornish Hen and haricot verts. His bloom of pride settled as attempts at broken conversation stalled. He felt the shift in Hermione's tone as her irritation grew.
It was a subtle thing; she kept it well hidden. If his parents could see past their dislike of her they would see nothing but a gracious, grateful, smiling guest at their table, trying so very hard to impress, to carry on a conversation longer than the series of syllables required to dismiss her attempts. But Draco saw her cracks, her frustration, her desperate need to succeed.
"Do you and Mr. Malfoy have any plans for the New Year, Mrs. Malfoy?" Hermione asked, voice so painfully formal that it stirred a physical sensation inside Draco, desperate to offer her his hand, or his arm, some kind of support. But the table stretched too long and she sat too far.
"We'll be in France," Narcissa said.
"I love France. Paris?"
"Yes, of course."
Hermione smiled, held it in place several beats too long, and then looked down at her plate. She pushed a slice of chicken with her fork.
"Hermione's family has vacationed in France several times—a favorite of theirs," Draco tried.
Lucius's brows lifted, meeting Draco's eyes, before he pointedly did not respond. Narcissa only made the quietest of acknowledging noises. She glanced at Lucius, then back at Hermione. She offered a small smile and said, "How lovely."
They weren't even trying. He hadn't expected a royal welcome, but something—anything—would have been more promising than condescending stares and implied eye rolls at Hermione's attempts to converse and his attempts to prolong conversation as long as possible.
It struck him suddenly.
Draco wanted to scream. He wanted to crack the fucking dining room table straight down the center and leave them to clean up the mess. He looked at Hermione again, who still hadn't torn her gaze from her plate, staring very intently at it as if a Cornish Hen might provide her with more successful conversation topics.
The many and varied things Draco wanted to say, needed to say, knocked and pounded and battered at his skull, demanding attention, demanding he pick one of them. Once upon a time, he would have pushed them back, silenced those wishful words, and suffered in silence.
This time would be different.
"Do you think—Mother, Father—that you might try to employ the outstanding social etiquette I know you are capable of? We are trying."
Neither of them answered. But when Lucius's silver met the tablecloth, both knife and fork returned to their resting positions—Draco realized only then that his father's meal remained as uneaten as Hermione's, as his own—he knew he'd said the wrong thing.
It had burst out of him: years and years of indignation, of offense he could no longer stomach. He'd regurgitated it, sour with bile and stinging his throat, all over their dinner table, effectively ruining their meal.
Lucius set his cloth serviette aside, pushed his china away, and placed his elbows on the table, fingers steepled just beneath his chin.
"Am I to take from this petulant outburst that the outstanding social etiquette we have employed in allowing this woman to join us at our dinner table on a holiday is not sufficient for your childish wants?"
Draco had a ring in a valet box back at their flat.
A future waiting for him. After. After a civil meal. He had to survive this, suffer this, for her. His throat had closed up, from shame or guilt or fury. He couldn't tell the feelings apart.
Narcissa filled the silence just as Draco broke his gaze from his father's grey glare to find Hermione, jaw clenched and looking just as shocked as Draco felt. Perhaps moreso: she'd been optimistic, after all.
"It's not—personal, Miss Granger. Not as it has been in the past. But the matters of an Estate"—Narcissa cleared her throat, a delicate sound—"Draco is our only child, and he carries two pureblood lineages in his veins, are you aware of that?"
Hermione's shoulders shifted, squaring, as she faced down Narcissa Malfoy in her own home.
"Yes, Mrs. Malfoy. I am aware of Draco's past, and of your implications."
"You are not ignorant, then?" Lucius asked, dropping his forearms to the tabletop, fists forming. "You realize what you will cost him? Social status, a fortune, his family name. Generations, centuries, of history and tradition? You know and you simply don't care? You wish to take my son from me? From his mother, his family?"
Draco suspected his father chose those words intentionally; he had to have known how deep they would cut. But even knowing they were likely said with intent, it still left Draco aching. He didn't want to lose the only familial support system he'd ever known. He didn't want to have to support himself financially, petulant as the thought might be. He didn't want to lose the opportunity to see his father's smile again, hear his mother's genuine laugh, realities that existed once, and surely, could exist again. But he felt all those things, all those wishes, slipping through his fingers like the sand in an hourglass.
And even as he thought those fatalistic thoughts, Hermione spoke: level, calm, with only the faintest trace of a quake around the edges.
"That's why we're here, Mr. Malfoy. This doesn't have to be a zero sum game."
"And what, pray tell, does that mean?" Lucius snapped.
Draco watched Hermione's confidence falter, a flush rising up her chest. If he'd known the answer to Lucius's question he would have jumped in. But Draco did not know what a zero sum game was, either.
"It's—a theory, mathematical, I think—about gains and losses relative to—what I mean to say is that you can still have a relationship with Draco, regardless of his relationship with me."
"How munificent of you, allowing us a relationship with our own son."
"Lucius," Narcissa began, perhaps an attempt to cut off the sharp turn towards a snarl his tone had taken. Her eyes were wide, volleying from one side of the table to the other: from her son to her husband.
Lucius continued, voice booming through the dining room. "He is my son. He is my legacy." Lucius shifted his focus away from Hermione, landing on Draco. "I am fully prepared to revoke access to your accounts should this dalliance continue any longer. It has gone on long enough."
Draco felt like he might be sick, white hot flames licking at the inside of his skin, boiling the contents of his stomach. Hermione sat back against her chair.
"Lucius," Narcissa said again, her own voice sharp this time.
Lucius switched targets again, back to Hermione. "Do you have any idea, girl, what I've done to protect my son, to preserve this family? In the war alone—"
The flames pushed words from Draco's throat, a dragon breathing syllables and sounds.
"The war? I was barely more than canon fodder. You had me branded—"
"Some things couldn't be helped—he would have killed us all." The snarl that tore from Lucius's throat felt more animal than human, the most visceral, the most vicious Draco had ever seen his father, war included.
Draco sucked in air, more fuel for the flames. He'd overheated: limbs charred, skin seared, bones burnt to a hollow crisp. If he didn't control it, he'd simply burn to ash.
The first time, it happened like this:
Draco wanted to believe his father. He wanted to believe that perhaps a sense of preservation, of wanting to keep all of them alive, drove him to make the many and varied terrible and unforgivable decisions he'd made during the war. Draco wanted to believe that the potential loss of his only son mattered as much to him as the uncharacteristically extreme emotion pouring from his face suggested.
Draco wanted the burning to stop.
After. If they could just reach after.
He had a ring in his valet box.
Occlumency came almost embarrassingly easy, as if waiting for its opportunity to freeze the flames. It took him by surprise, how easily he called upon it, encasing him in ice. He sank quickly, senses dulling, fires dying. Fog clouded his brain, blurring the bright lights of his anger, driving out impulses to shout, transforming it into an all encompassing will to survive.
He sank too far, too fast, completely dulled, errant emotion chipped away and discarded. He felt his posture settling, straight but relaxed. His fists unclenched, his chest, too. He inhaled. Exhaled. Met his father's eyes.
He wanted this to stop. Needed it to stop. His voice emerged from his throat as dull as his senses.
"I don't wish to argue, Father."
Lucius lifted his chin, muscles around his eye tightening, evident even from a distance. Then, slowly, carefully, Lucius lifted his serviette from the table and draped it over his lap again.
That felt like peace. Or a ceasefire. Or a stalemate.
Draco looked to Hermione, confused in a dim corner of his mind over why her eyes looked misty, why she looked so devastatingly disappointed.
He only realized as she stood, inexplicably leaving the table, that he hadn't addressed the point Lucius made about his accounts: the ultimatum about their relationship.
He stumbled through the fog in his mind, seeking clear skies, heat flooding his system again, trying to melt his Occlumency.
This wasn't how he'd wanted this meal to go. Not even close.
He stood from his own seat, following after Hermione. But she had already gone. And he'd burned up.
