The quiet was bone deep - a luxury nearly unheard of at Gare du Nord in Paris, but at just past six in the morning, beyond the barrier that separated them from the muggles, the stillness was palpable. Around them old Vietnamese witches and wizards dozed, while others contemplated the crossword in the Sunday Prophet. The portkey to Da Nang left in fifteen minutes, but until then, all was quiet.
"What did your parents think of our honeymoon plans?" Astoria asked sleepily, her head resting against his shoulder.
"It didn't go over very big, I'm afraid. 'Indochina? Why should you want to go there? If you're looking for somewhere exotic, Burma is very fine this time of year.' Then they just kept naming places that don't exist anymore for the rest of dessert."
Astoria laughed. "It's fine. My parents were rather confused as well - they didn't realize the Vietnam War had ended."
"Oh yes, that came up as well. 'Don't you know about the muggle revolutionaries?' It's like time stopped 40 years ago."
They lapsed into silence, Draco idly tracing her finger bones - phalanges and metacarpals, she remembered, from somewhere distant in her mind - with his own long thin white fingers. In her sixth year Alan Pucey had taken her hand and led her down to the Quidditch bleachers after hours. His rough palms had pressed over hers, and the beard he had been so proud of had scratched her cheek when he kissed her, fumblingly, her heart pounding and her head light. Draco's touch in comparison was smooth, precise, yet exquisitely graceful, like a bird dipping its talons into a lake to catch a fish then just as suddenly, soaring back up.
They were married now, and there would never be another Alan Pucey. She felt mostly relief, mingled with some trepidation, an old nagging voice that she had never been able to shake that second guessed her choices. Dating had never appealed to her. As a young girl she had far more enjoyed having crushes on boys than actually talking to them, and as she got a bit older she found she liked talking and flirting just fine at parties, but never seemed to follow up when they owled her or asked to see her again.
All of that was behind her now, but Astoria did not delude herself that marriage would bring bliss. It was not in the nature of the man she had married to offer stability or simplicity or any of the other comforts people seemed to place great stock in. There had been, she remembered, a younger Draco who had been her schoolmate, and had fewer cares on his shoulders and shadows in his eyes, but even then he had been a jealous and angry child.
Inside the angry child, who had grown into a difficult, unhappy man, there was a core of himself that he kept remote, his darkest thoughts, deepest feelings closed impenetrably to the world but open to her, bit by bit and in pieces at a time, if she was careful, if she held her hands up to show she did not come to this place to cause harm.
"Should we queue up?" he asked her, as some of the families began to stir and arrange themselves around the Portkey.
"Let's wait," she murmured into his shoulder. "It's not going anywhere."
He took her hand in his again, fingering the pair of gold bands that now rested on her ring finger. "Mother gave me quite a turn about this, you know," he told her. "She wanted my wife to wear her grandmother's ring. She couldn't believe I'd bought you a new one."
"Why did you?" Astoria asked, tilting her head back to look at his face.
He laughed. "Because you would have hated that ring. It's the size of a fist and about as subtle. Sort of a moldering Edwardian style."
Astoria barely managed to repress a shudder.
"I thought you might be a bit happier with this," he went on, giving the ring on her finger a gentle flick.
The trip to Hong Kong had been a whim; undertaken laughingly, daringly, while they lay around in socks and undergarments at the suite he had taken at the Avalon. A mostly extinguished bottle of champagne and chocolate covered strawberries ordered from in-room dining lay between them on the Persian carpet. As they argued over the last of the strawberries, he reminded her they should have a proper meal at some point during the evening.
"The restaurant's still open downstairs," he said, pulling himself up to his feet and rumpling his hair as he cast about for the menu.
Astoria groaned. "Not again," she protested. "We've had dinner there twice this week."
"You wouldn't be sick of it if you'd order something besides the lamb."
She threw the last strawberry at him. "Take me somewhere new," she demanded.
He glanced down at his watch, then up at her, raising his eyebrows. "Get dressed."
Twenty minutes later they had been flying to King's Cross, breathless with laughter, to catch the nine-thirty portkey to Shanghai, where, after a harrowing trip across the city in a flying bus piloted by an extraordinarily reckless wizard, they grabbed hold of the ten o'clock portkey to Hong Kong with seconds to spare.
Climbing down the steps from Hung Hom Station, head spinning, she stumbled in her heels, but Draco caught her arm.
He was grinning, the reckless, wild, joyful smile she loved and occasionally feared. Before she knew it he had Apparated the two of them to La Gargouille, the restaurant that appeared to be floating in the air among the stars atop the Cheung Kong Centre, its walls constructed from invisible glass that was both invisible to those looking out from inside, and made everything contained within invisible as well.
They waited at the bar for a corner booth about to open up and decided to stay there, as they both abruptly realized they were ravenous and began ordering obscene amounts of food. It was only later, after Draco and Astoria had enjoyed champagne, scotch, steamed langoustine tails, oysters, and were waiting on chicken veloute and filet de bouef that Draco realized he had forgotten his purse back in England, having paid the portkey fees with change from his coat pockets.
For several seconds they just stared at one another, open-mouthed. Astoria began to giggle.
Neither of their families had accounts at La Gargouille, so the general manager was brought. Assuring himself of Draco's identity with a haughty sniff, he agreed to bill them.
Pooling their resources in the cloak room after dinner, they found that Draco had about fifteen sickles left in his coat pockets and Astoria had another ten Galleons in her purse.
"We couldn't get a room anywhere in the city for that," he said.
Astoria laughed, floating on champagne bubbles. "Why should we get a room? What are we going to do - sleep?"
On the bartender's recommendation they visited a bar in the area frequented by members of the service industry, and over the next few hours Astoria found herself christened "Angelica," wearing a bright pink wig, and laughing so hard she hurt. Most of the patrons were expats, from anywhere and everywhere in the world, so here everything equally foreign to everyone, Draco and Astoria included. To their new friends, Draco became Sebastien, a dragon tamer from Orleans.
Under the winking Christmas lights strung up over the bar - ominously called "The Last Stop" - spending their last Galleons buying a round, Astoria looked at Draco, and when their eyes met she had the sudden feeling that she was seeing him for the first time, and that if he looked at her always the way he was looking at her in that moment that she could never bear to look at anyone again.
The countertop of the bar was sticky with some unknown residue, wet with melted condensation and spilled beer, paper coasters floating atop it, heavy and sodden. But when his hands grasped her waist and lifted her up to sit on top of the bar, she didn't protest.
There was a small box in his hand, she realized, at the same moment the Irish barmaid standing nearest them gasped theatrically and shrieked, "They're getting married! They're getting married!"
No one paid any attention, but Astoria wouldn't have noticed if they had.
"I just got this yesterday," he told her. "I had planned - I don't know, some candlelight dinner under the moonlight in Paris sort of affair. I was certainly going to ask your mother first. But she'd probably say no,"
"She already told me she would," Astoria agreed, laughing.
"Mate, d'you need some space?" The Australian wizard seated at the bar next to Draco asked, but turned back to his companions before he or Astoria had the chance to respond.
Draco reached up and adjusted her pink wig, which she only then remembered she was wearing, leaning in close.
"Marry me, Angelica, and make me the happiest dragon wrangler in the Loire Valley," he whispered into her ear.
She wrapped her legs and arms around him, drawing him close, pulling to her the scent of stale beer, the barmaid's perfume, the lanolin smell of his wool scarf, the traces of scotch that lingered on his breath, needing to hold this moment as tightly as possible so that it could not slip away.
"We really ought to queue up. I don't want to be caught in a crush for broomsticks at the station on the other side. I need to sleep this off."
She rested her head against his shoulder, feeling no sense of urgency.
"Let's go," she said.