Boundless as the Dark
Part III.
"No, 'Ionie," he insisted, looking up at her as beseechingly as only a five-year-old could. "Daddy says that I can't. Spiders." His blue eyes got very round as he emphasized the word.
Hermione tried very hard not to roll her own eyes. "Exie, darling," she said, scooping him up into her arms and nuzzling his neck until he giggled and shrieked, "your Daddy isn't here." She gave him a conspiratorial wink and then spun around so that they were facing the public swimming pool and all its denizens, to show him that there was no room for spiders to lurk. Several other children Exie's age on up were running around on a patch of grass, screaming something to the effect of "I'll get my mummy's wand after you, Fossil-face!" The moment his eyes lighted upon the crowd, he began struggling against her and pointing, effectively distracted from his earlier misgivings about the pool. "Very well," she said, setting him on his feet, at which point he ran over to join the game. "And he's off," she said under her breath. A mother who was supervising the tornado pitch of little bodies took note of her newcomer and sought out his guardian. Hermione waved to her, recognizing a former classmate in Su Li, who waved back and then barked some reprimand at a boy with darker hair than Exie's.
Satisfied that her godson was in capable hands, Hermione stretched her arms over her head and set about stripping down to her bathing suit to languish about in the sunshine, from under the liberal protection of sunblock, to work on a tan that always came quickly for her in her youth. At thirty, her melanin seemed to be revolting against her, but perhaps she could blame it on carrying Exie. Something about having a child with Weasley genes inside of her... it fairly convinced her that any of her own mother's Greek brownness had been effectively overridden. Even if such a theory disagreed with biology. She was a witch, after all. She could pick and choose which parts of Muggle science to follow. After all, everyone knew that certain species were never extinct as Muggles thought, and cancer could be cured with a simple anti-mutation draught.
She slid her feet back into her flip flop sandals and wrapped a fluffy beach towel around her waist to go buy an overpriced bottle of butterbeer and a witch's gossip rag because she seemed to have forgotten her current book on breakthroughs in potion brewing with particular emphasis on work both amino acids and full proteins. She was working on a 'Something Big,' as Draco derisively called it when she got into her frenzied projects at NeuroBrew and no one saw her for weeks. It had taken quite a lot of cajoling on Draco's part, literal and full-on begging on Ron's, and one puppy-dog look from Exie to convince her to take him for the day. She blamed Ron especially for making her forget her book, and it wasn't as if she could just leave the pool with Exie there to go get it, even if he was under Su Li's watchful eye. Damn them anyhow, being selfish enough to expect a godmother to take her godson-- who she happened to have given birth to-- out so they could have a day in.
She was halfway around the corner and well into the shade of a huge tree when she almost stepped on a little girl with dark curls and got her nose flattened against the chest of the man connected to said little girl's hand. Peeling herself backwards, she muttered, "Nice work, Granger. Not watching where you're going at all."
"I couldn't put it better myself."
The voice. She choked and looked up, spot-on deer-in-headlights (as if he'd get the reference). That voice that had haunted her most deeply repressed and also cherished thoughts since she was about fifteen. And Merlin, did he smell amazing.
"Er, afternoon, Zabini," she managed, only sounding slightly shaken up, all considering.
He cracked his crooked smile and eyed her choice in swim suit. She met his look, daring him to comment on it in front of his child. In the end, it didn't matter, for it was the little girl with the enormous blue eyes who beat him to the punch. "You got ducks on your boobies!" the girl exclaimed.
Rather than turning red, as she might have done even four years ago, Hermione knelt down and fixed the girl with a mock serious look. "Have I?" she asked in a very serious tone.
The girl let go of her father's hand and squinted back. "Yep, you do. That's nifty. My Mum doesn't got enough to--"
Blaise patted her on her head to stop her, laughing nervously to himself. Hermione looked up at him through her lashes, as if to say, 'Let me handle it, will you?' He raised his eyebrows and withdrew his hand, crossing his arms over his chest.
"I see you have broomsticks and Quaffles on your swimsuit," she said to the girl. "What do you think of that?"
The girl seemed to carefully consider her answer. "Well, my dad played 'Ditch and I like to ride around on my toy broomstick." She bobbed her head to confirm herself.
"Don't you think it's dangerous? Or scary?"
The girl shook her head furiously, her hair flying all over the place. "Oh, no. It's the funnest thing in the world." Hermione smiled broadly and looked up at Blaise again to see a similar grin on his face. Although, that may have had more to do with the impressive view he had down Hermione's cleavage. She wasn't going to split infinitives, though, and she was too focused on his adorable little girl to give it much consideration.
"Do you want to play Quidditch when you grow up?" Hermione asked.
The girl nodded fervently. "Oh, yes, oh, yes. I'm gonna play at Hogwarts for Slytherin-- Mum and Dad were both Slytherins. And Dad played on the Arrows in the 'fessionals. I got to play 'Ditch."
Hermione straightened back to her full height. The girl saw, from around Hermione's side as she stood up, the bunch of children playing on the grass. She glanced up at her father, he looked over to see Su Li monitoring the bunch and nodded his permission. "And she's off," he said to himself as she dodged a waiter serving lemonade to an old witch in pedal pushers and a cropped emerald robe, a brass lawn chair, and two teenage boys with matching blond mops of hair. "What's her name?" she asked as they watched his daughter's antics.
He smiled faintly with his eyes distant and even more warmly when he fixed his gaze on Hermione's face. "Noël," he replied simply. "Noël, because at Christmas her name is everywhere."
"That's wonderful. How is Pansy?" she inquired after who she supposed was the girl's mother. He had been seeing Pansy Parkinson about seven years ago, and Noël appeared to be about that old, not to mention that she had a bit of the doggish cast to her features.
He shrugged. "Last I talked to her directly she was in down Rio on break from the dig on the Amazon in May. I was over visiting Draco two weeks ago and caught the end of a conversation between them over the Floo, but it wasn't a very clear connection so I didn't catch much I could make out." He shrugged again. "I don't care. She left us five years ago to get her fingernails dirty in archaeology and she never looked back." He scratched the back of his head. "And anyway, I get Noël all to myself this way." He grinned, but it wasn't an entirely mirthful smile.
She nodded sympathetically. "Draco talks about her constantly. He misses her desperately. She was his best friend, you know. The only one of their little ring that stood by him when he came out."
"Oh, I know," said Blaise irritably. "And speaking of Draco, I left Noël with my mum for a few minutes to pop over to his and Ron's to see if maybe Exie wanted to come out with us. Of course, as I Apparate in, Ron is crossing the foyer stark naked on his way to the kitchen to get more chocolate syrup. I almost scream, he does scream. Draco comes running down the steps in his bathrobe to find me standing there, horrified, and Ron holding his hands over his private bits looking very red. So I say, 'You two are capable wizards. Could a Summoning Charm have caused you that much trouble?' and they look at me like I'm the crazy one." He threw his hands up in the air. "So I explained my idea about taking Exie out to the pool with Noël and I and Ron says, 'Oh, we already pawned him off on Hermione for the day.'"
Hermione blinked and it took her a moment or two to recover from the absolute deluge of words coming at her. She really was irrevocably obsessed with is voice. "I've never heard you say so much at once, I don't think," she said in measured tones. He cracked another nervous smile, a flash of white teeth against the dark tan of his skin. She stared straight ahead at his shirt for a moment before it registered that it was just a FCUK tee and it didn't say what she thought it said at first glance. "Muggle fixation?" she asked, gesturing to it.
He shook his head, then nodded. "Well, it's hard to explain, actually. I was dating this wonderful Muggle woman named Sophia, except on the fourth date she takes me to a football game and she's screaming as loud as anyone, and then at the nice French restaurant I take her to, she looks me square in the eye and says, 'I was born a boy. Does that weird you out?' Needless to say I got up and left. But I kept the shirt I bought her. It's a nice shirt. It shocks people."
"You're freakishly talkative today," she observed, adjusting the towel looped around her waist without breaking eye contact.
"Yeah, I can't figure out what it is. Maybe I was just knocked for a loop by seeing those parts of Weasley only Draco should be seeing." He turned very round eyes on her. "Hermione, it was frightening."
She shrugged. "I've seen Ron naked before. I didn't find it all together horrifying."
"But I'm a heterosexual male. It was horrifying."
"Well, he does have quite a big--"
He clamped his hand over her mouth and looked seriously into her eyes bracing her shoulder with is free hand. "I do not need to think of such things." She tried to say something but obviously he couldn't make out a word of it. "You're not going to talk about Ron Weasley's nether regions any more, are you?" An old wizard walking past caught that last bit and gave them both a very odd look. Blaise shooed the man on with a dark look. "Right?" She tried to say something again and again it was too muffled by his hand. "We understand?" She nodded and he let go.
"Circe," she hissed, bringing her hand to her jaw to massage a kink out of it, "could you have warned me, maybe, to what you were about to do? You think?" She frowned at him.
"Possibly." He shrugged. "So what have you been up to since you spilled coffee all over me?"
"Well, I carried to term Ron and Draco's kid. Actually, he's biologically mine and Ron's, but can you see me as a mother? Really?" She scoffed and didn't notice the accepting look he gave her. He'd seen how she was with his daughter. That seemed to him the mark of a good mother, and it was definitely more than Noël ever got from her own. "I'm an unofficial aunt fourteen times over before my thirty-first birthday, which is in three weeks. I live in a Muggle neighborhood now, not on Diagon Alley. Uh..." she trailed off, unable to think of anything else interesting that might have happened to her in the last seven years. "You?"
He pointed to the grass where Exie and Noël and one of Dean Thomas' two daughters (Hermione could never tell one from the other, and they were born three years apart) were engrossed in some discussion. "Well, a few weeks after the incident with the Arrows, Pansy comes over to my flat with a phial of blue liquid, sobbing, telling me she's pregnant and she doesn't know what to do. She graduates uni in June, she can't take care of a baby and finish off her thesis. So I become the quintessential single dad while she traipses around the world digging up bones and desecrating graves. I haven't seriously dated anyone since, since I don't think Noël really counts as a date." He grimaced at his own story and laughed in that self-deprecating way only a devoted father can. "That sounds really pathetic, doesn't it?"
Hermione shrugged but nodded. "Yeah, it kind of does. But no more pathetic than my story. At least you aren't Fag-Hag Extraordinaire to the point where you donate an egg and nine months to your best friends' drive to have a real family."
"If I had a lesbian couple for friends I would completely volunteer my sperm," he maintained looking moderately cheerful.
She shook her head. "It doesn't count, Zabini, darling. You're not the one who has to squeeze a watermelon-sized thing through a hole the size of a lemon nine months down the road, when the whole idea no longer sounds appetizing and you just want to claw out the eyes of whichever one of the boys suggested it in the first place."
"Draco said you offered to carry the baby."
"Shut up." She glanced down at her state of dress and took in his jeans and tee shirt. "Well," she said conversationally, deftly changing the subject, "have you noticed that each time we've met since Hogwarts, one of us is dressed only in abbreviations?"
"By that you mean in his or her skivvies, right?" he said, eyeing her up and down again.
She blushed, willing herself not to read too much into his action. Because that could end very badly. "Well, you could say."
"Speaking of which," he said with a grin, "your suit is quite... charming. You really have got 'ducks on your boobies.' Wherever did you find a bathing suit for a grown woman with ducks all over it?"
"Oh, it was difficult, let me assure you," she said. She beat down the fifteen-year-old flutter by sheer brute strength and met his gaze without much of a waver. She was determined to be witty and jocund. Ooh, and blithesome. She loved the word blithesome. He laughed. It was all so degage all of a sudden, and she had the nearly insurmountable urge to beat her head on the wall to her right.
"I have an odd question for you," he said suddenly as she was looking for an escape from the situation.
"Okay," she said, looking all around them and anywhere but him.
He cleared his throat. "Did you spill your coffee on me on purpose? I mean, back in, what? 2004? I meant to ask then. It seemed almost too perfect that you did. I meant to-- I should have-- What I mean to say is that I've-- Bollocks, never mind." He looked away, and Hermione decided that he must be flushed even though she couldn't see it for his tan and the shadows. He nervously flattened his hair. She raised an eyebrow at him, wondering why she was the one in the bikini but she didn't feel a bit off while he was clearly embarrassed at something. Maybe he was embarrassed because of her bikini. She looked down at herself, wondering if maybe she should have gone with the one piece.
"Hermione?" he said, testing out her name and then smiling. She started and looked up at him curiously. "Did you?"
"No, of course not. That would involve" --she scrunched up her nose-- "something like devious intent on my part. I don't think that far ahead anymore. What makes--"
"'Ionie, 'Ionie!" She stopped abruptly to see Exie tugging on the corner of her towel looking very anxious, and what ever she had been asking went blowing in the wind.
"What's the matter?" she asked, Zabini immediately forgotten in the wake of Exie's crisis.
The man smiled at her and made his way to the knot of now stationary children on the grass. "Enjoy your party, Granger," he said in parting.