If My Ashes Run Cold

The restaurant hummed with the kind of quiet that only came with wealth—the absence of desperation, of hunger. It was not the silence of peace, but of power, of lives too full to need words. Hermione had long since stopped listening for the whispers of ghosts here.

Draco Malfoy sat across from her, bathed in the flickering candlelight, his expression soured by whatever petty disappointment had settled in his bones that evening. He lifted his glass—something absurdly expensive, no doubt—and regarded her over the rim.

"Oh, I bet the wine washes away those great sins, Granger."

His smirk, all cheekbones and malice, had the sharpness of a blade yet to be dulled by mercy.

She didn't hesitate, didn't even blink, just turned her own empty glass in her fingers and murmured, "Wouldn't you know it. You know, I can't imagine any wine would pair with eating death." 

There it was—the flicker of something behind his eyes, not quite offense, not quite amusement. Just that thin, silver-threaded detachment he had long since mastered. He poured anyway, his thousand-pound wine filling her glass in a slow, deliberate spiral. It refracted in the crystal, dark as arterial blood, swirling like some forbidden incantation.

The smirk still sat, alien and wrong, on his too-pretty, too-hollow face.

She tilted her head back and drank.

There was nothing to toast to.

Necking it down would suffice.

The restaurant was bare tonight, stripped of its usual ghosts, save for the lone fusilli lover in the corner—a relic of another patron's discarded meal, long abandoned and curling in the dim glow of candlelight. The staff had left it untouched, perhaps waiting for its presence to decay into irrelevance.

Hermione understood that.

She traced the rim of her glass with a lazy finger, staring past Draco, through him, to the ghosts that did still linger in the corners of her mind. Their presence was softer now, blurred by time and repetition, but they never truly left.

"You're drinking more than usual," Draco noted, swirling his own glass, watching the legs of the wine cling to the crystal like the last vestiges of something unwilling to be let go.

"And you're watching more than usual," she countered.

A beat of silence.

Bitter from earlier, he flicked his gaze past her, toward the glass doors of the restaurant where the rain had begun to spit against the pavement, streaking the windows like ink bleeding through parchment. Outside, the street bots—those charmless, soulless little machines—vomited newspapers onto the slick stone. They lay there, pulped and crumpled, bearing the headlines no one wanted to read but everyone whispered about in their parlors.

"No one wants to watch the Golden Girl turn to brass."

Draco had seen them, of course. The slow unraveling of her image, like rot creeping through fruit. Some desperate columnist's poor attempt at poetry, perhaps. A tragic fall from grace, just palatable enough for the public to enjoy with their morning tea.

He knew what the papers didn't say. That Ron's wife had died. That Lavender Brown had wasted away in some too-white, too-sterile room, eaten alive by the war in slow motion. They called it complications—lingering curses, untreated wounds. But Draco knew better. It was the sickness of grief, of carrying ghosts in the hollow of your ribs until there was no space left for breath. He also knew who gave them that lovely idea for the headline a few days before.

And Hermione—well.

She had gotten hatesick all over her bed like lavender had many times in her Hogwarts days.

"I suppose it's poetic, in a way," he said, swirling his wine with absent disinterest. "Lavender always did have a talent for tragic endings. Pity she didn't get the romance to match."

Hermione's jaw clenched, the tiniest shift in the sharp line of her face, but she didn't rise to the bait. Too tired, perhaps. Or maybe she'd already drowned in something deeper than anger. Instead, she simply lifted her glass again, the red pooling against her lips like the edge of a wound, and let the silence swallow them.

The waiter arrived then, tending to the Malfoy heir with the kind of quiet deference that came with old money and even older fear. He barely looked at Hermione. She was nothing here. A relic of something once revered, now left to gather dust in the corner.

Draco exhaled, watching her over the rim of his glass.

"I'm watching gold turn to brass."

He smirked then, but it wasn't playful—it was something skeletal, something withering. "And it's a rather ugly thing to witness. Like watching a god die. Or worse—live."

The rain thickened, a steady drumming against the glass, the restaurant cocooned in the sound of it. Outside, London was dark and restless, but in here, there were no reporters tonight. No flashing cameras, no prying eyes. Just two war relics, soaked in red wine and something unspeakable, circling each other like vultures over a carcass neither of them could name.

🕰️

Hermione stumbled through the door of her apartment, pulling Draco Malfoy—a living corpse in human skin—behind her. His tall, thin frame, the silver of his death-eater past still clinging to him like an old stain, made him stand out like an alien in the suffocating modernity of her home. 

The apartment was too new, too clean, a jarring clash against the worn-out ghosts of her life. It was supposed to be hers, but it never truly felt like it.

Every corner had a sharp edge, every surface reflecting back a false promise of normalcy.

The room ahead of them—her "cheer-up party" for Ron, which had turned into a suffocating mass of humanity—overflowed with people, far too many, each one playing a part in some twisted drama of faux joy. the kind of hollow celebration that only grief could give birth to.  

Hermione's friends and their desperate charades. They filled the air like smoke—suffocating, irritating. Draco had no place here, and neither did she. They were already ghosts here.

She tugged him through the crowds—the looks that couldn't quite place what they saw—the golden girl and a Malfoy, together in a home that wasn't a home, in a world that wasnt hers anymore. Draco didn't belong here either, but he didn't need to. He had long since stopped caring.

"Know," Hermione muttered under her breath, her tone thick with exhaustion, "I'm convinced we should've just been buried in the cemetery. Are we just stalling, or are we already dead?" 

She flung herself into the bathroom, Draco following her like some creature of the night, looming and out of place, drenched from the rain. 

They both sank onto the cold marble floor, the scent of wet stone filling their lungs, mixing with the harsh scent of wine and whatever it was they'd been sipping all night.

The party beyond the bathroom door was all golden light and false laughter, too warm, too loud. A hollow sort of heaven, filled with people who only knew how to drink and forget.

Hermione let her head roll against the marble, her fingers lazily tracing the veins in the stone. "They look at you like you're the sickness," she murmured, voice thick with wine.

Draco snorted, eyes half-lidded. "And you, what, the cure?" His lips curled, slow and sharp. "How very noble."

She huffed, tilting her chin toward the distant hum of the party. "They don't care for it. Your lot, all your customs, your absurd little traditions... I don't think they even want to." She blinked slowly, eyes clouded. "And maybe neither do I."

Draco's fingers twitched where they rested against his stomach, tapping out an idle, absent rhythm. "You think you're above it," he mused, watching her through a curtain of pale hair. "As if you don't belong to something just as ridiculous." His gaze flicked toward the door, toward the noise of people trying too hard to be alive. "A different breed of dying gods, that's all."

Hermione gave a lazy, humorless smile. "Maybe. But at least we don't make a religion out of our own decay."

Draco let out a sharp, breathy laugh, but before he could retort, her eyelids fluttered, her body tilting, sinking. The floor beneath them felt heavier, colder.

His smile faded. "Granger?"

No response. Maybe they had a bit too much.

His head lolled back against the wall, his limbs too heavy, vision swimming. His voice came slurred, almost lazy, but with an edge of something colder beneath it.

"Granger if you don't wake up, I'm leaving your corpse right here."