That considered, I'll add a notice to the end of this one when the sequel's ready so that all my lovely subscribers will know when we're back in action.
In the meantime, thank you, thank you, thank you for following me all this way and giving me a reason to keep writing.I'm really sad this is over, and at the same time really relieved. Trite and sappy as it sounds, I really hope to see you all again next time. You've been wonderful.
Still and forever grammatically yours,
Tierfal
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue: Nineteen Days Later
As far as Draco Malfoy was concerned, nineteen days later didn't seem far enough from the climax to be the resolution.
But at least nineteen days later was better than 28 Days Later. No zombies, for one thing.
They were all sitting in the Weasley household, playing poker at the dining room table. Weasley had gone and gotten a job doing… something…, and he had a pretty nice place. It was airy, spacious, and sophisticated. While Draco attributed the last element entirely to Ilsa, given that Ron Weasley probably wouldn't know sophistication if it ran up and bit him in the ass (and then hung there, waiting, until he could get a good look at it), it was, all things considered, a very suitable Ermine Range. But the couches weren't orange, and Ilsa's white Persian cat had all its legs and both its ears, so it clearly wasn't home.
Things were going well for Draco Malfoy, and not just in the poker game in which he was smoking Ron, Harry, Ilsa, Ginny, and Hermione. He'd recently gone to the manor and relocated the contents of his bedroom closet to a huge, disorderly pile on Hermione's floor. Then he had relocated it from there to Hermione's closet, at her insistence. He'd been quite prepared to leave it in a heap on the carpet; wrinkles shmrinkles. But he supposed it was a good thing that he'd submitted to her feminine tyranny of all things clothing and had reluctantly hung his things neatly, because the undeniable sexiness of him in his wrinkle-free shirt was distracting everyone from their cards.
Even Harry and Ron.
Especially Harry and Ron.
Draco smiled at the fan of cards in his hands. There had been many, many, many two-in-the-morning poker games in the Slytherin common room, and while Crabbe and Goyle hadn't tended to put up much of a fight, Blaise Zabini had been a formidable opponent at the best of times. Thinking about it, Draco probably had Blaise to thank for the fact that he was now in the process of robbing his friends blind.
For they were his friends now.
In the olden days, Ron "Satan" Weasley wouldn't have been able to afford this bout of indignity, but now, at his nice table, in the middle of his nice house, alongside his nice wife, he had little choice but to grit his teeth and bear it.
Draco smiled a bit wider. There was always something infinitely pleasing about driving people insane. And if the person in question was Ron Weasley, well… all the better.
When Draco had collected just about all the chips on the table and added them to his personal stash, the congregation moved to the cushy couches of the dim living room to nurse some drinks. "Drink" was a relative term in Draco's case, given that his beverage of choice was lemon-lime soda. He was still rather leery of champagne after the last incident. He figured that tended to happen when people tried to poison you. Besides, a little paranoia was healthy enough.
Well, not really.
Ginny raised her glass. "Hermione's promotion," she announced.
They all toasted.
"Draco's drastic reformation," Harry proposed next, grinning now.
"You flatter me," Draco responded airily. But he drank to it anyway.
"The Weasleys and their lovely home," Hermione added, indicating the halfway-to-cuddling couple on the couch opposite. Both Satan—that was, Ron—and Ilsa smiled delightedly and blushed a little. Hermione smiled right back.
Draco knew there was still a little something awry with her and Ron—that not all the hard feelings had been smoothed over. But Hermione was coping with it. She had accepted that not everything in life turned out the way you'd planned it, and that sometimes your intricate roadmap of what you wanted mysteriously disappeared or ripped down the middle or got trampled into the dust by someone wearing cleats, and that when that happened, you just had to get up, brush yourself off, and start walking in a direction that looked promising. She had accepted that Ron had chosen a path different from the one she would have chosen for him, and that his detour had forced her to find her own alternate route. She had accepted that she didn't really know where she would end up, and she had accepted that sometimes not knowing where the road led was okay. And sometimes it would lead somewhere you hadn't expected, somewhere you hadn't even dreamed of, that was better by far than anything you could have planned.
So that was all right.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
They walked back to the apartment, because Hermione wanted to get some fresh air, or so she said. Hermione was like that—acting like one little half-mile stroll would matter in the grand scheme of things. But then again, maybe if you got into the habit, those little half-mile strolls would add up like children near a petting zoo, who saw other children stroking the twitchy, half-mad goats and pigs and llamas, assumed that those other children were having fun, and soon flocked over to stroke the twitchy, half-mad animals themselves. Maybe Hermione was on to something.
And maybe Draco was on an acid trip, after an analogy like that.
After a few steps, Hermione took his hand in hers, and Draco's thoughts ceased to make much sense. There were a lot of little fragments that involved Cupids and bunnies and a wash of pink conversation hearts and cream-filled chocolates, but nothing coherent.
"Work tomorrow," Hermione remarked.
"Yeah," Draco agreed, not really processing the statement. If his brain had been fit to do much more than dither and frolic among daydreams of bouquets of flowers and beaches at sunset, he might have added that the weekend was coming up. At the moment, he was too busy coordinating the bouquet to match the sunset. It was a complicated procedure. There were a lot of colors to consider.
"Draco," Hermione said.
"Mm?"
"Don't your parents hate people like me?"
"What, bookworms?"
"No," she said, though she was smiling broadly. "Muggleborns."
Draco forced his mind, which was wandering through a field of daisies and considering whether it wanted to attempt a sprightly jig, to focus on the conversation.
"Well," he replied slowly, "I figure they'll probably have come to their senses like I have." And if they haven't, he added mentally, their senses will come to them, and their senses will be wielding a very large mallet to enforce the point.
"You think so?" Hermione sighed.
Draco squeezed her hand and reveled in the way her fingers tightened around his in response. "One thing the Malfoys aren't," he noted, "is stupid. And at this point, doing anything other than realizing how amazing you are would be incredibly stupid."
She smiled up at him, and Draco felt like he could jump up and fly the rest of the way home, flapping his arms in the air like a three-year-old convinced he would grow up to be an airplane. But doing that, of course, would have required releasing Hermione's hand, and that was not something that Draco was willing to do just yet.
Eventually, they made it back to the apartment complex, and they took the elevator up to the seventh floor. The elevator ride was no less worrying than it had been the first time, though there was something slightly endearing about the horrifying creaks and groans the car made in protest as it rose slowly towards its destination.
Down the hall they went, and up to the appropriate door. The corridor was quiet, and there was a calm about the place that Draco knew existed primarily within his mind. It certainly wasn't the turquoise-with-purple-lilacs wallpaper that was doing it; that much he could tell.
After he'd taken a shower, Draco settled with Hermione on her bed, and for a while they did nothing but lie there, wrapped up in each other's arms like the fabric of some complicated knot. Sparky hopped up onto the bed in that lopsided way he had and wedged himself into one of the tiny spaces between his human housemates. All was still and soft and warm, and everything was in place.
Draco realized that he had never been happier. And all because he had found what Hermione Granger's nameplate had guilelessly offered his fidgeting fingers:
Her and Me.