Bound
Chapter 4
000
He was awakened by fear. Clutching, clawing panic, closing his airway. He gasped, kicking off his blankets, migraine forgotten in the moment. Frantically he gulped at nothing, trying to force air into the collapsing cartilage of his trachea, chest heaving like a bellows as he worked to suck in, push out. The sweat seeped out of his pores, clammy in the tepid bedroom, and he slowly began to relax. The feeling began to subside and he looked around. Draco hadn't had a panic attack in years, not since the nightmares had subsided. The feeling of being watched hung over him, and fear tickled the edges of his nostrils.
Not quite fear, he realized. More like, anxiety. Or perhaps apprehension. He had kissed her. Or, she had kissed him. They had kissed.
When would he see her again?
0
"Oi, wake up!"
Someone was kicking his feet, and Draco quickly wrenched them further up inside the blankets.
"Get up, you bloody oaf," someone was sniping at him, now resorting to poking.
Draco groaned and rolled over, curling even further into a ball, the memory of the previous night's migraine and subsequent panic – or had it been a nightmare? – slowly returning.
"Draco, why is Astoria on my doorstep looking like she's just chewed nails?"
He cracked one eye. The sunlight seemed awfully loud. "Blaise?"
"Damn right man, it's Blaise, now get up and explain yourself!"
"How'd you get in here?"
Blaise stopped in the middle of poking one of his feet again. "Through the front door?" he asked, staring at Draco like he was insane.
Draco sat up. "What about things like locks and wards," he said acidly.
"Apparently they don't apply to Zabinis," Blaise replied, smug.
Noticing that he wasn't wearing a shirt, Draco felt around by his bed for something he'd discarded the night before. His hands found a sweaty pajama shirt, presumably ripped off during his panic, and he sighed, forgoing the clothing.
"What do you want, autonomous Zabini that you are?"
Blaise sat on the edge of the bed, pushing Draco's feet out of the way. "I've already told you. I want to escape Astoria, and also to understand why she's on my doorstep at this hour of the morning."
"I expect it has something to do with me," Draco said. Guilt tickled on the edge of his conscience. He truly hadn't behaved like a proper Malfoy last night, but on the list of proper Malfoy behaviors, deceiving his girlfriend was probably the least of his transgressions.
"You think?" Blaise said dryly. "I expect it has something to do with the way you completely ignored her last night, instead trailing after a certain muggleborn witch like a –" Draco ricocheted out of bed, his wand appearing in his hands before he even knew what had happened, glaring at Blaise with an atypical ferocity.
"Don't you dare finish that sentence," he growled, holding his wand in front of Blaise's nose.
The darker man stared him down calmly, watching as the wand wavered slightly with every pound of Draco's head.
"What will you do to me, Draco?" he asked, voice low and silken, his lips curving at the edges, hands folded in his lap. It was impossible to tell if he was amused, offended, or both. "Will you hex me? Curse me? Oh, put that thing away," he finally snapped, exasperation creeping into his voice. "And sit down."
Draco sat down, alarmed by how unwilling his legs had been to support him standing. "It seems you already have a pretty well-formed theory regarding Astoria's motivations," he told Blaise. "So what is it that you want from me?"
Blaise laughed, stretching his arms behind his head and leaning back against the footboard. "Why, confirmation of course!" he cried delightedly. "Now," he said, "now that's settled. Tell me what's been going on."
What had been going on? "I'm not in the habit of making confessions to you," Draco grouched. Blaise simply watched him. "But," Draco finally managed to grit out, "I've found myself in a bit of a predicament, of late. A state to which I am unaccustomed, if you will."
"I will," Blaise nodded, making a circular beckoning motion with one hand that entreated Draco to continue.
"I haven't seen Astoria in about a week," Draco muttered.
"Because?" Blaise pressed.
"My team has been having… funding difficulties," Draco said delicately. They were stone cold broke, and Blaise knew it as well as he. "So a few weeks ago I began to go to the Ministry in search of patrons, or deals with the Department of Magical Games and Sports – what have you. And I saw a few old classmates around and was, well, surprised, shall we say, at the difference a few years had wrought."
Blaise quirked an eyebrow.
"I was also surprised at the change in my own… outlooks," Draco hedged. "Specifically, my outlooks on, women. A woman." He glared at Blaise. "You're taking this awfully well."
"Oh Draco," Blaise said, shaking his head. "Draco, Draco, Draco. Must I explain everything to you? Very well then. There's precious little overlap between promiscuity and blood purity. Every wizard worth his salt who wishes to – shall we say, play the pitch – soon discovers that they can't clutch too tightly to childish notions of heritage."
Draco gaped at him. "You?"
Blaise nodded confirmation. "Me. I don't care anymore."
"You never said anything to me."
"Well, I wasn't holding out much hope that you'd have some sort of moral reckoning with yourself," Blaise replied. "I figured the subject just wouldn't ever come up."
"I'm hardly having a moral reckoning," Draco said. "It's not even moral. It's just one particular… woman. Moral. Just one. One reckoning. Thought. Discussion." He almost blushed at how insensible he must sound.
"Moral reckoning," Blaise sang. "And you'll have to phrase it like that when you approach her, you know. Women are much less impressed if they think you've only changed because you want to trip them into bed. They think highly of you if you say you've been questioning the ideals you were raised with for a while and recently saw the error of your ways." He nodded sagely to himself. "Yes, women do love humility."
"Hardly my forte," Draco said in response to Blaise's soliloquy. He was not cross, and definitely did not grumble the words out.
"Hardly being the understatement of the year," Blaise crowed.
The conversation generally went downhill from there.
After the two men had finished sniping at each other, Blaise helped Draco find some reasonable clothes to dress in and Side-Along Apparated him to Blaise's apartment, where there was coffee and eggs. Astoria was thankfully absent from the doorstep ("she's probably moved on to your doorstep, mate,") and they sat for a while in silence as Draco's headache slowly began to recede. He carefully avoided thinking about the turn their conversation had taken before they'd left his place.
"I suppose I'm going to have to dump Astoria," he told Blaise lightly, changing the subject.
"I suppose."
Draco gestured to the other man with his forkful of eggs. "Any advice from our resident Lothario?"
Blaise choked on his sip of coffee, spraying it across the table. "Draco!" he cried in an agonized tone, "I'm hardly a Lothario! I think of myself much more in the style of a Casanova."
Draco snorted inelegantly. "Very well, Casanova, any advice on how to break up with a woman without being hexed?"
"That depends, does she know you snogged someone else's face off last night?"
Draco stopped breathing. Blaise's easy smile suddenly seemed brittle, a thin sheen clinging to his face and hiding anger underneath.
"Forgot to mention that salient little detail about last night, didn't we?" he asked Draco.
There was a long silence, and the two men watched each other across the table. Blaise held his gaze, black eyes demanding, and Draco looked away first.
"Astoria doesn't know," he said simply. "And I wasn't planning on informing her." Or you, hung in the air after the sentence.
"I won't pretend not to be offended that you'd hoped to keep me in ignorance," Blaise said airily. "But luckily for you, I know everything, so I was able to spare you the future pain of choking out that little anecdote."
"I'm eternally grateful," Draco said sarcastically.
Blaise waved it off. "It's nothing, nothing. Any good friend would do the same."
"Would they now?"
And suddenly they were both laughing, snorting into their coffees and inhaling the eggs before they became colder than they already were.
"Just tell her, listen Astoria, you're a prize heifer, but I need more than a two-galleon cow."
"She's not that boring," Draco snapped at Blaise. "And you know I hate it when you adopt that belittling sort of language to discuss women."
Blaise sneered at him. "How terribly feminist of you. One might forget you were ever even a Slytherin."
Draco shrugged, looking down at his eggs, but Blaise continued speaking.
"It's my mother's fault, really," he shrugged, black hair tousling around his face. "Thanks Freud," he tipped an imaginary hat, "great wizard that you were. But she used to speak about other women in that sort of competitive tone, and I've been meaning to kick it. Not all of us have had our crises of conscience yet… Not all of us have met the right witch, one might say, to help us on our way."
Draco frowned at him. "I'm not having a crisis of conscience. And besides, didn't you say you'd already had yours, when you decided to spread the vast Zabini virtues across as wide a pool of women as possible?"
"Delicately put," Blaise mused. "I may have to use that. You've always had a way with metaphors. Something women must appreciate in you, I'm sure."
Maturity had its limits, and Draco's had been reached. He picked up the toast from the side of his plate and threw it at Blaise, who ducked smoothly, coming up tutting.
"Tsk tsk, and you know I had really expected better aim from an ex-seeker."
"Sometimes I wonder if you cracked your head a little too hard during the war," Draco told him tartly. "It's a wonder you can still function with all your secretive little laughs and smarmy jokes."
Blaise nodded, seemingly in agreement. "Wonders never cease," he said gaily, and Draco threw up his hands.
"I'm off to break up with Astoria, I suppose, and then –" And then find Granger, he wanted to say, but choked that desire back down. "And then I'm going to tell Pansy that if your head gets any fatter you'll fall over in the mornings trying to get out of bed. You're too smart for your own good by half, and it's astonishing that no one has even tried to murder you yet."
Blaise grinned widely in that familiar Cheshire cat style. "Who says they haven't tried?"
Grumbling, Draco disapparated to Astoria's, preparing for a conversation he wasn't eager to have.
000
They passed each other in the hall and it was with a stony-faced silence that sent lurches down through Hermione's entire abdomen.
She saw him from miles away, it felt like, and her throat closed up. They walked toward each other and her hands trembled slightly, and she had to remind herself that she was a career woman with an active social life, friends and family, and – it all seemed to run out of her mind like water down the drain.
He was tall, as tall as Ron, standing long and lean among the diverse crowd of wizarding folk, and his hair was swept to the side. Not as the boys she loved did it, the accidental tousled look, nor even like the photos of James Potter that Harry had shown her, with the accidental-on-purpose sort of ruffling. No, the way Draco Malfoy wore his blonde hair, just a little long, just a little styled, reminded her of the pure, arrogant beauty of Sirius Black.
Her own aesthetic was much the same, with her tamed hair swept into a chignon today, though she had allowed some tendrils to creep around her face. Hermione rather liked a personal-professional fusion that she believed could be reflected in the wearer's attire.
His eyes glued to hers after a moment; a moment she had stared too long, and she was caught in those roiling mercury depths. They bored into hers, a hint of that arrogant smile creeping at the corners of his lips, making her stomach burn in frustration, and she genuinely thought for a minute that he would greet her, casually, as if nothing had happened, and she would be left, furious at herself for worrying about the encounter, and still furious at him for the party. Instead, despite that penetrating gaze and all that had happened between them recently, or perhaps because of it, his eyes glassed over as they approached one another and one eyebrow quirked.
He ignored her.
As he walked by her, she caught the full-face impact of his cologne, a heavy, minty, evergreen sort of scent.
Hermione almost screamed. She could have broken a plate over his head. How dare he?!
She marched back to her office in a rage and told her secretaries in scathing terms to admit no one for at least thirty minutes, as she was doing paperwork. Then, snapping the door shut behind her in a manner that could possibly be called a slam, Hermione picked up the large bin of memos that sat beside her desk and methodically began to shred them into the wastepaper basket.
To think that she had been about to tell Ginny and Luna about the events of the party, and giggle with them over what it could mean. The humiliation. The gall of him! How dare he ignore her, her! The most powerful witch in the Ministry, not to mention the woman he had kissed spontaneously at a party last weekend!
She torched one memo and watched with intense satisfaction as it billowed up in a gout of flame. Another, she hit with a jelly legs jinx, purely out of curiosity, and watched as its wings began to wobble and it floated from the air to her desk in a dazed spiral.
Honestly, Malfoy, to ignore her! Well, he would get nothing further from Hermione Granger, and that was that. To think – the absurdity of it! She could almost laugh, if she weren't so angry.
"That's what you get for tangling with Malfoy," she muttered firmly to herself, and one memo collapsed into a fine white dust.
"Intolerable man," she huffed. Then, looking regretfully at the mess she'd created, Hermione sighed. She supposed that all the departments would simply have to resend if the memos had been important.
000
Ironically, because half the time Draco despised the man, and the other half of the time he ignored him, it had been Blaise who had made him think of it.
He sat in his study, reclining in his favorite leather armchair and idly charming spiders to zoom out of their cobwebs and race each other across the ceiling.
After reluctantly confessing to the fact that he didn't think Granger an abomination, he and Blaise had discussed in very vague, general terms how one might go about having a…conversation…with a woman.
Blaise had mentioned – very offhand, very casual – that it would likely be difficult to be taken seriously by a woman if she believed that you disliked her. Draco, frowning, had realized Blaise had a point. Their encounter in the hall had left him breathless for days, cursing his inability to act when the moment demanded it. The truth of the matter was that he had been frozen but also undecided. However, the crisis of indecision passed, as they did, and he realized that perhaps the time was nigh for him to admit to himself that he was intrigued by Hermione Granger.
He said the words slowly to himself. "I am intrigued by Hermione Granger." It was difficult to think, difficult to admit – but harder still, to think of never trying to speak to her again.
Draco sat up slightly in his chair, returning the spiders to their webs, and focused on his desk, scattered with parchment.
For now, he decided, everything else could wait. He would let that thought settle, let it agree with his constitution, and later he could lie around and analyze his emotions until he was blue in the face.
So he was intrigued by Hermione Granger, so what? The real question was: what did she think of him? Judging by her cold indifference in the hallway the other day, not much.
His stomach cringed in shame at the memory, and also in – regret? No, not quite that. More – frustration, that he had added one more reason for her to dislike him to what he knew was an already significant pile.
Draco sighed. Blaise had been right; she wouldn't give him the time of day, much less a conversation. But there had to be a way to convince her – convince her what? That he was different? That he was changed, whatever that meant?
He drew a quill, dawdling idly on a spare scrap of parchment, then immediately throwing it away when he realized he was drawing an eye – a very brown, muggleborn eye.
He thought back to all the sorts of speeches and gestures he'd witnessed between people over the course of his life, and found himself thinking of the story he'd heard, about how Harry and Ron had rescued Hermione from a mountain troll in the first year, and that was how the three had become friends.
He'd heard that some people apologized with lavish gifts or large gestures, and he supposed that saving someone from a mountain troll was a sort of 'gesture.' So, an act of virtue or kindness, then, he decided. Something…symbolic, to show Hermione that he meant what he said. But what?
0
He had seen her in this hall before, so he knew it was simply a matter of waiting. Dawdling around, really, until she walked by, and then just pulling her aside for a quick word. An hour dragged by slowly, the silken minutes sliding by, and then amidst the slow trickle of people, he saw her practical yet attractive black shoes on the marble. The gesture, the symbol, really, that he was holding in his hand seemed to burn up his arm. He had to talk to her.
He walked up to her, nodded at her, her name graced his lips – "Granger," he said, and, "may I?" His hand touched her arm, briefly, gently, he guided her along a side corridor, "if you don't mind, just a quick word," and they were in a small nook, a broom closet really, alone.
"I broke up with Astoria," he babbled, the words slipping out from behind his teeth, almost greased, out before he could clamp his teeth shut and keep them in. "We were never official, really, but I ended it with her, because I wanted to."
"Get your hand off my arm," she said in response. "I don't give a flying –"
He removed his hand and she stopped her train of thought to blink at him in surprise. Shaking herself a little, she recovered.
"How dare you?" she demanded. "How dare you, you accost my like this in my workplace, when you could have—"
"I hardly accosted you," he said smoothly, coolly. "I asked you for a moment of your time."
Her anger was hot and brittle. "Save it for someone who cares. What's going on? Why am I here?"
"For the pleasure of my company of course," he said, trying out a smile on her. "You're free to leave at any time, you know. I don't see you walking away."
"Don't think for an instant that I don't know what you're on about, Malfoy," she snapped at him, her tone sharp and vicious. "I'm not going to play your little game so you might as well leave me alone before I hex you."
"Listen Granger," he snapped back, his icy aristocrat upbringing in full force as he let his temper blaze only through his verbiage, "I won't be spoken to in that manner. I wanted to have a civilized conversation with you – I need to speak to you, in fact –"
She barked a laugh. "Oh that's rich," she spat. "Please, Malfoy, tell me all the things that you've historically done to show me that you deserve to be treated in a civilized manner."
His face lit up with a flush and he knew some of the archness was gone from his bearing. "I won't tolerate this sort of treatment," he began again, and she cut him off again.
"What do you want, Malfoy? You kiss me, you ignore me, you approach me at my job of all places? I mean really, what is going on?"
"Our kiss was mutual," he corrected her, and her mouth twisted. "And I didn't ignore you, you ignored me."
She stared at him, rage and incredulity melding in her face. "You ignored me, and I assumed it was because you've always been vocal about despising me, and therefore that the evening was to be stricken from memory. Which, by the by, I don't have any particular fondness for you either!" Her voice started to rise slightly at the last bit, creeping into the octave reserved for fury.
And then they proceeded to have a truly bitter fight.
He had pulled her into a broom closet at the Ministry of all places, against his better judgement and all logic, but he simply hadn't been able to deny himself her presence any longer. And she had been ready to see him, if the vitriol she was harboring was any indication. It was true, what he had said when she asked what he was doing. She was free to go at any time, but she didn't. So they let loose, they threw themselves at each other, and it was unsparingly brutal and excruciating.
Her harsh words seared at him like basilisk venom, crawling under his skin and settling against his soft undercoat of self-loathing. Hermione spared no detail of their time at Hogwarts, and her perfectly ordered textbook mind listed the litany of his sins in a whispered scream that left him under no illusions. He had bullied her – mercilessly, at times – and made huge mistakes. He had been rude, conceited, prejudiced, and disloyal, and Hermione Granger had been brave and true.
"Oh yes," he sneered, "so brave and true. What a perfect loyal Gryffindor. Except for that time when you fled from me after I practically laid myself bare in front of you with that kiss and then refused to so much as look my way in public, like I was some sort of filth, not even good enough for a nod, so how's that for all your touted Gryffindor heroism?"
"How does it feel, then?" she shouted, stabbing a finger at his chest, and her voice echoed against the walls because this, now, here, they were finally at the heart of the matter. "To be treated as if you were less than someone else?"
"Are you really going to hold everything I did as a child against me?" he threw back at her, glaring at the finger that had poked his chest. "Granger, I made mistakes and now I'm here, asking that you take me at face value."
"What are you saying?" she asked him warily, and things became clearer in his mind.
He sighed, some of the anger leaving him, and fought the defeat creeping in at the edges. This had been what he came to do, after all, though he had not imagined it in quite this way, and it was harder than he had expected, and more painful than he might have hoped.
"What I'm trying to say," he replied, "is that I'm sorry."
She stared at him for a moment, and then shook her head, crossing her arms. "It's not enough." When he didn't interrupt, she continued. "You can't just waltz in with an apology – which I'm not even sure I believe, first off – and then expect that everything is just going to be peachy and we'll suddenly be best chums. Not only were we enemies in school Malfoy, but you seem to be forgetting that we fought on opposite sides of the war."
He stood in front of her, eyes blazing with newfound frustration, his perfectly blond hair disheveled around his face, cheeks and neck flushed pink from their row.
"What do you want from me?" Something beyond irritation laced his voice, something closer on the spectrum of emotions to desperation than anything else.
Hermione saw he was clenching his fists, hands at his sides, like he'd been doing for the duration of this argument, but suddenly the gesture seemed different. Not in anger, but as if he were holding something. Fury clouded her memories but she tried to think back and recall if he had been holding something when they had begun talking. Yes, she thought so.
He brought his hands up in front of him, knuckles closed so tightly that they were white, and she surprised herself by not flinching. No, she supposed, she no longer had any real fear that Draco Malfoy would be slapping her in revenge for what she had done in third year.
Involuntarily her gaze flickered down to his hands, then back up to his face, still stony in anger.
"I don't know," she said, in response to his question.
His left hand opened from its fist to cup the right hand and he held it in front of him like a supplicant, one protecting the fist. She bent her head forward to look again at the strange sight. His shoulders bowed around him, and their postures were suddenly intimate, both inclined inward, focusing around the central piece. Hermione's curiosity rose in her like a wave, sweeping out anger as she wondered what he could possibly be doing.
Draco's hair fell forward around his forehead, softening the harsh lines of his aristocrat's face, making him seem younger and more vulnerable.
"I brought you this," he told her, and slowly opened his hand.