As gratifying as it was to see Draco punch the Carrow woman in the face, the evening would go down as one of the worst Hermione had spent at Malfoy Manor. She wanted to scream at Narcissa for trapping her, she wanted to hex Alecto for the smug look on her face even Draco's fist couldn't wipe away, she wanted to cry on Draco Malfoy's shoulder but she knew that would be unwelcome so she held it all in until he was walking her back to her room with instructions from Antonin Dolohov, of all people, to be adult about this and just choose an invitation style.
"I'm sorry," Draco said. "Punching her was uncalled for."
Hermione kept her eyes on the thick carpet and her jaw ground shut as she walked along, on her way to pick out wedding invitations. "I just couldn't stand her calling you that," he said after she didn't respond.
"You've used the term often enough," she said. That was unfair, of course, and he hadn't used it at all since this adventure had begun. He'd objected to it before now. She didn't think she felt like being fair, though. Bonded. Forever. To Draco Malfoy. For the good of an Order who'd all but abandoned her.
For the good of overthrowing pricks like Dolohov.
"There comes a point at which I won't apologize for things I said at sixteen again," he said. "These egg shells hurt my feet."
"I hope you won't have to -."
"I'm sure I will," he said before she could say suffer, be punished, endure still more on her account.
She pinched her lips together and opened the door to her room. "Let's pick out invitations," she said. "We're getting married in a few short months. They probably need to go out."
Narcissa, terrifyingly efficient, had had a binder from a print shop left on her desk. God knew when she'd found the time to order that done, or maybe she'd magically moved it there herself. Who could guess. Hermione flipped it open to look at the first page and wanted to be ill. Cherubs – actual cherubs – moved about the parchment holding onto silver and pink hearts. As she watched, one of them hurled a heart at the other and the romance disintegrated into a pitched battle.
Draco leaned over her shoulder. "Pity about the pink," he said. "Other than that, it seems thematically dead on."
She snickered without meaning to and turned the page.
She would not have believed it possible, but the second choice was even worse. Some sort of horrible block printed pattern of black leaves and flowers writhed under her eyes as the sample letters slowly appeared. She didn't even like the font and all the black made it look like they were planning a funeral.
"No," Draco said. "Please not that one."
"I would have assumed purebloods preferred very traditional invitations," Hermione said. The third page featured a washed-out wizarding photograph of two sample faces. The witch had very high cheekbones and the wizard smiled with too many teeth. She hoped they were models and not an actual couple because they seemed a bit irritated with one another as they each jostled to each get their face more prominently positioned in the photo. Their movement made reading the sample text difficult.
Draco reached over and turned the page. "I think we might have stumbled into my mother's sense of humor," he said.
"The wedding?" Hermione asked but there was no hope behind the words.
"Maybe we'll be able to fake the bonding bit," Draco said.
Hermione didn't hold out much hope for that either. "Maybe," she said.
Draco lit the fire with his wand and snorted though whether at the idea of escaping this fate or the current ridiculous invitation sample she wasn't sure. She joined him on the floor and they settled down to look through the book and find something – anything – that wasn't just painful. By the fifteenth invitation the sheer awfulness of it all had reduced them both to laughter. A winged Cupid shot arrows. Flowers bloomed up out of the bottom of the card. One even had an exhortation to live with the values of Circe in their marriage.
"Drug you and turn you into a pig?" Hermione asked.
"It could have been the values of Nimue," he said. "Then you'd have had to lock me in a tree."
"I could be sold on that," she said.
He twisted his mouth around the sourness of that and turned the page without comment. The last page had the obvious choice. Simple black words embossed on thick white parchment. Hermione glanced up at Draco. He was looking back at her with those unreadable grey eyes. A lock of his hair had fallen down across his face and marred the near perfect symmetry of his angles. "This one?" she asked.
"I'm still fond of the cherubs," he said. "But I'm willing to yield a little."
"Compromise," she said.
He picked up the book and said, "Well, I'll be going. Off to tell mother."
"Tell her the pale green and silver is fine," Hermione said. She didn't want to pull her eyes off his face. "If you are happy with it."
"It's fine," he said. "She'll want to take you dress -."
"No," Hermione said. She'd had too many fantasies in her childhood about wedding dresses. She'd imagined going to Harrods with her mum, sipping champagne and trying on dress after dress, lost in a romantic haze. She didn't want to live the bitter reality of being paraded through robes shops as a stratagem. That would be too much. "I'm sure she can find something that will suit," she added awkwardly. What bride didn't care about her dress? Could she be more obvious she didn't want to do this? A flash of what might have been pain narrowed his eyes and was quickly blinked away. She wanted to apologize for that, for the bar, for her fury over everything. She wanted him to apologize. She wanted all of this to go away.
"If you prefer," he said, ignoring whatever misery played across her face to stay with the issue of the dress and nothing else. "I'm sure she has opinions."
"I'm sure," Hermione said. "I don't know what people of your class would consider right, anyway," she added. "I'm sure I'd pick out something tacky and lower class."
Draco looked at her for a long moment before said, "You couldn't be lower class if you tried." Then he opened the door and slipped away.
. . . . . . . . . .
Hermione excused herself in the morning to 'run errands.' It was probably stupid to go so quickly after learning Percy had escaped. Dolohov probably had people tailing her, and, if he didn't, Yaxley certainly did. Narcissa had just nodded almost absently over her tea and fruit cup and said to have anything she purchased charged to the Malfoy account and delivered via owl post. "No need to be weighed down by boxes and bags," she said. "I'm sure you want to go hide in a bookstore and get a break from us all. I always like the backs of the shops. Tiny doors leading out to alleys tucked away between memoirs and travel books."
Hermione blinked a few times, then nodded. She made a point of buying herself a brilliant red jumper in the most outrageous cashmere imaginable in one shop, and, after some hesitation, a set of practice Snitches in another. She didn't spot anyone following her but that didn't mean they weren't there. The man picking his teeth by the fountain could be one of Yaxley's trackers. The woman fussing with an umbrella might be.
In the bookstore where Narcissa had so aptly predicted she'd end up, she pushed past the stacks of Pansy Parkinson's vile book. Maybe the pile meant they hadn't sold well. A woman could dream.
Umbrella lady appeared at the side of that table, book about auror's in her hand. She turned it over and squinted at the back, then fumbled in her purse for a pair of spectacles. There weren't that many stores, really. Diagon Alley wasn't like Muggle London. There were only so many doors a witch could enter. It might mean nothing.
Constant vigilance.
Moving deeper into the store, Hermione ran her fingers along the spines of children's stories, hesitated over a volume of spell craft for the modern witch, then wound her way toward the back. She'd never bothered to go past the tomes on daily meditations and tripe like What Would Nimue Do. Nimue would have started a war and locked Yaxley in a tree and while that seemed like a good idea, Hermione suspected the book was a little less fiery than that.
Wizarding travel books seemed even worse, with books on the exotic customs and how a wise person wore good socks and sturdy British boots on any trip and hell would freeze before she'd pick up any of Gilderoy Lockhart's memoirs. The memory of that crush still stung. At least his lie-filled books had been stashed in the back of the bookstore right by a narrow red door that she almost missed.
She looked over her shoulder. Umbrella lady was nowhere in sight. Maybe she'd toddled on her way, off to pick up some biscuits. Maybe she assumed the front door was the only way out.
Hermione tried the latch on the red door. It opened under her hand and she slipped into a small alley. Rubbish bins lined the brick walls and not a single window peered out. Given the smell of rotting food and urine, Hermione wasn't surprised this was a crevice no one wanted to acknowledge. Determination. Destination. Deliberation.
She hoped the crack when she disappeared wasn't too loud. Apparition wasn't made for stealth. She appeared in Little Whinging under a ragged tree behind Arabella Figg's house. A cat peered at her from a window and she wished, not for the first time, that she had Harry's cloak. Being invisible had been handy in a way she hadn't appreciated. A hand might have twitched a curtain aside. The cat was gone, jumped down from whatever ledge it had been on, and the house sat silently.
Hermione took a deep breath and pulled a sheet of paper and quill from her bag.
Let me know if you need anything, she wrote. I'll check back when I can. Then, after a pause, she added, I'm sorry, I had no choice though she doubted Percy would accept the apology. She reached her hand into the trunk of the tree, shuddering as she always did at the way the wood was both there and not, and left the note in the drop point.
When she turned Mrs. Figg stood in the doorway. The woman pursed her lips then gestured urgently at her, waving her in. Hermione sighed and crossed the yard. Another thing she had no choice about. Maybe the house didn't smell quite as badly of cat anymore.
It did.
"Doreen?" Hermione asked wryly once the door was shut.
"Engaged?" Mrs. Figg asked in return. At Hermione's shocked expression she pulled out a copy of The Daily Prophet. She'd already opened it to the gossip pages and Hermione's heart sank as she saw the photograph of her and Draco, dancing together at that club before he'd stormed off, captioned with Youngest Death Eater Takes a Muggle Bride.
"I'm not exactly a Muggle," she muttered.
"Well, he's not exactly a Death Eater," Mrs. Figg said. She tutted and reached down to pat a ginger cat on the head. "Nice boy?"
Before Hermione could answer she heard Percy Weasley's voice. "Yes, Hermione. How nice is he?"
She spun and there he was. He had a tortoiseshell cat in his arms and the creature looked blissfully happy. Percy raised a brow at her shock. He looked a lot of things. He looked pale. He looked like he hadn't eaten enough in a long time. He looked haggard and there was a nasty scar on one cheek and he'd shaved his hair. What he didn't look like was angry. Hermione's shoulders lightened as she studied him.
"He's nice enough," she said.
"The romance grows," Percy said. "What I'm curious about isn't Malfoy. It's how you convinced Rodolphus Lestrange to break into the Ministry holding cells and get me out."
Arabella Figg scuttled into her kitchen to find tea. "Milk?" she yelled back.
"Yes, please," Hermione called, then in a more normal volume, "Didn't he say anything?"
Percy sank into a chair, cat still in his arms. "He went on and on about the god-slayer and what the god-slayer wanted, and the god-slayer's mouthpiece -."
"Well, I'm glad I get a nice title in his crazy monologues," Hermione said. "That's got more of a ring to it than filthy Mudblood."
Percy laughed and the cat glared up at him for a moment, ears pressed back so she looked like an angry owl. "Do you know what you're doing?" he asked as he stroked the cat, trying to settle her back down.
"Not a clue," Hermione admitted.
"They just threw you to the wolves," he said bitterly, "Just like they did me. Moody told me to do that undisguised, you know. And I trusted him."
She wanted to argue it hadn't been like that but, of course, it had. She'd been sacrificed so they could get away. Percy had been sacrificed to solidify her cover.
"Want help?" he asked her as she stood there, not sure what to do now.
She began to smile. "More than anything in the world."
Mrs. Figg brought a tea tray that included a plate of something hideous for the cat on Percy's lap and they began to make plan after plan after plan.
. . . . . . . . . .
A/N – Thank you to salazars for beta reading. She is a cupcake of happiness.