Draco's mother left him alone, and he finished his shower, rehashing the events between him and Granger, storing key information she had given him during their time together. There were some things she remembered and some things she didn't. She recalled being captured during the War and taken to the Manor but hadn't a clue who owned the property up until recently, therefore, could not remember his parents. Yet, she was aware of the Malfoy name.
The scars, her physical imperfections, made her feel ashamed and that bothered him the more than her promiscuous lifestyle. Her scars were nothing to be ashamed of, for they were earned by battle and bravery. Though she had hidden her Mudblood scar ten years ago, it was not out of shame, but to simply keep people from staring. A simple scrap of sleeve was perfectly suitable for covering her forearm, she had once told him.
The one scar Dolohov gave her in the Department of Mysteries had only been seen by her parents, Draco, and Weasley when she dated him. Potter hadn't even seen it, nor had his wife. During that time, the skin was uncharmed and unnecessary to cover it because the blemish was already hidden by clothing.
Draco understood why she felt the need to hide her imperfections due to her active participation in promiscuity. Some blokes did not appreciate flaws on women. What he didn't understand was why she hid them from herself. She mentioned that she hardly let her scars be seen by anyone. This 'anyone' was probably a bastard and made her feel physically inadequate, blowing a gaping hole in her buoyancy.
There were so many unanswered questions and at the moment, all Draco could do was fill them with his own scenarios.
Draco was eating his lunch provided by Pansy while skimming over the papers Astoria's solicitor sent him. Wincing, he set his sandwich down and placed a balled fist on his chest, rubbing at the acidy feeling inside. He then did the same to his stomach, acidy coils twisting and churning inside of the cavity. Setting his food down, he opened up his left hand drawer and fished out a bottle of potion he sometimes would have to sip at if eating spicey food or too much food in general. The sensation certainly did not feel like heartburn, but the medical fluid couldn't hurt.
Halfway through his meal was when his distraught looking receptionist came stumbling through the door apologizing profusely. "Mr. Malfoy, I apologize, but she's determined to see y-"
He watched with puffed out cheeks as Ginny Potter entered his office, purposefully bumping into Sandra and smiling at her triumphantly. "I told you I'd get to see him," she smugly told her and then shot a withering glare at him, hissing at his secretary, "Leave!"
Sandra yelped and scurried away, closing the door behind her. Ginny then stalked forward and pointed her finger at his nose and yelled, "I'm going to kill you! It's going to be slow! It's going be bloody, and it's going to be damned satisfying! I am going to watch with delicious glee as that disgusting, arrogant flicker goes out in your pretty, pretty eyes, Malfoy!"
Still full mouthed, Draco peered upon the frightening witch with the developing child inside of her. Surely, the girl knew it was unwise to cast Unforgiveables while pregnant. The dark energy messed with the baby's brain wavelengths, increasing the chance of the baking infant to be born cuckoo.
Draco exhaled loudly and dared to chew up the rest of his food with Ginny's finger still pressed to his nose. He figured if she was going to kill him, she would have done it already.
"Mrs. Potter, I find your loud screeching quite troubling, and the fact that you want to take away my life irks me greatly. Tell me how I can calm your obviously strained nerves and revert you back to the capable human being I know you to be."
Tremors ran over her body in her high fit of anger and Draco fancied the thought of casting a Calming Charm upon her.
"She's having a baby, Malfoy," she whispered before repeating the main point in a bellow, "A baby!"
Draco groaned and foresaw terrible things coming in the next seven months. He set his sandwich down and shot Ginny a pitiful look of shame, hoping that her womanly nature would blast away her anger and forgive him. It worked on his mum.
"She told you?" he complained pitifully.
"I told you to stay away from her!" Ginny howled.
"I did, but two days ago she sought me out and told me of her condition. What was I supposed to do?" he defended with his hands up and fingers splayed in surrender.
Ginny glared at him. "You should have left her alone to begin with. You definitely should have left her alone once she told you about the baby."
"That's irresponsible. What kind of man would I be to ignore a woman that is up the duff with my child?" he scoffed hotly.
"A normal one!" screeched Ginny and then exhaled loudly before plopping herself in the chair across from him looking haggard and a bit flushed, her hand rubbing her belly.
"Is everything okay?" Draco asked.
"It's kicking is all," Ginny muttered tiredly and glared at him once more. "And you need to leave Hermione alone."
"I can't do that now. You know I can't. Not now," he said, shaking his head from left to right.
"Yes you can, and you know what? I bet Hermione wouldn't even care. She's ready to do this on her own, and she can. She's got money, and she's smart. She's not much of a kid person, but she likes them well enough, so I think everything will be fine. You don't need to assist her with anything. In fact, it's probably best if you don't. If word got out that you soiled your precious lineage by impregnating a Muggle-Born, I can only imagine what kind of woes you would face at home, especially since you are still married."
"You let me worry about that," said Draco.
"She told me that you spent the night again last night. That you were, and I quote—kind of sweet for a former Death Eater. This is terrible, Malfoy! It's happening all over again!"
"What is?"
"This! The relationship which should have never begun. Not now and not twelve years ago. You two were so stupid over each other. Neither of you could see the disaster ahead of you, and it's happening again! Draco…" Ginny sighed, surprising him by the usage of his first name and how softly she asked "Don't you remember? Think back. Do you really want to go down that road again?"
On the outside, Draco appeared indifferent by Ginny's words. On the inside, he was pressing his back against a closet door he had locked a long time ago.
"Hermione and I are not in a relationship," Draco stated coolly and collectedly. "I simply got her pregnant."
"Are you really this daft, or are you acting this way to make me laugh?"
"It's the truth," Draco argued.
"Perhaps now!" Ginny exclaimed, tossing her arms in the air. "But don't think I don't know where you were last night! I know you were with her. Tell me, if you are not pursuing a relationship with her, then why did you sleep with her again?"
"Sex is not about liking the person, Mrs. Potter." A salacious smirk formed that was quickly extinguished by a slap of Ginny's outreached hand. Draco jolted from the force and goggled at her in shock while rubbing his stinging cheek.
"You must think I'm stupid! It's not just sex. End this now before something bad happens. Do you think just because she can't remember you, you can start all over again?"
Draco paused pensively before replying honestly "No, I don't. I don't want to start all over again with her, and I know it would be foolish to start a relationship with her, so-"
"Then why did you sleep with her again?"
"Let me finish!" Draco snarled. "So I'm not going to, and I think I know why she doesn't remember me. Somehow she got slipped a potion called Memoria Obscurare. That's why she doesn't remember anything about me. I've done some research and there is a counteragent for it. I think I can brew it. Of course, I'll have to wait until Hermione has given birth before I offer it, but after, she'll remember me."
Ginny's face masked a million thoughts, her lips twitching bemusedly, eyes narrowing, and forehead wrinkling. A full minute had passed before she leaned forward and propped her elbow on his desk and rested her chin on her palm. "And then what, Draco?" she asked.
"Well…" Draco paused, unsure of how to answer her question or what she meant by it. "She'll remember."
"Why does she need to?" she whispered, her words similar to Severus'.
"Why doesn't she need to?" Draco challenged, an anticipating bubble springing within him. He was close to some answers; he could practically taste it. He watched as Ginny's right eye twitched as she sat back in her chair and folded her arms on top of her protruding stomach.
"Draco Malfoy, did it ever occur to you that the reason why Hermione cannot recall a single memory of you was simply on purpose?"
"Yes," Draco answered. "Hermione not knowing me at all seems too precise to be random. It makes me wonder who gave Memoria Obscurare to her. Bloody knew what they were doing, yeah? Do you think it was your husband?"
The freckles darkened against Ginny's pale skin and when she replied, she ignored his inquiry about Harry. "Did it ever occur to you, Malfoy, that nobody slipped her the potion? That maybe perhaps Hermione drank it willingly?"
All thoughts dissolved in Draco's mind, but the word 'willingly' echoed against the inner walls of his skull.
"I-I don't understand," stuttered Draco, and Ginny surprised him with pity in her eyes.
"Draco…" Ginny lingered his name.
"What do you mean willingly? Are you saying that she…" Draco couldn't finish. He felt sick. His office was spinning, and his tie was strangling him.
"She was so angry," Ginny said, like the four words would explain everything. The worst part was that they sort of did.
"Angry," Draco quietly spat and rubbed his fingertips on his eyelids.
"I told her that it wasn't worth it. That it was dangerous. A potion like that is considered Dark Magic and could come with consequences, but she refused to listen to me, to Harry, to logic. I had never seen her that way and neither had Harry or Ron. When she told us she was going through with it, we begged her to stop. She argued with us to exhaustion, screaming things like how we didn't understand, and if we were really her friends, we would show support. She eventually persuaded Ron to see things her way, and he was all she needed to go through with it. He found someone to brew the potion for her. He never told me or Harry who but when the potion was done, Ron delivered it to her with specific instructions."
Ginny paused and sniffled. Draco watched numbly as tears slipped down the woman's face.
"In order to remove you from her memory, she literally had to remove you. She had to get rid of everything that had anything to do with you: Presents, cards, flowers, clothes, pictures, and even some of her books. From what Ron said, she gathered them into a box, shrunk it, and asked him to get rid of it. The next day, she applied to Magical Yale in the States where she planned to continue her studies in business. The night before she left for school, she drank the potion.
"The next day when I saw her, before she was due to her Portkey, she was…" Ginny turned her head towards the window, staring off into the distance, "different. Happy but completely different. Her personality had changed. I figured out why later after pondering it for a while. You weren't just her ex-boyfriend; you were her bully, Malfoy. In school, you would call her horrible names. You verbally beat her down any chance you got by calling her horrible, horrible names. So often you would call her these things that I think she believed them. When she removed you from her memory, she woke up wondering why she was the way she was. When she was attending school at Yale, she stripped herself of those names completely, trying to prove herself that she was better than that and more exciting. That she was smart but could have a good time. The way she went about it, I think crushed her self-confidence even further.
"I had never heard of a witch go through as many wizards as she did. A lot of the boys were pricks to her, but it wasn't like she kept one around forever. On to the next one. Sometimes on to the next two if she couldn't decide. Until now, with her pregnancy in mind, it was a lifestyle she had not been able to shake off."
Ginny Potter might as well have shot an Avada at him because Draco felt like he was dead. He couldn't think, he couldn't feel his heart beating, and he was motionless. Even being Stunned or Stupefied didn't feel this way. Minutes had to pass before he was capable of making sound which started with a bitter snort.
"She must've really hated me." He kind of smiled wryly, and Ginny opened her mouth to reply. He shook his head to stop her. "Don't deny it. She did."
"She loved you, Draco. It hurt too much when you left, she couldn't-"
"Move on," finished Draco. "I don't believe that. Cry for me, she would have, maybe for a year at the most, but she would have moved on eventually. She would have loved another in time. Hermione was not a foolish, lovesick sap, Ginny. She didn't drink that potion, so she could make the hurt go away. She drank it because she hated me. When she drank that potion, she was over me, I assure you. If she had truly still loved me, she would have suffered the heartbreak naturally and not tossed all of her memories of us into the rubbish bin. A lot of those memories were damned well amazing, and she didn't care. She hated me so much that she purged away those images because she found them tainted. It didn't matter that she was happy when I first told her that I loved her, bought her a new book, or whisked her away to Italy for a Roman holiday. The fact that I was in those memories deemed them unfit and had to go."
He watched as Ginny's chin wobbled, and her cheeks became wet with the tears but made no move to wipe them away. "Yes." She nodded meakly. "She hated you, but do you blame her? You worked so hard to just get her to even go out on a date with you. You blistered through Hades to just for her to agree to be your girlfriend. You had to jump through so many hoops and come up against any obstacle Hermione placed in front of you, and you burrowed through them without complaint. You made it out alive when you met her father. You spoiled her and worshipped her for two years before giving her a ring, only to take it back a month before the wedding."
Draco's throat constricted at the all things that Ginny was digging up which had been locked away and discarded because that had been the easiest way to do what he had to do as the only son and heir of the Malfoy line. The pain of shoving away Hermione had been the most painful thing he had ever experienced. A Crucio would have hurt less.
His engagement to her had been a very private ordeal. The first people to know were her parents. The second group of people consisted of Ginny and Blaise. For months, that was all who knew. Not even Potter or Weasley were privy to the information until later. He and Hermione wanted their privacy withheld from the hungry mouths of the media, and they succeeded. Even now, the Wizardry media had no idea that Hermione Granger, War Heroine, had ever been involved with Draco Malfoy, former Death Eater.
They were going to elope. The date to run away for a weekend had been set and…
Lightly coughing, he composed himself and lit fire to his musings and transformed his exterior into an indifferent state of business formality and said, "My father had found out about the engagement and gave me an ultimatum, Potter, as did my mother. I would have been disowned for following through with the marriage. My inheritance would have been cut off. I would have had nothing to offer Hermione or our children if we chose to have any."
"Hermione never cared about your money, Malfoy. But that wasn't the problem, was it? You cared about the money."
"Because I needed to provide-"
"That's shit, and you know it! Hermione did not and never will need someone to provide for her! You ran out because you were a coward!"
"My father was ill, and I had obligations a lot bigger than Hermione."
"Were they worth it? Those obligations?" Ginny's asked hoarsely.
Draco actually thought about Ginny's question before answering carefully, like he was walking on a cracked, stained glass window. "Yes," he answered softly, and the witch's eyes narrowed in disbelief. "I have Scorpius."
Draco would have thought mentioning his son would have softened the unforgiving, homicidal glare of Ginny. Regardless, the witch remained cold and unforgiving.
"You would have had a Scorpius, I assure you, if you would have stayed with Hermione. You may have had no access to the family galleons at Gringotts, but you would have had your son, maybe even more. You would also have had a wife that would be faithful and loved you and your children. Your children would not be smothered by another woman's affection on their birthdays, and you would not have had to seek another female's company to satiate your thirst for intimacy."
Ginny stood up from her seat and jutted out her chin. "You need to keep your distance from Hermione and her baby. You've made your decision a long time ago. You can't just change your mind because it's convenient."
"Is that all?" Draco stated, striving to keep himself composed. Ginny Potter had verbally handed him his arse and made him take a whiff of his own hole. But he had pride, and he was a Malfoy; he would not yield to the witch's temper and spry tongue.
The slam of the door was loud and unforgiving, making several photos on his wall crash into the floor.
A/N: Thought it would be good time to point out that I got this idea from the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Thank you to my readers, reviewers, followers, and those who have put this fic on their favorite list. Hope the chapter answered some questions. Feel free to review and comment about. Everyone have a great weekend!