Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in, nice and deep and slow. Focus on the feel of the ground under you. Focus on the brush of your clothes against your skin. Focus on the smell of dusty books. Focus on the crackling of the fire. Focus on the smoothness of the wood under your palm. And try not to cry.

Hidden in the library, reclined against the mahogany table by the red curtain, Harry repeated those words like a mantra, the same strategy he had used to keep himself from crying ever since his world had come tumbling down on him less than a day before. He tried to ground himself in the physical world around him, focusing on the objects he could see, feel, touch, smell, or hear to bring him back into himself, to bring him back from the brink of breaking down. Anytime he heard himself draw in that small, sharp breath, the very signal that the tears were threatening to flood forth, he closed his eyes and tried his hardest. It had worked the first few times, but now— now it was becoming increasingly useless. Now that little breath came every few minutes, threatening to topple him over the edge.

He had excused himself from the dinner immediately after clearing his entrée, not even bothering to stay around for dessert. Because dessert— well, dessert was usually when champagne was poured and toasts were made, and tonight there were sure to be a lot of those. Because Lady Amelia Granger, in her usual predilection for hospitality, had thrown an enormous engagement party to both announce and celebrate it to their social circle (hoping to inspire them with either jealousy or awe, Harry hadn't decided). And Harry didn't think he could ground himself without crying if he had to hear a single one of those toasts cheering on Draco's marriage to someone who wasn't him.

But what was he thinking? He never would've been able to marry him, anyway. But a part of him had always harbored a small fantasy that they might end up like Sirius and Remus, 'bachelors' for life but with a deeper love and commitment than most married couples would ever know. He had been stupid to wish it, though, that much was clear now. Stupid, stupid boy.

And there it was again, clear as a bell, that little breath piercing through his nose and into his lungs. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath in, nice and deep and slow. Focus on the feel of the ground under you. Focus on—

The creaking of the heavy library door as it opened brought Harry out of his recitation. He opened his eyes and blinked away the beginnings of tears to see who was there.

"Hi," said Hermione softly, giving him a sad smile as she showed herself in. She closed the door behind her, careful to make the least possible noise.

"Oh, it's you," Harry said, relieved that he would not have to give explanations to anyone that wasn't one of his oldest friends. "I should've known."

"Yes, well," Hermione said, walking toward him and reclining against the table beside him just as he was, "we always seem to end up here, don't we?"

"That we do," Harry agreed.

They stayed in silence for a few seconds, watching the hearth across the library sizzle and pop with the dying wood.

"Care for a drink?" Hermione said, turning her waist slightly so she could reach the whiskey decanter on the far side of the table.

"Sure, now that you're here to join me."

Hermione reached for two of the small, squat glasses by the decanter, and took the stopper out of the bottle's neck. "I'm surprised you weren't nursing one already."

"I was shaking too badly. I would've dropped it," Harry said.

"Yeah, I know what you mean," sighed Hermione. She finished pouring two fingers of the whiskey into each glass and replaced the stopper and then the decanter back where it had been. "Cheers," she said sarcastically. This is a toast I can drink to, Harry thought, and held out his glass. The two glasses met with a bright clink in the middle, and then they both drank from theirs.

Harry took a sip and then expelled a shaky breath. The glass still shook slightly in his hands, but he felt calmer now. At least now he wouldn't drop it.

He looked toward Hermione, and was surprised to see that she had downed all of her whiskey in one swig. He raised an eyebrow. "Taking the marriage well, aren't we?"

"Don't get me started," Hermione said, setting the glass back beside the decanter with a little too much forth. The corners of her mouth were damp with the remnants of the whiskey. "Can you believe that, of all of the fifty-plus guests my mother invited here to martyr me, Cedric Diggory was the only one with enough decency not to congratulate me?"

"Well, he has always been a sensible chap," Harry shrugged, taking another sip from his glass.

"Yeah, well, he probably saw my mother's delirious grin and knew that anything that made her so happy must be making me rather miserable."

"Perceptive."

"That he is," Hermione said. She looked longingly toward the whiskey decanter once more, but decided against it with a slight shake of her head. One drink would steady her slightly, but two might make her silly. And she felt humiliated enough as it was.

"Your mother let you leave the table?" Harry said after another pause.

"I didn't ask her. I've been a good little girl up to now: I sat there, I put my napkin on my lap, I cut my food into little pieces and chewed with my mouth closed, and I stayed all the way through to the toast. I just didn't make it to dessert. But I asked Cedric to tell anyone who asked that I had retired momentarily with a spell of indigestion."

"Smart girl."

"Fed up girl," Hermione countered.

For a second, Harry dreaded the moment when Hermione would inevitably ask him what he was doing taking refuge in the library, but no such inquiry came. Hermione, like him, seemed to be too far lost in her own head to bother cracking into Harry. It was only when she couldn't take the storm brewing inside it that she burst out into speech once more.

"I just can't believe it," she said, her voice cracking. "I mean, I do, she's always wanted to marry me off, but a part of me still refuses to accept that this time it is truly happening. And I don't want this." Her voice was positively quivering now, laden with the same tears Harry had been battling all evening to hold back. "I mean, Draco is a good man, but I don't want this, and it's all happening too fast, and—"

She broke off there, and the tremble in her voice dissolved into an earnest sob. Harry put a reassuring hand on her back, rubbing slightly in circular paterns he hoped were soothing. "I know, Hermione, but it's going to sort itself out somehow, I promise." Even as he said it, he wondered: was he trying to reassure her, or himself?

"No, it won't, not this time," Hermione wept, burying her face in her hands. "Not this time, Harry, and I cannot feel even a smidge of hope that it will."

"Believe me, Hermione, I'm just as miserable as you are."

Hermione recoiled from his hand and whipped around to face him, her face contorted with anger. Her face rose into a feverish pitch. "How could you say that, Harry? How could you possibly be? You're not the one being forced to get married!"

It was that, and not the toast, that finally pushed Harry over the edge. "No, Hermione, I'm not, but I'm the one being forced to see the man he loves be married off to someone else!" he almost screamed before dissolving into the bawling he had been trying to stave off all day.

Hermione stood in stunned silence as the full force of what Harry had said hit her, the crying gone from her body. "Oh," she said softly, and now it was her hand that found a comforting spot on Harry's back. "Harry, I'm sorry, I didn't know."

"How could you?" Harry eked out between the sobs that racked his chest violently. "No one did. We were careful with that, careful for a whole year. But no, I couldn't keep it in my pants and I forgot to lock the door, and then Lucius walked in, and he knew, and that's why he was so quick to accept, and— and—"

"Harry, you're rambling," Hermione said, a shred of her usual self breaking through against her better wishes.

Harry, however, seemed to appreciate it. Taking heed of her words, he paused his words and gulped in a few breaths of air until they replaced the wails, until he could speak a bit more normally and not in tearful outbursts. "This is all my fault," he said, and Hermione was stricken by the self-loathing in his words. "It wasn't enough that I ran a useless risk by going back to his room right before breakfast, like some idiot teenager; no, I didn't stop there, but forgot to lock the door the one time I had to lock it. What an imbecile I am."

"You couldn't have known," Hermione said, her hand remaining on his back. "But I know what you mean."

"You don't," Harry snapped.

"Now you're being rude, Harry," Hermione said, peeling her hand off his back and crossing her arms over her chest. "I got caught too, and all because I ran out of the library like a stupid girl without looking to see if anyone was watching me. And, sure enough, I got caught by the one person who might."

Behind Harry's thick lenses and the blur of his tears, his green eyes betrayed some curiosity as he looked at Hermione. "You...?"

"Yes, me," Hermione huffed. "I had Cormac McLaggen walk in on a little rendezvous I orchestrated in the servants' staircase."

"I bet he wasn't too happy about that," said Harry with a dry laugh. He'd noticed Cormac's eyes lewdly trailing Hermione whenever he was around the two of them at the same time, and had deduced he had all but honorable intentions. "That explains a lot. One of my unanswered questions was why exactly Cormac had backed out of pursuing you and just proposed that you be married off to someone you're not even tangentially interested in. Well, knowing that he did it out of spite..." Another unanswered question, however, lingered in the back of Harry's mind. "Who were you meeting in the staircase, though?"

Even in the dim light of the fireplace, Harry thought he detected a faint blush creep into Hermione's cheeks. "Ron," she muttered. "Ron Weasley."

Despite himself, Harry's expression brightened. "The bibliophile handyman?"

"That's him."

"Well, whatever book it was you ultimately chose to recommend him, it must have been an outrageously good pick," Harry said, calling back to memory their exchange in this same library, against this same table, all those weeks ago. The same memory must have returned to Hermione, for she too mustered a slight smile.

"Actually, he did like it. You were right to suggest that I pick a book I saw myself in."

"And did he see you in it too?"

"Just not in the character I'd hoped," Hermione said. The remembrance of her little spar with Ron in the rose garden sent a titter of laughter forth from her lips.

"Ah, well, you always run that risk," Harry shrugged. He looked at his friend as in a new light, observing her quizzically out of the corner of his eye.

Hermione noticed him staring. "What."

"Nothing, nothing," Harry said, raising his hands in mock defense. "The vindictive side of me loves that you're in love with someone your mother would hate."

"As if it could ever be otherwise."

"You are impossible, Hermione Granger. But really, I'm just pleased to see you happy. Even if, y'know..." he left the sentiment unended, because the words didn't need to be said: they hung there as painful reminders between them. Now they again became tangible.

"I know," sighed Hermione. Even so, she gave Harry a lopsided smile. "And I still think that you'd like him, too."

"Well, you'll have to bring him over round your new house once you and Draco marry. Because I think my chances of Lord Malfoy ever admitting me back into Ashcroft Manor are slim."

They shared in a laugh that was as self-aware as it was laced with pain. "It's awfully soon to be joking about this already," Hermione remarked.

The last of the fleeting laugh died on Harry's lips. "Yes, well, but what else is there to do?"

Stranded in the middle of an engagement party he did not want to be at (and even less wanted to be about him), Draco looked every bit as miserable as Orlando would expect a man shoved by surprise into an arranged marriage to look. Taking pity on his friend, he disentangled himself from Ms. Vane (an overbearing young lady his mother had hastily shoved him toward) and braved the sea of party guests amid which Draco was marooned.

"Fancy a walk?" he said when he reached him.

His words brought the sullen Draco out of a trance. "Yes, please," he said, the relief evident in his voice.

Orlando looped his arm around Draco's and propelled them both through the throng and out at the other end, where the front door was open so Gramsley could easily slip in and out to announce to guests when their carriages or cars had arrived to take them home. They walked past a small, funny-looking car that looked far too small for the humongous lady stepping into it and made the bend around the house to walk along its western wall and toward the little path leading to the rose garden, a spot Orlando knew no guests would find in the dark of the night and where they could talk in peace. Because peace and quiet looked exactly like what Draco needed now.

Flanked by the rumor of a nearby fountain, Orlando led Draco away from the more open benches and toward a wooden gazebo at the far end of the garden, under which four garden chairs and a table were, meant for outdoor tea parties. It had been long since they'd hosted one, however, and the chairs were strewn with leaves and shriveled petals that had fallen off the roses that wove the gazebo serpentinely. Orlando dusted them off one of the chairs and took a seat. Draco did the same and, wrinkling his nose at the thin film of dust that covered his hand as he did it (and would no doubt get on his trousers too if he sat), reluctantly sat down as well.

"I thought you said we were walking," he said without looking at Orlando.

"Well, we walked here," Orlando shrugged. "Besides, that was really just an excuse to get you away from the horde. You looked like you needed it."

"I did," Draco admitted, and then, after a pause: "Thanks."

"It's what friends do, isn't it?" Orlando smiled slightly.

The silence settled over them, laced only with the hush of the fountain several steps back and the whistle of the wind as it ran through the gaps in the gazebo and rustled the leaves of the plants that adorned it. For a second, Orlando almost asked Draco whether he wanted to talk about it, but one quick glance at his friend's face made him decide otherwise. Draco was staring fixedly, too fixedly, at the center of the table between them, as if trying to keep himself focused on something to distract himself from all the things he didn't want to focus on. What worried him the most was that, in years and years of friendship, Orlando had never so much as seen a threat of crying venture forth on Draco's stoic facade. Now, his gray eyes were ominously watery.

The very sight of it scared him, and he hurried to crack a joke as if that would eradicate the threat: "I know it seems terrible right now, but trust me, Draco, my sister's sort of okay. You could do worse."

"Oh, she's a wonderful woman," Draco said, shifting his shoulders so that he wasn't sagging quite as much and was instead looking, if not at Orlando, past him. He shrugged. "It's just that I'm not much of a ladies' man."

"Oh," Orlando said dumbly. His next words began assembling on his tongue (but that doesn't matter, you need not be a casanova, I'm sure you can just get along and be fine)— and then what Draco meant, what he had truly meant, hit him like an anvil. "Oh."

"Well, now you know," Draco said, looking away from Orlando, but unable to resist the sour smile that appeared on his lips.

"What? But— I mean, I—" Orlando paused and tried to gather his next words carefully. Finally, he settled on declaring: "Well, it's good to know that I needn't be worried about you ravishing my sister."

Draco winced. "Did you really need to say ravishing, Orlando?"

"Sorry, sorry, I've been reading a bit too much Fanny Hill," Orlando said, the boyish grin Draco knew well splitting his face. It turned almost immediately into confusion. "But wait, if you didn't want to marry Hermione, then why—?"

"Let's just say my father didn't take the news with as much grace as you did," Draco said bitterly.

"Old Lucius," Orlando said, hoping his voice matched the disapproval Draco needed to feel supported.

"Blasted Lucius," Draco said through gritted teeth.

Orlando looked at Draco and rued that he couldn't do more to ease his pain. "Does Hermione know?"

"Whether she knows or not won't make a difference," Draco said hastily, turning away and staring off into the night. "It all has been decided anyway, hasn't it?"

"Even so, I've kept information from Hermione once," Orlando said, already rising to his feet. He was sure that Hermione had deduced Cormac was at Rosebury with the object of courting her, but he still could not forgive himself for failing to let her in on it despite his two foiled attempts. "I need to tell her, Draco. You understand, don't you?"

"Well, no functional marriage, arranged or otherwise, was ever built on lies," Draco weighed in cynically.

"Will you be quite alright on your own?"

"Yes, go," Draco waved him off. "I'd like to be alone in the peace and quiet for a while, anyway."

"Thank you!" Orlando exclaimed. He almost kissed Draco's forehead before thinking better and bolting back along where he'd come from, retracing the small gravel path back to where it branched off from the main one around Rosebury House.

He almost didn't see Harry walking aimlessly about, and he wouldn't have if Harry hadn't hailed him with a wave of his hand.

"Harry! Just who I was looking for!" Orlando panted. "You wouldn't happen to know where Hermione is, would you?"

"In the library," Harry said, already looking toward the rose garden path Orlando had come up from. Draco had disappeared from the party, and surely Orlando, even eccentric as he was, hadn't been meandering about the grounds on his own. Harry had an inkling that both Draco's whereabouts and Orlando's companion were mysteries with the same solution, and had already resolved to go down the rose garden path on his own.

But Orlando, in a state as he was, didn't catch on to any of this. "Thank you!" he chirped, and continued his darting race back into Rosebury House, leaving Harry to walk with a concrete direction in mind.

Gramsley's eyes widened as Orlando zoomed past him and through the front door, but Orlando didn't even slow down to pay him the proper pleasantries: like Harry, he was a man with a destination, and he was determined to arrive there with as few detours as possible. He almost broke down the doors as he crashed into the library, startling Hermione, who had lingered by the table under the red velvet drapes.

"Hermione!" Orlando exclaimed, almost triumphantly.

"Keep it down!" Hermione shushed him, glancing frantically around the library. "In case you hadn't noticed, I don't really fancy being found!"

Orlando lowered his voice somewhat, but he continued to bound toward Hermione, almost bouncing off the carpet with the fill of the news he had to finally deliver. He waited until he was just a foot away to speak.

"Hermione," he began, trying to seem somber but his words tumbling out too quickly to really preserve that illusion. "Hermione, I have to tell you— you have to know— oh, I'll just spit it out— Draco's not in love with you!"

To his disappointment, Hermione didn't look surprised in the slightest; instead, she sighed exasperatedly and clapped a hand to her forehead. "I know, you buffoon," she said, giving him the big-sister stare he hadn't seen in years. "He's in love with Harry."

"Oh," Orlando blurted dully for the second time that evening. Now his mind hopped back to Harry as he'd seen him on the gravel path, and immediately began to rush through the labyrinth of things that were beginning to become clear to him. "Oh, shit."

"Oh shit is right," said Hermione.

Orlando scrutinized his sister's face, trying to pick out any traces of disappointment or even mild unsettlement and puzzled when he couldn't find them. "You don't seem too upset."

"Of course not. I'm not in love with him either."

And then, for the third time that evening: "Oh." And again came the pause as Orlando's thoughts, racing a mile a minute, rearranged themselves into coherence. "But who, then?"

Hermione almost wanted to mess with him, to say the name of some man she knew they both found unpleasant just to get a chuckle at watching Orlando's jaw drop. But she decided against it: she was in no mood for jokes, though she knew to speak his name would only hurt. "Someone mother would hate."

Her little brother, however, surprised her by being more perceptive than she had ever expected from him. "It's Ron, isn't it?"

Hermione lifted her gaze. "How did you know?"

Orlando ignored her and spoke to himself. "It all makes sense now," he muttered. "Why he asked about you and Cormac at the hunt the other day. Why you took longer to come into the library for Continental."

"Okay, Mr. Holmes, are you done yet, or am I going to have to cringe through this any longer?"

"Sorry, sorry," Orlando said, shaking his head slightly like a dog shaking off water. "I just feel like I'm missing something. I'm sure Cormac is a part of this somehow."

"Chief orchestrator. He caught me and Ron the other day. I don't want to talk about it."

"Understandable," Orlando said. He wouldn't press— for the moment. He'd wait to get the full story when the wound wasn't so raw. It didn't take long for his face to brighten again. "But Hermione, then this isn't so bad! Can't you see? You'll marry Draco, sure, and it'll be terrible for the moment, but then you'll move into your home together, and you can bring Ron and Harry along! You can hire Ron so it all looks in order, and Harry can be a frequent guest, and—"

"That all sounds lovely, Orlando," Hermione cut him off, "but I'm afraid this 'and the four of them lived happily ever after' business is a bit too much like a fairy tale."

"But why not?" Orlando pouted. "I truly don't see what's stopping you."

"You're forgetting one crucial detail: Draco is the heir to the Earldom of Malfoy. That means that he has to live in Ashcroft Manor, with his father, until Lucius dies and he becomes the Earl. And I'm entirely certain that, so long as Lucius lives, he is never letting Harry set a foot in Ashcroft ever again, not even for the Black reunions. And Ashcroft surely has its own handyman already— I can't replace the house staff until I am the lady of the house. So sure, that could happen, but with as long-lived as the Malfoys tend to be, it could be a good forty or fifty years until it does. And I don't think it would be right to ask Ron or Harry to wait that long. I'd want Ron to be happy, and—"

But even as she said it, she knew she didn't fully mean it. Of course she'd want Ron to be happy, even if that meant that he'd have to share that happiness with someone else, but the mere thought of Ron's arm around the hearty waist of some country girl and not her own corseted one, the mere idea that Ron could push her even slightly out of his heart to make even the smallest room for another woman, hurt too much to bear. She ceased her talk and looked away, with all her attention turned to keeping herself from bawling. Beside her, Orlando seemed defeated too.

"I'm sorry," he said soberly, walking around her to wrap her in his arms. He was at least a head taller than her now, Hermione thought unconsciously, and the top of her head now came up only to the chin of the young man she was no longer sure she could call her little brother. In that moment, she was aware of the man he was becoming, and the boy he was leaving behind. That thought only made his arms around her seem more solid, and she returned the embrace. "I wasn't thinking, Hermione. You're right. And I'm sorry. I would do anything so that this didn't have to happen to you."

"But you can't," Hermione sniffled, pulling away from the hug and wiping at her eyes. "That's the worst part of the matter. You can't."

"I know," Orlando said, the impotence overwhelming. "But it doesn't mean I still wish you didn't have to hurt like this."

"I know," Hermione repeated.

Orlando allowed a brief pause to bloom in the sorrowful silence before his ever-helpful nature kicked back in. "I know I can't do anything about it in the long run, but can I do anything at all, however small, for you right now?"

"Could you leave me alone for a bit?" Hermione said. Her voice came out in a mouselike murmur. "I don't want you to see me cry."

Then it was that Orlando felt his heart shatter in his chest, looking at his sister —so proud, so intelligent, so self-sufficient, whom he had always admired— reduced to this mess because of their mother, and knowing he could do nothing about it. He was seized by the overwhelming impulse to wrap her in his arms once again, but the budding man once again won over the juvenile brother. She had asked for peace, and that was all he could give her.

"I'll ward off the guests," he assured her. "I'll make sure you have the library to yourself as long as you need it."

"Thank you," Hermione eked out.

Orlando hesitated, and then finally decided to lean forward and brush a light kiss to his sister's forehead before heading for the library door.

Hermione waited until she heard the door close to finally allow herself to break. Painfully aware of how much effort it was taking to hold up the damn, she finally allowed the flood to rush forth and rupture it, crack it, reduce it to rubble as the tears pushed out of the corners of her eyes and raced down her cheeks. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if she could squeeze herself into staying in one piece, and rocked back and forth slightly, allowing her body to sway in the movements of her despair like a helpless leaf trapped between gusts of wind.

Her eyes closed to try to at least abate the merciless flow of the tears, powerless against the typhoon-like force of her misery, she didn't see the face at the window behind her. A freckled face, a face that had lurked around Rosebury House all evening and peeked stealthily in through the windows to try to catch a glimpse of her. He was finally seeing her now, but it was nothing like what he would've wanted.

Because Ron was sure, entirely so, that his heart could break no more; watching Hermione cry alone in the library, however, his chest throbbed with the realization of how wrong he had been.