TW: Discussion of Maternal Mortality
TW: Biphobia / Homophobia
CW: Grief
CW: Strong Language
"Love you, dad!"
Scorpius left with Blaise, who arrived at Malfoy Manor with a new smile on his face. His Dean Thomas smile. His silence was different and the air around him was lighter. Draco couldn't quite label it, but Blaise was happier; he'd found a light in Dean Thomas. Conversely, Scorpius left and all the manor's light went with him.
Without Hermione, everything had reverted to a certain degree of sameness. Monday afternoon, Draco stared at his monitor so long the faces blurred together. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed the pads of his thumbs to his temples. Perhaps if he squeezed hard enough, he would black out and be rid of these meetings. He opened his eyes and the time in the lower corner of his screen read 1:58. Draco always had tea with his mother on Monday afternoon.
His phone was a heavy weight in his pocket. Someone had gotten him a new one, transferred every bit of data, every contact, and every photograph. If he hadn't felt the first phone's cracks beneath his fingers, he wouldn't have believed this was a different phone. It was exactly the same. Just as every fucking day was exactly the same.
Draco was desperately avoiding Hermione. He was in love with her. The sort of lost love that had Draco seriously considering jumping into the manor pond with no intent of coming out.
Draco mumbled goodbye as the virtual meeting came to a close. He fluffed his hair and leaned back in his chair. Draco stared at the ceiling until his eyes burned. Love was his father's area and, for the first time since his death, Draco found himself wishing his father was still around to ask. Draco took a deep breath in through his nose, held it, and exhaled through his mouth. His father never quite approved of Astoria; said she didn't make Draco feel enough. He believed a proper love should be unbearable, run hot, freeze over, make him mad. God forbid Draco be comfortable with his wife.
But Hermione …
Draco went mad the moment Graham Greengrass touched her. His blood boiled inside him, his vision whited out, and next thing he knew his forearm was braced against Graham's throat. Draco needed to make him understand hurting Hermione was a death sentence. Draco was ready to do it, strangle Graham in front of his wife. Prove to Hermione he could protect her in ways none of her previous lovers would. Because that's what he wanted to be: her lover. Her partner.
The ground she walks on.
Draco should have kissed Hermione when he had the chance. She'd been ready, she'd brought condoms for fuck's sake. He remembered the way she smiled when he asked to kiss her. It had been a picture-perfect moment in the gardens under the stars and he didn't take it because he was scared. He was looking into her eyes and all he could think was, What if I lose this? Hermione had gone off and fucked Viktor Krum, her first shag in seven years and it could've been Draco if he hadn't been so deep in his own grief.
He stood out of his chair, walked out the office door, and made for his mother's study. Draco walked through the halls with his father's voice in his head. Your mother is my soul. Everything I do is for her. I love you because she loves you. I am in this world only because she is in it. Draco needed tea and biscuits. He needed his mother to put everything right again. To make things make sense. When he met his mother in the sitting room, she was next to Penelope Clearwater and macarons were waiting on the table.
Shit.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at each of them. Penelope Clearwater was wearing a black top and bright red trousers, and an expression as though she was braced for a fight. Nothing about the tension between Penelope and his mother felt like a peace offering. Yet, Draco found himself saying,
"I am delighted you two have mended things."
"My plan for Hermione has backfired spectacularly and I have to salvage it," said Penelope. "Quickly."
"Miss Clearwater has a proposition." Narcissa scooted the plate of macarons toward Draco. "One you will accept."
Not a choice. Draco pressed his tongue against the inside of his right cheek, acutely aware of how deeply a refusal would hurt. Penelope revealed,
"Over the past month Hermione has been connected to Cormac McLaggen, yourself, and now Viktor Krum. You're all incredibly wealthy and Hermione is being presented as a journalist on the hunt for, in simple terms, a benefactor."
"A benefactor?"
Penelope rolled her eyes and huffed, "A sugar daddy."
Draco laughed. He doubled over and pressed a hand to his chest, wheezing. He half-fell into a chair and shook his head, trying to calm himself enough to say,
"What if I am her sugar daddy?"
"That is, in a way, my proposition."
Draco frowned and asked, "Sorry?"
"Right now, Hermione is a whore. Three degrees, a permanent anchor position, multiple journalism accolades, and she's been reduced to her dating life all because I thought …" Penelope sighed. "I thought the public would like her better if they could see her trying to be like them. And they know she isn't like them, so they're rationalizing it however they can. I have to take the pieces available to me, which are you, McLaggen, and Viktor Krum, and turn those pieces into a narrative."
"I'm half-following you."
"McLaggen is out of the picture. He is my foil, my villain."
"I'm sold."
"You and Krum are my leads. Picture it," Penelope scooted to the edge of her chair and held out her hands like she was staring at an invisible painting, "Hermione Granger: burned by her first attempt at love since her divorce. She is swept off her feet by a widowed billionaire, who is interested in her, but keeps her at arm's length. He is too much in love with his late wife to give her the love she deserves. She turns to her first love, who also happens to be her first heartbreak. Viktor Krum knows she is in love with another man, but cannot help the magnetic attraction between the two of them. It runs hot then cools, leaving Hermione caught between the love that was and the love that could have been." Penelope smiled and asked, "What do you think?"
"I don't understand."
"I laid it out—"
"Your novel idea is to, essentially, tell the truth?"
"Yes."
"Then what are we discussing? How does this impact me at all?"
"Your British GQ interview on Friday is our launchpad. I've got Hermione a cover as well. It's in about six weeks' time, and it will take a lot of convincing for her to accept. I'm working with Krum's agent to set him up as the lost love, positing a broken heart. It's a storyline that will carry him through his final season, especially if he has an injury. Then he'll have lost everything, giving him the opportunity for a comeback story and women love a broken-hearted footballer."
"Why will Hermione need convincing to do publicity? It's not as though she is uncomfortable in front of the camera or giving interviews."
"It's a cover story about her injury. I want her on the cover with no sleeves and a deep neckline so everyone can see what she's been hiding. People need to know her style of journalism comes at a cost, and they should respect it."
"Which magazine?"
"British Vogue."
Draco's jaw dropped. He asked,
"How much pull do you really have? This takes a lot of weight. Everyone told me you are a great publicist, but I get the sense you and my mother work together because you are on her level."
"With three properly-placed tweets and a call to The Sun I could pick the next PM." Penelope added, "Media is a public puzzle. Reality is just the edge pieces, and I fill it in with whatever I choose. Once I'm done, that is what the public sees. I am very good at my job, and Hermione gave me the clout to begin with. I owe it to her to make her career a happy one."
"So I understand, you are putting us on two of the most highly-respected, well-read magazines to place our names in the zeitgeist both separately and together."
"Yes."
"Hermione will never agree to that cover."
Penelope sighed heavily and said, "That is one reason I have come to you. I need you to convince her—"
"We aren't even speaking! She's shagging Viktor Krum, now. Hermione is not my girlfriend and I don't even know if we're friends. She hasn't texted me since Saturday morning."
"And you can't pick up your own phone?" asked Penelope. "I keep making the mistake of believing you're an intelligent person."
"Penelope."
Draco watched his mother turn toward Penelope. She waited patiently for Narcissa to say,
"You have come to us for help, and you would do well to avoid insulting my son."
"Your son would do well to not break my best client's heart."
"On that," replied Narcissa, "we agree."
"Your son is the reason I am in this mess," added Penelope. "If Hermione had hopped right from McLaggen to Krum, the narrative would be a simple level up. I could have made this a long-lost lovers find each other again scenario." She turned to face Draco and said, "Instead, you had to sandwich yourself in the middle. It is my job to make sure Hermione keeps her job, and I need your help to do it."
"Why would she lose her job?" asked Draco.
"Do you remember last year, when the Romanian PM couldn't form a government?"
"Of course. Something about deforestation and the EU. I remember Parliament pushing for sanctions on companies using old growth trees. Malfoy Holdings looked into it, trying to see if there was an opportunity to expand our sustainability footprint. Didn't happen."
Penelope said, "The only reason Parliament did anything was because the public doesn't like billion-dollar companies chopping down ancient trees for cheap furniture. The only reason the public knew anything about logging in Romania is because while the rest of the country's news programs covered the government failure, Hermione covered logging's impact on the country's economy for two weeks. She puts the perspective where people in power don't want it to go. Governments hate her because she's good at her job. They want her out and it is my job to keep Hermione in the seat at Ten."
Draco insisted, "That can't be true. Otherwise they never would have offered her a spot on BBC Breakfast."
"The Breakfast gig was meant to embarrass her; they always knew they would rescind the offer. They outplayed me. She's been labeled undesirable and the press is using her dating life to paint her unfavourably. There are people in government who want her off air, and they are trying to force BBC's hand. Hermione, as much as I love her and as brilliant a woman as she is, is shit at politics. You're not, and I need at least one player who understands the game."
"I thought the network loved her. I had no idea."
"Nobody does, not even her producer. I am the only one with the contacts to connect all the pieces."
"Right." Draco nodded to Penelope. "I will do whatever Hermione needs me to do."
"Excellent." Penelope pulled out her mobile and replied, "Planning begins now."
.oOo.
Wednesday morning, as Draco said goodbye to his CFO and three higher-ups whose names he didn't bother to remember, his phone vibrated in his pocket. Draco answered as he closed the office door.
"Hello?"
"I have found myself in an unexpected situation."
Draco smiled, happy to hear Blaise's voice. Penelope had been in his head for nearly a day with what amounted, in his mind, to platitudes. Tell the truth. Work your way around to Hermione's credentials. Talk about your grief. Be an asshole, but only if it's funny. Be the slightest bit self-effacing. He'd allowed her to go on because Penelope wanted the best for Hermione, and she outlined the preferred narrative for him. He'd been in the public eye long enough to control the flow of an interview. Draco replied,
"What naughty things have you done this morning?"
"It's nothing like that. I did something desperate."
"Oh?"
"I found Dean's ex-husband on Instagram."
Draco put the call on speaker and opened the app. He was logged into Bastien's account just for moments like this. Draco asked,
"What's his username?"
"SheaIsFineAgain."
Draco scoffed, "Very classy." He scrolled through Finnegan's photos to see he was an avid hiker and skier. He worked, apparently, an explosives technician, which explained how there was no hope for Dean Thomas to pull equal weight financially. Finnegan was also engaged to a new man quite recently. Draco asked,
"Why are you phoning me?"
"Because he follows me."
Draco laughed.
"Of course he does. What gay man in the country isn't following you on Instagram?"
"You, for example."
"Blaise, I love you, but I have seen far more than the cock tease selfies you post on your stories. Not newsworthy for me. I hardly believe you miss my presence seeing as Elton John follows you."
"Sometimes he likes my selfies."
"Of course he likes them, everyone likes them. Women like them. Do you want to tell me why you phoned?"
"I asked Dean if I could post a photo of us together, and he said yes."
"That's great news!" Draco smiled and said, "If he's allowing you to make it official on social media, does that mean he's committed? I'll admit, this is more Bas's area than mine. I am not seeing the issue."
"I don't know whether Dean knows that his ex-husband follows me. What if Finnegan sees the post?"
"Good. Let him know he lost a great fucking bloke, and his ex-husband has a boyfriend who is far sexier than he could ever hope to be." Draco paused before adding, "And who is in the same bloody postcode. Christ, Finnegan's got to be a foot shorter than Dean Thomas."
"My editor already prepared the photograph for posting, but I feel it may be evocative because his ex-husband will see it."
Draco's phone buzzed with a text. He opened it to see a photo clearly taken by Blaise as he leaned into Dean's side. Dean was reading a book, holding it in one hand with the other arm wrapped around Blaise's shoulders.
"You look happier than I've seen you in a long time." Draco asked, "Have you been together often?"
"He's come over twice for a late dinner after Scorpius was in bed. I have brought him lunch at school every weekday since he mentioned where he works. He has spent the past three weekends at my house." Blaise was quiet for a long moment. "He still carries the pain his ex-husband caused him. I find myself wanting to post the photo not to tell the world that I have a boyfriend, but to let Dean's ex-husband know that Dean has a boyfriend."
"Good."
"It feels petty."
"His ex is a prick; be petty."
"I don't believe Dean would like that of me."
"Blaise, I may well have lost my only chance with Hermione because I hesitated. There are moments in a relationship where it's proper to consider all the options, all the outcomes. This isn't one. Don't hesitate, just be petty."
"Okay."
"You really like him?"
"He teaches maths."
"Hmm ..." Draco put in his other earbud and said, "Not sure that answers the question."
"He's intelligent, he writes children's books, and wears hideous jumpers to school because the kids love them. He tells me these things as if they are of no consequence, as if they are expected. He's a good person to his own detriment, and I fear he may be too good of a person for me."
"What if he is?" asked Draco. "If he chooses to be with you, and you're the man he wants, not much else matters."
"He plays amateur football and invited me to a match."
"When? We can bring Theo, Tracey, and the twins. Make a day of it." He paused before adding, "Perhaps Bas and Padma, too. And Hermione if they want company."
Blaise didn't say a word. Draco would get no reply, so he huffed,
"I'm in love with her."
"I know."
"I am trying to stop carrying the weight of Astoria's memory, but I have nowhere to put it. Tori wouldn't want me to be like this. I've failed her and my son and my mother—"
"You failed yourself, Draco. We hardly know you anymore. For six years, we have been waiting for you to find yourself again. Hermione has found a way to give you what you need and it is, by far, the best birthday gift you will ever receive. But you have to find yourself again or you will lose us. Scorpius won't, but you will."
Draco blurted out, "You have plans for my birthday?"
Blaise paused for a long while, but Draco felt the words coming. He waited, and waited, until Blaise finally said,
"Clean yourself up."
Then ended the call.
Draco stared down at his phone where Blaise's contact photo smiled up at him. It was an older, grainier photo taken on one of the early iPhones. They'd been dating a couple months and Draco remembered that moment so clearly. Blaise was looking at the camera while Draco was pressing an innocent kiss to his cheek. It was the moment Draco realized, for the first time, he was in love.
He wanted so desperately to feel that joy again. Draco opened his contacts and scrolled to the Hs. Hermione's number was right there. He could phone her, beg her for a chance to be a stronger, more self-assured man … But that wasn't proper. He had rejected Hermione, so she needed to come to him. It had to be her choice. He pulled up her contact information and changed her name to Golden Girl. After all, she'd signed her name that way.
Your Golden Girl
.oOo.
Press was easy.
Press had always been easy.
Draco stayed at Blaise's house the night before his interview with British GQ. He said goodbye to Scorpius that morning before meeting Penelope Clearwater and the reporter at his plant in Tilbury. Justin Finch-Fletchley was writing the article and seemed a nice enough person. Oddly enough, he was very interested in the sustainable cement cycle. Draco walked him around the plant, outlined the supply chain, ran through everything he wished as Penelope encouraged him to be as much of a nerd as he pleased. Halfway through the tour, a voice came shouting,
"I'm here! Sorry I'm late! I'm—" The man had a camera in one hand and a bag slung over his shoulder. "Sorry."
Finch-Fletchley seemed rather unbothered as he said, "We only need one or two photographs of Malfoy in here."
"Malfoy?" The man looked at Draco and his mouth fell open. "Oh my God, hi! Hello, pleasure to see you again."
Draco frowned.
"Again?"
"Right, you probably don't remember me without the hat. I'm Colin Creevey, I'm, um, I'm Hermione Granger's driver."
"Colin!" Draco offered his hand and said, "Yes, you got us out of a tight spot last week. Thank you for that. I appreciate you keeping her safe."
Colin shook Draco's hand and replied, "She's a great boss. GQ is my morning gig, and Hermione's the gig that pays."
Finch-Fletchley added, "I am standing right here."
Colin held up his camera and asked, "Where do you want him?"
Finch-Fletchley and Colin Creevey placed Draco where he needed to be. Draco grabbed a hard hat and pushed his hair up inside before placing it on his head. He posed, put on his I'm a serious businessman face, and looked toward the lens. Once Colin lowered the camera, Draco said,
"Make me look cool, yeah?"
"Respectfully, Mr. Malfoy, I don't know if there is a way for you to look uncool."
"You should see me in the mornings. I use a whole suite of Sleekeazy's products to get my hair this nice. The real Malfoy family secret is that our hair is not naturally this shiny."
Both Colin and Finch-Fletchley laughed at that. Draco's spirits lifted the slightest bit. Guiding a conversation was so easy that Draco wondered why he stopped doing this sort of press. Then, he supposed, the past several years he hadn't been much for conversation. He hadn't lost a step, though. By the end of the tour, even Penelope Clearwater appeared impressed.
They had lunch at Smith & Wollensky on the corner of the Adelphi Building. The location was convenient, but Draco suspected most interviewees were not given quite such high treatment. This was Finch-Fletchley's attempt to coax Draco into giving him some kind of scoop, something Draco hadn't discussed publicly before. Halfway through the entrée, Draco hadn't given him much of anything and Finch-Fletchley's patience was wearing a bit thin. He said,
"You were married."
Draco had prepared himself for this. Penelope prepared him for this. Yet, it took a few moments for Draco to find his voice.
"Yes, I was."
"But your wife died?"
"Yes." Draco focused rather intensely on slicing through what remained of the sirloin. "My wife died after giving birth to our son nearly six years ago."
"Oh." Finch-Fletchley hesitated for just a moment before deciding to push forward with this line of questioning. "I am sorry to hear it."
"I wish I could say it gets easier to talk about, but it doesn't." Draco placed his fork and knife on the table, still not quite able to meet the reporter's gaze. "I think this specific grief is something you cannot understand until you are in it."
"Can you try to tell me what it feels like?"
"No."
"Okay, then, how about telling me how it's evolved? After six years, how has the grief changed you?"
"It hasn't, and that's the worst bit. I've put every part of myself on pause because I feel her death was my fault. My wife didn't want to admit she was in pain after she got home. I saw it in her eyes, but she didn't want to complain and I didn't want to push her to say anything. She'd just had our baby, I wasn't going to tell her what to do." Draco paused before admitting, "I should have pushed her to say something. She took a nap in the morning, woke up, felt a bit better but I believe she was just half-asleep. By the time she mentioned pain in her stomach, it was unbearable. I think she knew by that point it was too late. When my wife was going back to hospital, she knew she was going to die. She knew it, but I still had hope for her. I kept insisting, no, you're going to be fine, and Astoria stopped talking to me. She just … stopped. The last thing she said to me was, 'You have to love him enough for two.'"
Draco's voice caught in his throat. He blinked away tears and shook himself out of that moment. His heart ached with it, knowing that he could have said so many things and didn't just because he was convinced Astoria would be okay.
"Astoria didn't want to go to hospital. I believe she was afraid to tell me that she wanted to die at home. She wanted to die with me and our son at her side. Instead, because of my own bloody insistence that she go to hospital and unwillingness to let her tell me what would have made her comfortable, she died in an operating room. Without us. When I look back on her death and my role in it, that is what I regret more than anything. I wouldn't listen to her when she tried to tell me she didn't want to go to hospital. I imagine it must've pained her to know I wasn't prepared for her death the way she was. Astoria was my everything, my peace. I looked at her body in the hospital and felt so betrayed by it. That body gave me my baby boy, my son, and yet that same body took my wife away from me."
"That didn't change you as a man?"
"The moment she died, the grief hollowed me out. I work so hard to be present for my son while balancing Astoria's memory. I have one foot in the past and one in the present. I feel a responsibility to her that I can't properly put into words, and it's distanced me from my son. I haven't allowed myself to grow since I lost her. Nobody has told me how to fix it, how to keep Astoria in my heart while opening it to someone else."
"Is there someone else?"
"No."
"There is no truth to the Hermione Granger rumours?"
Draco felt Penelope's gaze turn toward him. They prepped for this. Draco pled ignorance and wondered,
"What rumours?"
"It's been reported the two of you were seeing each other before she was spotted with Viktor Krum. And after Cormac McLaggen—"
"Hermione is an exceptional woman, a powerful journalist, and respected by everyone for her intellect."
"So you were seeing her?"
"No. She is my friend."
"Do you normally let your friends borrow your jumpers?"
"Yes."
Finch-Fletchley's mouth tightened into a thin line for just a moment. He thought he had Draco with that one.
"Right. Are you jealous of her relationship with Viktor Krum?"
Draco grinned and asked, "Do you truly believe I am so easily baited?"
Finch-Fletchley shrugged and admitted, "Hoping so."
"I will say this and be done with it. Hermione Granger is my friend, and she pushes me to be a better father without realizing she's doing so. She fits into my family, my group of friends nicely, so we have been around each other quite a bit as of late. I care for her very deeply and I wish I could be the sort of man she is looking for. Unfortunately, my grief remains a ghost between us that I have yet to put to rest. If Hermione has found her happiness in Krum, then there is nothing for me to say about it. I want her to be happy."
"So you're in love with her?"
Don't do it. Don't take the bait. He will print whatever you say, don't—
"Of course I'm in love with her. How can you not be? Everyone sees her on the news, you see her character, her professionalism, but my God she's funny. I always find myself smiling around her. Hermione is … I suppose she is everything a man could want his partner to be. If she has landed on Krum, then he should thank the stars for aligning his way."
The interviewer sort of stared at him for a second before asking,
"You know I'm going to print that."
"Yes."
"Reading GQ is pretty much the last way a woman wants to find out a man is in love with her."
"She knows."
Penelope made a noise low in her throat and they both turned to look at her. Penelope waved them off and insisted,
"I'm not here."
"Okay. Well … Can I ask about your father?"
"It depends on the question."
"Would you say he was a good father?"
"Oh."
Draco frowned. He looked quickly over toward Penelope, who sipped from her champagne glass. She gave him nothing. Great fucking publicist. Well, her strategy for this interview was rather simple: tell the truth.
"My father, on the face of it, was shit. He always put the business before me and hated when I didn't understand why. I think he wanted to see my mother in me and all he kept seeing was himself. Then I told him I was bisexual when I was fourteen and he kicked me out of the manor. Literally threw me down the front steps."
Finch-Fletchley grimaced and mumbled, "My God."
"Yeah, well, I went to stay with my friend Bastien's family, and my mother presented my father with divorce papers."
"Bloody hell." That didn't come from Finch-Fletchley. Those words came from Penelope. She placed her hand over her mouth and shook her head. "Sorry, sorry, I'm not here."
"I think the most important thing for anyone to understand about my father is that, above all else, he loved my mother. He didn't teach me much, but he did teach me how to love my wife. Looking back, I think he focused on the business because he needed to provide for her. He needed to be the foundation for her life, for her success. If he'd looked at me and seen my mother, he would've felt the need to provide the love I always wanted from him. But he didn't, he only saw the parts of himself he didn't quite like. The parts that deserved to be discarded. My mother knew if she made us a package deal, both of us or neither, he would choose whichever option kept her in his life. So … I came back and two years later my father went to prison."
"Were you upset by that?"
"Of course I was; it wrecked my mother."
"How did you feel when he was released?"
"Proud, actually. I'd done everything he expected of me. I married a woman I loved and found peace in it. I felt whole for the first time in my life. Astoria understood me, and I always knew peace with her. And I did the most important thing Malfoys are expected to do: have a son." Draco pushed back the tears he could feel building behind his eyes. "I'm so glad my father got to meet his grandson. Hold him. You know, he loved my son in all the ways he never loved me."
"Did that irritate you?"
"No! My son is the one bright light in a very dark family history, and my father acknowledged that. He had about a year-and-a-half with my son before he died, and the most emotional part of his death was having to explain to my four-year-old why he's never going to see his grandfather again." Draco took a deep breath in through his nose then admitted, "I suppose I don't handle death well."
"Do you feel like you are a better father than yours?"
Draco laughed.
"Oh, God, I hope so. It's probably easier for me because I see so much of Astoria in my son. The way he smiles, his tiny laugh, the way he dances to the same songs she danced to …" Draco shrugged and offered, "I love my son a million times more than my father loved me. As for whether I am good at being a dad? I know my limitations, and my son has loads of other adults in his life to love him, too. That's the thing I missed, you know? Being loved. My son won't be left wanting for people who care for him."
"That's great. I'm happy to hear you've made strides within your own family through all the pain. I think I have enough, actually, to run with. All that's left is the ten things featurette and the photos. I've quite enjoyed this, if you don't mind me saying. The previous bloke we had settled on for the cover was quite a prick."
"Depending upon whom you ask, that title still fits."
"Well, as I'm writing the piece, the only opinion that matters is mine, really."
Draco raised his glass and said, "There's the truth."
.oOo.
He flopped onto his bed that evening and replayed the interview in his head. Had he said too much? He ought not to have confessed his love for Hermione, but what was he meant to do? Deny what the whole country had already seen? Hermione's tits looked great in his jumper. When she was around, he smiled and laughed bigger and louder than he had in years. Scorpius adored her. Being with Hermione made so much sense, and yet …
He let grief come between them.
Draco pulled down the covers, leaned back onto a pillow, and closed his eyes. What had been said was said, and what had been done was done. Finch-Fletchley would present it as he chose. Draco felt his phone vibrate on the bed next to him, but didn't look. This late at night it was probably Bastien. But if it was Tracey, he should answer. He glanced down to see the last name he expected to see:
Golden Girl.
Draco picked up the phone and answered. Hermione popped up on the screen, hair in a frizzier mess than usual. She was wearing a bright red hoodie and appeared to be curled up on her own bed. Light was bouncing off one side of her face like she was watching something on a telly. She whispered,
"Hi."
Draco nodded, but couldn't seem to find his voice. He ached to be with her, watching a film in bed. Hermione said,
"Bastien told me you had a big interview today. I thought you'd call sometime this week to talk about it, but you never did."
"I didn't know I was allowed to."
"Oh."
"Figured your boyfriend might have something to say about our time together."
"My boyf—Viktor?" asked Hermione. "Viktor and I aren't dating."
"Well there are plenty of photographs of the two of you snogging. Romilda has to present them to my mother for her performance appraisal. Then he gave you what you wanted, right? Sex without making you feel self-conscious about it. Without being intimidated by you. It's exactly what you asked for."
Hermione rolled her eyes and continued looking at the film playing on whatever telly Draco couldn't see. She insisted,
"It had been fourteen years and we had a night together." She asked, "Can I tell you something awful?"
Draco insisted, "You can tell me anything."
"After I slept with Viktor, I woke up alone the next morning and all I wanted was to roll over and see you there. I wanted to be in your arms and tell you I love you even though I've only known you six weeks, I …" Hermione sighed and rested her forehead in the palm that wasn't holding the phone. "I can't stop thinking about you. That's why I texted you, because I wanted you to feel as awful and alone as I did."
That was a lot to process. Draco didn't know how to feel.
Tell you I love you.
She slept with Krum not to make him jealous, but to prove to herself that she could be desirable to someone else. There was a certain satisfaction that she slept with someone as hot as Viktor Krum and still woke up thinking of him. He was territorial, in that someone else had made Hermione feel desirable. Honoured that Hermione felt safe enough to talk about this, and over the fucking moon that she loved him. Draco said,
"It's not healthy."
"No, no it isn't," agreed Hermione.
Draco grinned and said, "But you woke up thinking about me."
Hermione glared at him through the phone and Draco reveled in it. He felt himself changing as he acknowledged how deep their love would run if he let it. Hermione insisted,
"I don't believe we can be friends."
Draco leaned forward and said, "I don't care if we are friends or partners or lovers or whatever you want to label us. I love you, and I can't lose another woman I love. Tell me what you want and I'll give it to you. Tell me what to be and I'll be it. But, I am begging you, don't walk out of my life."
Hermione pressed her lips together then tossed her phone aside, so Draco was staring at her ceiling. She sighed and admitted,
"I feel like I'm taking you away from your wife. I don't know what to do."
"You're not, Hermione, I promise. Can we pretend this conversation didn't happen?"
"No, because Jami Greengrass told me something this week; she paid me a visit at work."
Draco balled his fingers into a fist and said, "They will leave you alone. You are not available to them; I will make them leave you alone."
"That's it," Hermione's voice was softer. "Right there, what she told me, I can hear it in your voice."
"Hear what?"
"She said that you are in love with me because there's a darkness, a pain inside of me you connected to. She said that when you pushed her husband against the wall, the rage in your eyes was your father. You don't want to be that sort of man."
Draco insisted, "I'm not."
"But you could be. If I let you love me it wouldn't be the soft, simple love you had with your wife. Jami Greengrass said you'd love me the way your dad loved your mum."
"No, I could be—"
"Bastien said you threw your mobile at the wall when you found out I had sex with someone else."
Hermione picked up the phone, but continued to look at something off to the side.
"I don't have to be that person. I am trying to let go of Astoria, but there's this fear inside of me, like if I don't hold on tight enough her memory will float away and I'll never get it back."
"I know." Hermione nodded and said, "Even if you did, you would love me differently than her, wouldn't you?"
"Of course I would. You deserve more than a copy of what I was for her. I want to be your boyfriend, your partner, whatever you need me to be. That doesn't mean I will end up loving you as my father loved my mother."
"That's just it, Draco. I want you to."
"Oh."
"The intensity I feel for you is everything I never had with Ron. I liked how you protected me and wanted to make sure I was okay, even if you had to carry me to my car. You always give me an honest opinion that my friends rarely feel as if they can give. You make me feel so deeply, I feel everything deeply. Including the humiliation, the anger, and the fear."
"Hermione, I am sorry I couldn't be intimate with you in the way you wanted, the way I wanted, or in any way at all. I am feeling a lot of things I have not felt in a very long time, and some things I am feeling for the first time. I know I cocked this up, but I don't want you to stay away from me."
"I don't want to stay away from you, I only want to look at you and not feel the embarrassment I felt when you were so close to snogging me and stopped at the last possible moment. I am scared that if I let you love me, you would either become a person you don't want to be or take that moment away from me again."
"This is Jami in your head. I know how she can plant a seed that grows inside your mind; the Greengrasses have guilted me for years. Don't allow them to pull you away from me. When can I see you again?"
"I don't know."
"Will I see you again?"
"Stop asking questions I don't know the answers to."
"Hermione—"
"Stop."
"No, because it feels like you are pushing me out of your life."
"You didn't call me, either, Draco. I love you. I am in love with you. Can you accept that as enough for now?"
"No. You wouldn't have driven all the way up here in the middle of the night to see me last week if you didn't trust me. You trusted me to keep you safe, Hermione, to give you a place to cry and not be judged or pitied. You know me now, so can you at least promise me I will see you soon?"
"Of course," Hermione laughed sardonically and said, "turn on the telly at ten, Monday through Thursday."
Draco rolled his eyes and said, "I need to sleep now."
"I don't want you to fall asleep angry at me."
"Hermione." Draco groaned and pressed the pads of his fingers against his eyes. He held up the phone to see Hermione was finally looking at the screen. "I am not angry at you. I am confused and tired. I'm happier when I've seen you, and I want you to be happier when you've seen me. Right now, you can't even look at me."
"You are only one part of this. Losing my dream job to Percy has messed with me somehow, and I know I'm not strong enough to deal with another loss. I am sorry for using Viktor to upset you. It wasn't kind to you, and it certainly wasn't fair to him. I love you both, and I was wrong to use the situation in the way that I did. We were lying in bed together and talking about you. Viktor was defending you and he was right, I knew he was right, but I was angry and hurt, so I pushed those feelings onto you. I don't know how to overcome this."
Draco begged her to, "Let me help you through it."
"I ... I suppose ..." Hermione twisted one of the pullover's strings around her finger. "There is something I need to talk about. I don't trust anyone else to give me an honest answer."
Draco insisted, "I will always be honest with you."
"Right." Hermione looked off to the side of the screen, as if she couldn't quite bear what she was about to say. "When Viktor and I were ..."
"Fucking."
"It sounds so crass when you say that. Viktor was careful and perfect—"
Perfect. Draco felt something again, tugging at a deep part of him which he was afraid to name. Romilda would call it jealousy, but it was something more. Something primal that scared the pants off Draco because he couldn't name it, and certainly couldn't control it.
"—and everything I needed him to be."
Well that fucking did it. Draco squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Everything I needed him to be" sounded very much like "everything you could have been for me but weren't." Hermione kept going as if Draco hadn't begun to drown in that failure.
"He was on top of me and I felt an ache in my shoulder. When I woke up the pain was mostly gone, but it made me think something was wrong. I went to see my specialist and he said it's the plate."
"Is this because of Graham?"
"No." Hermione frowned and revised, "perhaps a bit? I've been pushing myself more over the past couple months. Since I met you. There have been a lot of hugs, and I like when you hug me. But you're so tall I have to tilt my head to look at you and lift my arm higher to make sure I'm not touching your bum—"
"Your hand on my ass is not a problem."
Hermione laughed. She finally looked back toward the phone screen and halfheartedly tossed the pullover string toward the camera.
"You're ridiculous."
"Quite."
"My specialist suggested I have the plate removed. I didn't truly consider it, except I mentioned it to my physical therapist. Oliver said if I have it removed, he might be comfortable pushing the range of motion up a bit. Just a couple of centimetres, but it's a couple centimetres closer to normal."
"A couple centimetres above my ass."
"Yes," Hermione smiled softly and said, "just above your bum."
"Why don't you want to have the plate removed?" asked Draco.
Hermione sighed.
"That answer is very long, and quite personal."
"I would like to understand, if you want to tell me."
"Do you know what skin grafts are?"
"Vaguely. As I understand, they take bits of skin from other parts of you, then use that to fix whatever needs to be grafted."
"Essentially," Hermione agreed. "The whole left side of me needed skin grafts, which meant they had to take it from the right. It happened slowly, in stages, and they took from anywhere that was available. In one session, they would take from the inside of my thigh and my stomach. Once that healed, they would take from my back and my bum. I could sleep either on my stomach or on my back depending on where they'd removed the skin, and that process repeated for months."
Draco breathed in sharply through his teeth.
"I am surprised you're not bitter about that. It sounds agonizing."
"It was. I lost my range of motion, a year of my life, and my marriage." Hermione took a deep, slow breath in, and looked off to the side again. "After the explosion, I was sent to a hospital in Bahrain where they reset my clavicle. To this day, throughout my entire body, the scar on my collarbone is the only one that's healed. It's completely gone, and allowing a surgeon to slice it open again will leave me with another piece to add to the puzzle my body has become."
Draco guessed, "It would take away the one win you felt you had?"
"It would take away the one bit of normal I still have. The bone is healed as best it can. But I don't know what to do; if it's worth going into surgery again."
"Are you talking to me, or are you asking me?"
"Asking."
Draco was quiet for a long while. Hermione didn't look at the screen, her eyes were out of focus, staring at something he couldn't see. Presumably whatever film she'd been watching, but perhaps she was staring at nothing at all. He said,
"If the only reason you want to have the plate removed is because you hope to feel normal, you believe it will make you feel a bit closer to everyone else? I think that's a shit reason. You're not a normal person, Hermione, and you shouldn't hope to be. If removing the plate will make you feel better about yourself, if you want to find out whether you can increase your range of motion, that's a fine reason."
"Fine?" asked Hermione. "Is there a better reason?"
"When my son asked what happened to your arm, you said that sometimes you feel as if your arm is more metal than it is Hermione. If you have the plate removed, it should be because it isn't part of you. It holds you back, it keeps you in the past and I know all about that, Hermione. I think, since you asked for my opinion, you need to ask yourself whether removing the physical memory of the explosion from your body is worth one more scar."
Hermione nodded, half to Draco and half to herself.
"I can't believe you remember I said that."
"I listen to you whether you're on the telly or not."
Hermione did smile a bit at that. She finally looked back at the phone and admitted,
"I knew you were the proper person to ask."
"Speaking of questions to ask, Blaise mentioned you've planned something for my birthday?"
Hermione rolled her eyes and said, "You lot can't keep anything secret, can you?"
"No." Draco laughed and conceded, "If you tell Blaise, you're essentially telling me."
"And vice-versa?"
"Oh, absolutely. He's smitten with your boy, Dean, though. I mean properly in love with that man. He phoned me up this week to tell me one Seamus Finnegan follows him on Instagram."
Hermione's eyes darkened immediately.
"We don't discuss him."
"Dean gave me an overview. Said you offered to have Finnegan murdered."
"No," Hermione revealed, "I offered to murder him myself with Parvati as cleanup crew. Nobody would have known or suspected a thing."
"You're serious."
"Deadly." Hermione clenched her jaw before adding, "Dean teaches eight-year-olds. There's no money in it, he has a master's degree in applied statistics modelling from Kings College and could've done any number of things with it, but he chose to teach kids. Dean is kind and giving and loving and so non-judgmental that he couldn't see his husband had become jealous of how good of a person he was. Until you've seen one of your best friends sleeping on random sofas that are well over a foot too short for him, eating lunches that are nothing more than two pieces of bread with a bit of cheese in the middle …" Hermione shook her head. "He never let on to his family how bad it was. I offered him my spare room, but he wouldn't stay more than a week because he felt like he was imposing. Seamus tried to snuff out all the kindness in Dean and I hate him for it."
"Well—"
"Ron and I divorced because it was right. It was amicable; the only thing we argued over was my name. He hoped I would hyphenate it somehow, but I wanted a clean break. It wasn't much of an argument, more like a very emphatic suggestion which I ignored. Shea took Dean's car. Shea hated Dean so much he demanded Dean's car in the settlement so he couldn't sleep in it. Took the watch collection so he couldn't sell any. Through it all, Dean blamed himself for Seamus not loving him properly, and I will never, never forgive Seamus for making him feel that way."
Draco mentioned, "Dean said he'd gotten his book advance before the split."
"He used most of it to pay for his sisters' university tuition."
"Oh."
"Anyway, I doubt you want to hear about my plans to commit homicide."
"On the contrary," Draco teased, "it's very sexy."
"When you were with Blaise, how did it end?"
"Perfectly."
"Perfectly?" asked Hermione. "What does 'perfectly' mean?"
"Blaise is a complicated person, but all he has ever wanted is a family of his own. He's been searching for a husband pretty well since he discovered he could sleep with just about any man he wants. I was twenty-three and twenty-four when we were together. I was an asshole and Blaise taught me how to be a better partner. If I was being an ass, he'd get this look on his face like I was disappointing him. He'd say, 'Clean yourself up.' Then mumble something in Italian.
"I matured enough during our year together, but Blaise was the one who ended it. He said that I was ready for someone else, and he was done waiting for me to be what he needed. A year later I met Astoria and, Blaise was right, I was ready for her."
"I don't need to worry about him?"
"Sounds like he should be more worried about you."
"Perhaps."
Draco smiled at her. It was so easy to talk to Hermione. He hated that he'd missed his opportunity to be there for her the way she wanted him to be.
"You didn't tell me what you've planned for my birthday."
"It's a surprise."
"A hint, then?"
Hermione considered it. She said,
"Your mum and Blaise paid for most of it. Bastien, Theo, and myself chipped in a bit but it's mostly symbolic. I promised you I would find a way for you to lay your wife to rest so you can move forward. I hope we've done that. I wish I could be there to see it, but I have to be on air at ten."
Draco's heart sank.
"You're not coming?"
"As much as I care for you, I still have feelings about the last time we saw each other. I hadn't allowed myself to hope for love in years. And here you are, saying you love me, but it's not enough. Every time I look at you I hear Viktor and Ron and BBC and the UN telling me I'm not where I am meant to be. Every time I look at you I feel like I am not enough."
Hermione wasn't looking at the screen. Hell, she'd hardly looked at the screen during the call except to defend Dean Thomas's honour. Draco ached to know that he'd taken such a powerful woman's confidence and thrown it in the bin.
"Right." Draco ran his fingers through his hair and fluffed it out. "I'm tired. I don't know what we're arguing about anymore. If you don't want to see me, Hermione, then don't. I love you, I want your friendship, and I wish you had asked me what I wanted for my birthday because it would have saved you all money."
"What is it you wanted, then?"
"Another chance to kiss you properly."
"Oh."
"Why did you call me, Hermione?"
She looked at the screen and began fiddling with one of the strings again.
"Because I couldn't go another day without telling you how much I care about you. I didn't think you knew."
"I didn't. And I might've told GQ that I'm in love with you, so … Plan to see that in print."
Hermione laughed.
"This has Penelope's fingerprints all over it."
"She is my publicist," replied Draco. "But I meant what I said, Hermione. I am sorry Graham has put you in a position where you are considering surgery again. I hate that my being in your life has caused you so much pain."
"I suppose." Hermione hummed softly to herself before admitting, "Yet there are moments I'm happier than I've been in years."
"I can say the same."
"I think …" Hermione sighed and admitted, "I think I've never been in love like this, and I don't know what I'm doing."
Draco yawned so wide his jaw popped. Hermione laughed. He offered,
"How about we figure it out together?"
"I'd like that. As long as you're alright that I take things rather slow."
"Okay. G'night golden girl."
"Be seeing you, Malfoy."
"I love you, by the way." Draco realized, "I don't think I've said that as its own sentence. I love you, Hermione Granger."
"I love you, Draco Malfoy. Even if you're half-asleep and I don't think you will remember."
"I'll remember." He pressed his hand to his chest and said, "In here, I'll remember."
"Be seeing you."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
Draco hung up so she couldn't take it back. He smiled up at the ceiling and mumbled,
"She loves me."
He fell asleep on top of the covers with that thought in his head.
.oOo.
June 5th began just as any other Tuesday would. Eight AM check-in with the Deputy CEO and CFO, where his Chief Financial Officer continued to beg for a COO. Draco continued to brush it off. He was handling things just fine.
"The business is fine, Mr. Malfoy. You are not fine."
Draco nodded toward the office door without another word. They saw themselves out and Draco prepped for the 9:30 meeting about an overloaded barge. That meeting ended and he dodged a call from Sotheby's by hopping into the monthly brief with Thunderbolt Cement's executive team. A meeting that should have lasted until one o'clock, but the door to his office was flung open at 12:30.
"THIS IS A BIRTHDAY KIDNAPPING!"
Draco turned toward the door to see Bastien, Theo, and Blaise peeking their heads in through the doorway. Bastien stepped inside the office and said,
"We are taking Mr. Malfoy, here, on a birthday road trip."
"Where?" Draco groaned. "To Hell?"
"No, you bloody prat, we're road tripping to your birthday present."
"Why couldn't you simply bring my gift here?"
"Because I fucking said so, now you can either get in the car willingly or—"
"—I have to work."
Bastien revealed a roll of tape in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other.
"I'm serious, we will kidnap you."
"Where do you even—"
"Theo's closet."
Theo rolled his eyes and huffed, "Now his team's going to believe that's true."
"Fine." Bastien amended, "The tape came from Theo's supply closet and the handcuffs are from Blaise for reasons that are fairly self-explanatory. For legal reasons, Padma says I cannot contribute supplies to the kidnapping. But, if it comes to it, I will drug you and stuff you in the boot."
Bas was just a bit too enthusiastic. Draco glanced at the Thunderbolt team, each of whom was hiding a smile. He asked,
"Are you lot in on this?"
The CEO nodded and admitted, "Your mum planned this, and we thought it was hilarious."
Which is how he ended up in the back of the Mercedes with Theo. How they managed to get the keys to his car was a question he could easily answer: his mother. Bastien drove and Blaise rode up front. For a half hour, Draco continued to ask where they were taking him and received no answer that led to a conclusion. He asked how long the trip would be and, again, received nothing. Out of nowhere, forty-five minutes into the drive, Blaise asked,
"How long should you be in a relationship with someone before you ask them to move in?"
"At least six months, mate." Bastien shook his head and insisted, "It's bad form to move too quickly. Especially if they've got the sort of baggage your Dean fellow carries around. Any time someone mentions your boy's ex, Padma gets this look on her face. She is always composed, but damn there's hate in her eyes like I've never seen."
Blaise asked, "Does the timeline shift if he lives in a shithole?"
Draco insisted, "When we dropped him off, it looked perfectly adequate."
"'Perfectly adequate' in East London is a shithole," replied Bastien.
"All his friends say that they tried to support Dean and he wouldn't accept it if he believed the effort put them out at all," said Draco.
Theo offered, "If moving in is off the table, maybe just give him a room? You're never in your office, maybe give him a space so when he stays the weekend he has space to work. Then you're not pressuring him, you're giving him space in your life. Whether he uses it is up to him."
Blaise nodded.
"Grazie. That is a good idea."
"So the sex is good, then?" asked Theo.
"I believe he would say so."
Nobody responded. Twenty years in, they had learned to unionize against Blaise's silence. He allowed it to linger for two minutes before saying,
"I think he's afraid of disappointing me because I've been with loads of men."
Draco added, "And had one very attractive boyfriend."
"He wants to please me, like he has to earn me in bed. I am hopelessly in love with him already, the true challenge is going slow. I know I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I feel as though I need to earn him."
"Look, Blaise, as someone who managed to land someone so far out of my league it's embarrassing for both of us …" Bastien shrugged. "Padma likes that I'm funny. I'm intelligent enough for her, I knew enough about her culture so I wouldn't be the white boy to humiliate her in front of her parents, and I didn't want kids. I think, personally, the biggest leg-up I had was that Ti likes me." Bastien said, "It's hard to make your life with a bloke if your bloody twin doesn't like him. If you want my advice on how best to get Dean to see you as a permanent part of his life, you've gotta get Ginny on your side. Seeing as she's the one who pushed you two together in the first place, I think you're set."
"Who would that be for Hermione, then?" asked Draco. "If we were together, who would be her person?"
"Ron." Bastien didn't even hesitate. "Her ex-husband. Potter's too deep into whatever happened to him for Hermione to take his opinion seriously. Ron's holding everything together right now, and he's leaning pretty heavy on Padma and Parvati."
"That's what he said when we spoke on the phone. I think he was hoping for me to take a bit of Hermione's emotional weight off him, and I believe I added to it instead."
"Well, this was her idea," replied Bastien. "She phoned Padma in the middle of the afternoon and I happened to be in. She asked me, 'What do you usually do for Draco's birthday?' and I said, 'Try to make him a little less of a sad sack of shit.' Then she told me what she was planning, and I thought she was the most brilliant woman in the world."
"I think," said Theo, "that if we had listened to Draco better, we would have thought of this years ago."
"What could you possibly have bought me that I couldn't buy for myself?" asked Draco.
"That's just it, me and Theo and Hermione contributed purely as an aesthetic. It was a gesture. Blaise and your mum split the bulk of it."
"How much is a bulk?"
Blaise revealed, "Your mother and I put in five hundred thousand Pounds. The others covered the rush order fee, as Hermione had this realization less than two weeks ago."
Draco felt his eyebrows nearly knit together.
"What the bloody hell did you buy with half a million Pounds?"
Theo answered, "Exactly what you didn't know you wanted."
Draco received no more information about his gift. Bastien prodded him with the occasional, "We made this drive before," but he didn't catch on until they were in Manchester around five o'clock. It didn't click that this had something to do with his wife until they parked in front of the Manchester Opera House. His heart sank into his stomach, this was the last thing he wanted for his birthday. He hesitantly stepped out of the car and said,
"I haven't been here in nine years."
The theatre had aged, but nothing had changed. Blaise led everyone through the front doors and the first thing Draco noticed was the merchandise booth with its half-hearted neon signs. They all followed the carpeted stairs that led up from either side. Draco smiled down at the gold railings, covered in fingerprints that were at least months old. He remembered those most of all, for some reason. Like they exposed the haphazard care the theatre was given, but the delightful chaos always found a way to shine through. The butterflies in his stomach quieted a bit as they entered the theatre itself. It was still coloured in three separate but equally hideous shades of green. The carpet was a grassy green suede which was slightly less awful than the atrocious brownish-gold accents.
They led him over to the box.
The box.
Mid-level, stage left.
Their box.
Draco's mother and his son were standing in front of the door. They made the trip earlier? Wasn't Scorpius meant to be in school? Scorpius looked confused, but his eyes lit up the moment he saw his father. He ran to Draco, who scooped him up in a tight hug.
"Happy birthday, dad!"
Draco felt tears stinging in the corners of his eyes. The last time he was here, he'd met Scorp's mum. This was the closest Draco's son would ever be to his mother, and it hurt deeper than it ever had. A convergence of what was and what is. Draco held his son close and said,
"Thank you."
His mother tried to keep the smile off her face as she said,
"Blaise and I made a sizable donation to the theatre. Hopefully they use that money to do some redecorating."
Draco laughed.
"All we asked in return, is that they dedicate this box to your wife."
"What?"
Draco placed Scorpius on the floor as his mother moved away from the door. There was a plaque, in the same hideous gold as the railing covered in fingerprints, which read: The Astoria Malfoy Box. Narcissa opened the door to reveal a mural on the far wall; it was three panels of Astoria in various roles. On the left, she was the young Professor Higgins. In the middle, there was a panel featuring her biggest role: Azucena in Il Trovatore. She'd been really proud of that one. Finally, entirely in greyscale, was a panel of the role she'd been promised and unable to fulfill. Rosina in a touring production of il Barbiere di Siviglia. The style was familiar, not quite cartoonish, but the portraits had a dreamlike quality to them. It was ethereal, it was perfect, it was everything Draco never would have thought to ask for. He found his voice after a moment and asked,
"Who painted this?"
"My boyfriend works with your son's favourite artist," answered Blaise. "I felt, if Lovegood was available, that would be a good way to honour Astoria in a way Scorpius could appreciate."
Draco turned around and pulled Blaise into a tight hug.
"I love you so fucking much, you know that?"
Blaise wrapped his arms around Draco in a familiar embrace. It was too much for Draco to handle and he began to sob into Blaise's shoulder. Blaise tightened his hold on Draco and stood there without a word, holding Draco together as he fell apart. Draco felt a lot of things, but mostly relief. He'd never had a place to cry for her before. But her name—their name—was on the door and her face was on the wall. Her passion was resting right there in that box where Draco's life had really begun.
Draco stepped out of Blaise's hold and turned to Theo as he wiped his eyes.
"I know they got the reference photos from you."
"Yeah." Theo smiled, tears threatening to spill over from his eyes, as well. "I'm your brother, I kept things that made you happy. I'm happy we finally have a place to use them."
Bastien stepped forward and offered his phone. A video was paused on the screen.
"This is the gift from Hermione and me, since we didn't have anything concrete to contribute. The whole performance is there, but I believe this part is what you need right now."
Bastien pressed play and Draco watched as final bows ended and Astoria pulled off her wig. He knew what was about to happen, remembered it with stark clarity, but seeing it on film was something else. She unpinned her wig cap, fluffed out her hair, and pointed up toward the box where they were standing. Draco laughed because she was still in the mustache and beard as she shouted to the audience that he'd been there five nights in a row.
"Where did you get this?"
"Jami Greengrass."
Draco nodded to himself as he confirmed, "Jami gave you this?"
"More like she found Hermione at work and used her as a carrier pigeon, but yes. Jami had this saved from some project the theatre was doing at the time to document independent productions."
"That's what gave Hermione the idea? I showed her the tickets I have framed in the office. I can't believe she remembered that." Draco shook his head and wiped some snot with the end of his sleeve. "You all really did this for me?"
"You've been saying for years that you don't have anywhere to put Astoria's memory. You've got nowhere to see her name." Theo shrugged and offered, "This made sense. She wouldn't want some sort of memorial that existed just for you. Astoria would've wanted her memory to rest in the theatre. Her gravesite is for her parents, but this was her heart, brother. And it's here for you."
Draco pressed a hand to his chest because it felt like his whole body was about to split in two. Scorpius tugged on Draco's trousers and pointed to the mural.
"Who is that?"
"That," Draco's voice cracked, "is your mum."
"Oh. She's really pretty."
"Yeah, Scorp. She was. She is. I loved her so much and she would've been so proud of you."
Scorpius looked up at Draco and asked, "Why? I didn't do anything."
"You make people smile. That's what she did, too."
"Oh. Okay!" Scorpius said, "This looks like pictures from my books."
"Miss Luna painted this."
"WOW!" Scorpius walked up to the wall and placed his hand as far up as he could reach. "Miss Luna painted my mum?"
Draco walked into the box and shut the door behind him. Something about Scorpius seeing his mother in the theatre, in the very box where Draco fell for her, it felt as though his family was in the same place for the first time. He sat in one of the hideous green chairs, placed his elbows on his knees, let his head fall into his hands, and cried.
Finally.
His name was there with her. It was all he wanted, really, and every bit of this exceeded expectations. The sadness he'd held in, the strength it had taken to keep her alive in his heart all these years, he let it go. She had a place to stay, where everyone could see the talent the world had lost. The tears were relief.
I don't have to hold onto her anymore.
Draco sat there for several minutes, until he didn't have any tears left to cry. Scorpius sat on the floor with his legs crossed, dutifully silent. Without looking up, Draco said,
"I'm sorry it took so long for me to feel this way."
"Are you talking to me or my mum?"
Draco chuckled and answered, "Both." He looked up at his son and said, "If your mum could tell you anything, do you know what she'd say?"
"What?"
"She'd say that you are a terrible dancer just like she was."
Scorpius laughed and asked, "Would she want me to draw like Miss Luna?"
"Your mum would want you to do whatever made you happy, Scorp. And she would love your tree drawings."
"I know what I want to learn next."
"What's that?"
"Clouds."
"Clouds?" asked Draco. "Why clouds?"
"Because my trees are lonely."
"Okay." Draco offered his son a watery smile and said, "I think we should go outside now. Will you thank everyone?"
Scorpius nodded. Draco took his time standing from the chair and wiped his face with the inside of his collar. He opened the door and stepped out of the box to see his family standing there, whispering, waiting. Before Draco could say a word, Scorpius stood up to his full height and looked up at all the adults to say,
"Thank you for letting me see my mum and my dad at the same time."
He hugged everyone. Draco nodded to his mother, who raised her chin the slightest bit, acknowledging she understood what Draco was about to do. (And she approved.) Draco asked,
"What is everyone doing after this?"
"Cake," replied Blaise.
"We were going to take you to dinner," added Theo.
"Right." Draco took a deep breath. "There is someone who is not here, whom I need to thank. Personally. If it's alright, Blaise, I will leave my son with you and Theo. Bas, are you up for a break-in?"
Bastien nodded.
"Destination?"
"Broadcasting House."
Bastien grinned and flipped the keys between his fingers.
"Let's go get your girl."