Chapter Forty-One
Hermione carefully folded the letter where there were already creases in the parchment and placed it neatly onto the writing desk. "Interesting," she merely said. Draco stared at her so fixedly, Hermione quickly realized she had missed something important about the letter. She fidgeted uncomfortably.
"Are you comprehending what that means?" Draco prompted, as if he was worried about her competency after all. "It means whatever business my father has got about hoof enamel is unrecorded."
"Or Adrian just didnt look hard enough," Hermione pointed out indelicately.
"He works for the German Wizarding Society Libraries and Records."
"Oh."
Hermione had heard of such a place in History of Magic before. It apparently contained all the known records of the Wizarding world. Centered in Frankfurt, Germany, it was famous not just for the wealth of knowledge it contained (it was rumored if someone lived a hundred years, they could never absorb even half its contents), but also because it had the best security systems in Western Europe, with only two exceptions.
The bookworm in Hermione tinged green with envy. If she had been around Harry, Ginny, or even Ron, she would have immediately expressed a desire to go sometime in the near future – but she felt it was different with Draco.
"What could he be about?" Draco mused aloud.
Watching Draco pace about the room, Hermione steadily grew more and more nervous. It was like watching a pendulum that was counting down the minutes to an execution.
"I think we should go," Draco finally said.
"Go?" Hermione repeated stupidly. Her brain was fuzzy – she wasn't herself.
"To Germany to visit Adrian," Draco clarified slowly.
Hermione's heart leapt into her mouth – she couldnt help but be excited by the prospect of so many books. "To the library?" she asked hopefully.
Draco gave her a withering look, "Not quite. To visit Adrian, not the library."
Hermione blushed, "You dont have to talk to me like I'm a child."
"Well your logic at the moment resembles that of a child."
Hermione blushed a deeper crimson, "We're never going to be able to work together if we only demean one another." Draco ran his fingers down the velvet curtains and said nothing, which Hermione realized was his way of consenting to her words without compromising his pride. "When do we go?"
"Immediately, if you will."
"But... the time!"
"I've already taken care of it."
"Oh, but-"
"Would you like to stay here and commence with our original plan?"
Hermione became immediately crimson, "OH... no, no. Let's go."
Draco hid his relief from her... after all, with so much intensity resting on the two of them having sex, he wasnt even sure he could perform properly.
.
.
Adrian's apartment was a comfortable nook of a place nestled on the second floor of a very old house in Osnabruck.
"Rufus! Bad dog! Down!"
Hermione did not notice the mutt at first, but the words forced her to acknowledge the good-sized dog that seemed to have attached itself to Draco, paws on his chest, big tongue slobbering. It was odd however, that the dog made no sound at all.
Adrian came into view around the corner with a dog bone, which he tossed toward an old couch. Rufus's mouth made a motion like he'd barked, but no sound came out.
"Sorry about that oaf," Adrian apologized. Hermione watched with interest how the brothers reacted to one another: Draco stuck out his hand to shake Adrian's, which Adrian ignored and swiftly pulled his brother into a hug. "Good to see you! Good to see you! Hello, Hermione."
Unconsciously, Hermione also stuck out her hand to shake his, which Adrian noticed and also ignored, pulling his sister-in-law into a hug as well. Hermione wondered if hugging Adrian was what hugging Draco would be like, until it struck her as odd that she'd never hugged her own husband before. It didnt occur to her until a few moments even after that, that she had idly thought about hugging Draco Malfoy.
"Come on, have a seat. You've got some Floo powder on your shirt or, actually, I think that's ash. I havent had a chance to clean out the fireplace in awhile. Sorry about that."
"Don't worry about it," Draco lazily protested, taking a seat next to Rufus, who took up most of the couch and was busily chewing on the bone Adrian had tossed.
Hermione took in her surroundings: So this was where Adrian stayed when he wasn't traveling. She wondered how he'd gotten involved with Patrick and the travelers in the first place, but now didn't seem like the right time to ask.
Rain pattered on the windows while an empty umbrella stand seemed to glare accusingly at the weather. A pile of blank canvasses were stacked in one corner, collecting dust, while next to it a stack of canvasses already completely had already acquired a thick film and probably permanent damage. The closet door was open, revealing a sadly shabby collection of cloaks and jackets. There were books, but no bookshelf, stacked in the same manner as the canvasses. The tower of hardcovers seemed solid, but the leafed-through paperbacks seemed more and more precarious as they climbed to the top of the stack. The only lamp, a sickeningly pink thing Hermione would have bet ten galleons Adrian had not chosen himself, stood just in the right dimension that the one many-paned window looked lonely and sad as the rain beat down relentlessly. The faint smell of some seafood-based soup seemed to emanate from the kitchen.
Hermione assessed the couch and discovered that there wasn't quite enough room for her to sit on it, since Rufus took up so much of it. Instead, she sat down on a mismatched chair that looked like the only survivor of a dining room set, which Rufus had kindly destroyed with bite marks.
The room was such a shabby place, it reminded Hermione more of The Burrow than Malfoy Manor. It was hard to think the Malfoys had so much wealth when Draco's own half-brother lived in such shabbiness. Adrian seemed to follow her wandering eyes. "Its not much," he admitted, "but this is my humble bachelor pad. I'm only here a part of the year, anyway. I'm afraid its a little less fine than what you're accustomed to."
Hermione reddened, "Oh! Certainly not. I just had no idea you painted." It was a white lie, but it made her feel a little better.
"I don't, anymore," Adrian answered, "tea?"
Hermione accepted the steaming cup that was offered to her, fidgeting in an effort to be comfortable. The rickety chair seemed to creak whether she was still or not.
"Down to business," said Draco, declining some tea. "My father claims he has a spell of some sort that will bring back the Dark Lord. This is based on his knowledge of some prophecy he'd heard somewhere about me and Hermione..."
"It doesn't exist," Adrian interrupted calmly, dumping four cubes of sugar into his tea.
Draco stared.
"It has to exist," Hermione countered.
"It doesn't," said Adrian.
"But it has to. Carissa Baxter, the rain – we're... we're married!" Hermione sputtered.
"There's no prophecy," Adrian explained, "at least not one that was recorded, and one of that magnitude tends to be recorded in some way or another."
"Baxter made that prophecy, herself," Draco iterated.
Adrian rolled his eyes, "Carissa Baxter has a reputation in many parts of the world at this point... she MAKES all her own prophecies. As in, she can convince herself that something will happen and her mind creates a trance-like state, which will overtake her until someone happens to hear something they like. She also takes requests."
"So... she's not actually psychic," Draco stated, falling back into the couch.
"Oh, she's psychic alright. But she hasnt made a legitimate prophecy in about 350 years. She's the last holder of the Elixir of Life now that Nicholas Flamel has passed on, may he rest in peace. Why do you think Baxter has so many different names? She's not taken seriously otherwise."
The weight of this statement hit Hermione like a load of bricks. "But," she struggled to find something, "what about all the rain?"
Adrian smiled a little, blew on his tea, took a sip and said, "I did some research to see what that was all about, actually. As it turns out, there was a prophecy made in 1818 by Jemima Hindswaggle that foretold a great rain that would cover the entire world for exactly a month. She also predicted that no parts of the world would be lost to flood because by then a magical force field would surround the world, once the entire Wizarding World was connected as it is today."
Dumbstruck, both Hermione and Draco wore identical stunned faces for several moments while their brains caught up to this information. Adrian took the silent moment to rigorously scratch Rufus's belly.
"When did you discover this new prophecy?" Hermione queried, finding her voice before Draco did.
"This morning. I've had my assistant doing research with me to cover more areas of the library. He was actually the one who found it."
"Are you sure it's legitimate?" Hermione further questioned.
"Absolutely sure. I made sure there were two other documented sources." Another silence paused them until Adrian added, "The rain should stop in exactly 3 days."
"Another three days is worth waiting to see if it holds true," Draco mused aloud.
"I should say!" Hermione agreed and another thought occurred to her, "...the world HASN'T flooded! I remember when I went back to the manor, I had expected the lake to be flooded over, but it wasn't. It was just as it always was!"
Draco surveyed her, almost as if trying to detect if she was lying, until Adrian supplied, "Rightly, if flooding were to occur, we'd have lost a fair portion of the world already."
"I'd been told it had been lost already," Draco interjected.
"But, Draco, it makes sense!" Hermione cried, "we heard that information from your father and OF COURSE he would lie if he wanted us to believe him!"
"I just can't understand why he would want us to believe such a thing if it weren't true, though. What could be the gain for it?"
"Maybe he's bonkers," Adrian idly suggested, turning back to his tea, which had so much sugar in it, the white-stained-brown grains were visible.
"There has to have been SOME motivation, though," Draco muttered more to himself than to his companions, "it just doesnt make any sense this way..."
"I feel like such a weight has been lifted off my chest!" Hermione burst out happily. Truly, she was smiling in such a way as she had never smiled for months. Rufus made another motion as if he was barking and ambled over to slobber on Hermione and have his ears scratched.
"He's mute," Adrian explained, looking adoringly at Rufus. "Only case I've ever seen of it."
Draco sat in perfect silence, the wheels of his mind spinning rapidly. The rain could be explained away... Carissa Baxter could be explained away... but his father's determination to fulfill a prophecy that supposedly never existed... could not. Draco had grown up with that man, known him for eighteen years and NEVER had Lucius chased a wild dream or sought to achieve anything that would put himself on the line. The most reckless thing he'd ever done was to put the Dark Lord's schoolbook diary into Ginny Weasley's hands. Draco still wasn't sure how his father had done it, and certainly he hadn't even learned the truth until years after it had happened, but that had been the extent of Lucius's following a mere whim of his.
No, there was a bigger picture to this puzzle. Hermione and Adrian might be pacified, but there was a beast inside Draco's soul that was pacing back and forth, contemplating and restless...
.
.
Author's Note: If anyone has never seen Moulin Rouge, I would now suggest making it one of your priorities. And then you can get the soundtrack and listen to it a million times. It's worth it.
Thanks to Xx. Shaiya Star-Gazer .xX, Megara Spoiler, sureynot, dg17, InvisibleLilacNights, CountingSheep123, gitgit, ebbe04, and LyLyLo for the reviews!
Xx. Shaiya Star-Gazer .xX - I deleted the old copy of the story because the more I read it, the more embarrassed I was about my writing. Fear not though, I went through it and took out the good parts, which I am trying to fit into this version of the story.