By the time the dinner hour arrived, Hermione wanted nothing so much as to lay her head down and sleep. So far today she'd gone flying, an activity she never liked, seen Dolohov smirking up at her, had a terrible lunch, and had the immeasurable pleasure of seeing Ronald Weasley's photograph. Today could go hang. She was done.
Only she wasn't, because she still had to go put on a performance as a good little Malfoy bride, chipper and smug and hateful and wholly committed to this vile, fascist regime. If she had to put on dress trousers and slip her feet into high heels, she wanted it to be because she was walking to the town square to set Yaxley's funeral pyre ablaze. Fantasizing about that propelled her out of her room, down the corridor, around corners, and all the way to the formal dining room. Draco met her there.
"Which lucky players are we eating with tonight," she asked, so tired she couldn't keep the bitterness out of her voice. "Are these actual former Death Eaters or just toadies?"
He flashed her a wry smile. "Mother did not inform me of the guest list," he said.
"Not friends, then," Hermione said. Figured. She pushed the door open without waiting for Draco to do the gracious thing, the aristocratic thing, and hold it for her. She pulled out her own chair, and sat her own self down without pretending she needed his help to slide her way in. She had just about had it with pretending to be weak when she was strong.
"Mrs. Malfoy."
Antonin Dolohov was seated opposite her. She supposed that made a kind of horrible sense. She'd seen him here this morning and he'd never left. Like the plague, he hung around, waiting for an opportunity to rear his ugly head again and infect the innocent. "Mr. Dolohov," she said. "How lovely to see you."
"You need to have your eyes examined," Lucius said. Three glasses in. Whatever filter he had was washed away. He poured himself another and lifted a brow at a glance he must have found censorious. He was wrong. She wasn't judging him. She was envying him.
Draco took the bottle from his father and measured some out for her. He paused at the usual, polite level of full, then added a bit more. "Would you like some, Rabastan?" he asked as the door opened.
Hermione managed not to close her eyes as the unmistakable Rabastan Lestrange sashayed into the room. He grabbed the bottle from Draco's outstretched hand and said, "I know how to fill a glass, Malfoy." He added a bit more to hers, then poured the rest into his before he even sat down. He miscalculated how much wine was left in the bottle and the overflow spilled out and puddled on the white tablecloth. Red wine. Hermione remembered her mother saying that was one of the hardest stains to get out. Worse than blood, she'd said.
"Mr. Lestrange," she said. "I didn't see you in the hall."
"Just got here," he said. He patted ineffectually at the spill with his napkin before giving up with a shrug and dropping the now equally stained fabric into his lap. Narcissa ignored the entire thing.
"You missed Rabastan, too?" Dolohov asked with a tsking sound. "Not at your most observant today, Hermione."
"You really do have vision problems, darling," Draco said.
"Is the bloom already off the rose?" Dolohov asked, with so much false concern Hermione began to consider that since this tablecloth might already be ruined, it was quite possible that Narcissa would forgive her getting even more red wine on it when she threw her glass in the Death Eater's miserable, rotten face.
"People think roses are so difficult to grow," Narcissa said placidly, as though she had just heard the last word of his sentence and hadn't followed the entire conversation in detail. "It's a misunderstanding, really, born of ignorance."
"What's your secret," Hermione asked. Some devilish impulse made her add, "to keeping the bloom on the rose, I mean."
Lucius choked on his wine.
"Yes, Lucius," Dolohov nearly cooed, "What is your lovely wife's secret to keeping the rose blooming?
"Fertilizer, really," Narcissa said. She took a dainty sip of her wine and smiled at him. "Give roses the proper decomposing matter, and they do very well indeed."
"What about pests?" Hermione asked. She was terribly proud she kept her face straight.
"They can be a problem," Narcissa said as though conceding something. "But with proper treatment, you just add them to the compost heap."
Hermione continued to keep her composure until Narcissa flicked a glance at Dolohov. Then she had to bite the inside of her cheek until the pain kept her focused and not laughing. "Are you interested in gardening, Mr. Dolohov?" she asked.
"Please, my dear," he said. "Call me Antonin."
It would be unpardonably rude to make a gagging noise at the dinner table so Hermione refrained. "Gardening, Antonin?" she asked.
"I'm afraid it's an art I know nothing about," he said. "I prefer divination."
"Divination?" She couldn't hide her genuine surprise at that. Curse the man, he looked amused.
"It was never your favorite subject, was it?" Draco asked.
"No," Hermione said. "At Hogwarts, I dropped the class."
"Not a huge fan of dear Sybill?" Dolohov asked her.
This was treacherous ground indeed and Hermione's smile became even more false. The lie she'd told so long ago about Harry's damned prophecy jabbed at her. She'd thought she was so clever, but she'd been too clever by half. She should have kept her fool mouth shut. "Students often fail to appreciate the classes that will most impact their lives," she said. "A problem with being young."
"Yes," he said smoothly. "Age brings wisdom."
"Then you are surely the wisest of us all," Lucius muttered. He drained his glass and ignored Narcissa's attempts to catch his eye as he filled it again.
Dolohov let out a cultured chuckle that made Hermione's teeth grind down into one another. She forced herself to relax. Her mother had always hated to deal the teeth worn down because people clenched their jaws. You only have one set of adult teeth, she would say reprovingly after they'd left the clinic. You need to take care of them, Hermione.
Funny, the things you remembered.
"What I mean," Dolohov said, "was that as one becomes older and wiser one learns to read the tea leaves of public opinion and, what is that crude phrase, back the right horse."
Hermione shoved her tongue between her teeth to keep herself from behaving in a way that would have upset her dentist parents. She would not clench her jaw, or ask this prick bastard what he meant, or do anything at all other than look bland and perhaps a bit perplexed.
"You enjoy horse racing?" she asked.
"I know how to pick a winner," he said. "Don't you, Rabastan?"
"God killer," Rabastan said, and any hopes Hermione had that this conversation might be kept safely away from his delusions disappeared. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose and considered what pain medications they had around of headaches that came out of nowhere and began to stab at you from behind one eye. "God killer becomes god."
Whatever those painkillers were, they wouldn't be enough.
"Yes," Dolohov said. "That is certainly the way it looks." He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and slid it across the table toward Hermione. When she made no move to pick it up he said in a voice so oily she was reminded he wasn't merely unpleasant and conniving and wretched, he'd worked for Voldemort and given every indication of liking it. "I do think you'll want to look at that, Mrs. Malfoy."
She quirked a brow up but, with every frisson of calculated unconcern she could summon, picked up the envelope and opened it. It held a small bit of paper, torn to leave only two words.
Miss you.
Did she blanche? Did her hands tremble? If so, she controlled herself within an instant and dropped the paper with Ron's handwriting, the note she'd carefully saved so long ago, back onto the table. "I'm afraid I don't understand," she said.
"A protean charm," Dolohov said, but it wasn't an explanation. He was holding court now. "Very sophisticated magic. Hard to do. I'd say I was impressed, but I'd expect nothing less of you. They leave a trace, of course. Perhaps you didn't know?"
"What are you talking about," Narcissa said with staccato impatience. A murmured accio and the paper was in her hand. "Miss you? What on earth is this?"
"I'd like to pretend I thought it was a love note," Dolohov said. "But no woman as accomplished as our young Mrs. Malfoy would waste her time on love notes. I suspect something far more insidious."
Draco's knuckles had gone white around the stem of his wine glass. "You're going to have to enlighten me," he said. "Forgive me for being quite so slow, but I am not following you at all."
"Then let me be blunt," Dolohov said. An accio of his own and the scrap of paper was back in his hand, tucked into another envelope, and slid into a pocket. "Your wife has been in contact with the Order of the Phoenix via the protean charm, and some form of misguided sentimentality led her to save as single line."
"Gryffindors," Lucius muttered.
"Well, I would lay the sin at the feet of her sex," Dolohov said. "Women are often prone to fits of sentimentality."
"I beg your pardon?" Narcissa sounded more offended than Hermione had ever heard.
"The lovely ladies of the House of Black being a notable exception," Dolohov said with a nod of his head. His eyes lingered too long on Narcissa's thin-lipped face to be courteous. "How many bodies are in your garden, Narcissa?" he asked softly. "How many corpses have you planted blooms over without batting a single one of your perfect eyelashes?"
Narcissa drew her wand. "There's always room for one more," she said. "Lucius, get the shovel."
Her husband twisted his mouth. That twist derided the idea he would ever dig a grave with something as plebeian – as Muggle – as a shovel. Manual labor was for the lesser orders, for people who couldn't excavate a perfect hole with a single charm. Murder, however, crossed all social barriers.
"Before you slaughter me," Dolohov said, "You might be interested to know I have a companion who will mail the contents of an opened box to the Ministry if I do not return tonight. Without boring you with the details, I can assure you if our mutual friend Lord Yaxley were to see the contents, well, things would go very badly for all of you."
Narcissa did not lower her wand. "Do not threaten my family," she said.
"Who said anything about threatening you?" Dolohov asked. "Rabastan, my friend, have I threatened them?"
"She's the one pointing a wand at you," Rabastan said.
"Yes, do put that away, please," Dolohov said. The salad plates picked that moment to appear on the table and he picked up his fork. "Pears," he said. "My favorite."
"What do you want?" Hermione asked. Her own fingers itched to slide down into her pocket and pull out her own wand. Everything in her screamed to kill him, to quiet the threat, to make things okay again. If he hadn't dangled the threat of revelation, she'd have done it. As it was, she was cursing herself for having saved that scrap of paper. It had been foolish and just as sentimental as he'd said. She'd needed it when she'd first gotten here, needed the confirmation her friends missed her, that they cared, that she wasn't alone. She hadn't even thought of it in ages. She took her strength from Draco now, and his terrifying mother, and even his horrible drunk of a father. Ron had made his choices, and she'd made hers, and while it had been a shock to see the picture of him propped up on the mantle today, he'd become nothing more than a friend from her past. In a fair world, they'd be godparents to one another's children and send inappropriate gifts for birthdays. Drums and such. She wanted to send an entire toddler drum kit to him as a christening present for the baby.
It was a bit peculiar to realize she didn't want anything more, and that she didn't hold a grudge. She had a habit of grudges. But you had to care enough to carry one of those and the truth was she didn't. Not anymore.
Though she didn't look forward to explaining that to Draco.
Assuming they didn't end up murdering Dolohov and spending the night fleeing. That might not leave time for talking about the note she'd saved.
"Want?" Dolohov said. He stabbed a slice of pear with his fork. "I want to have a delicious meal with old friends, their lovely son, and his talented young wife."
"And then?" she asked.
He smiled. "And then, when you overthrow Lord Yaxley, which you will inevitably do, I want you to remember that I was always working with the opposition and am on the right side of history."
"God, you're despicable," Hermione said.
He popped the pear in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed before he said, "But do we have an agreement?"
She closed her eyes. "Yes," she said.
She could hear the satisfaction in his voice. "Then you're just as despicable as I am."
. . . . . . . . . .
A/N - Thank you to quickhidetherum for beta reading!