Suite
Hermione laid on the huge king sized bed and stared at the sloping handwriting, holding the note high above her head.
She sighed then tossed it onto the bed, letting her arms drop down to her sides. The note calmly drifted down onto the soft silk sheets, still unmade from when Hermione had woken up 2 hours ago.
There were no cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, no sirens passing by on the street outside her room—just the sun streaming in through the wide French doors which lead out onto the balcony overlooking the River Thames.
The suite was clean and decadently furnished. It had a bed that didn’t squeak when Hermione turned around in her sleep and a showerhead whose water stayed the same temperature instead of arbitrarily switching from boiling to freezing cold.
It was beautiful and lavish and Harmione hated it.
She had tried to hold out, at first. She had scrunched up Malfoy’s note and hurled the hotel key into the bin, cursing Pansy for running her mouth and obviously having told Malfoy that Hermione was staying at the Old Oak Inn, and cursing Malfoy himself for… pitying her? Thinking he was doing her a favour?
She didn’t know what exactly Pansy had told Malfoy. Best case, she hoped that Pansy had just mentioned, in passing, that Hermione was staying in less than ideal accommodation. Worst case… Hermione touched her cheek, the bruise still tender underneath her fingertips.
Worst case, Pansy had revealed to Malfoy the reason for why Hermione was staying at a decaying inn instead of with her family during the holidays. Hermione cringed, praying that the former were true. Not that Option A was any less mortifying. Being on the receiving end of Malfoy charity was unthinkable, whichever way you put it. She couldn’t stand anyone feeling sorry for her, let alone him.
She suddenly recalled his face after their last meeting, during Astronomy. She could have sworn she saw a hint of regret in his eyes. Was this an apology, then?
She snorted. Fitting for Malfoy to think that he could simply purchase his apology, throw some money and a hotel reservation her way and undo all the horrible things that he’d ever said and done.
Fat chance.
She didn’t need his charity or his handouts, bought using whatever blood money his family had accumulated over centuries of aristocratic rule. She was perfectly capable of looking after herself, as she had always done, thank you very much.
That resolve, however, lasted 2 days.
When she got woken up by screaming from the room next door for the second night in a row, the sound penetrating through the paper thin walls of the Inn, she decided that she’d rather accept some charity than be found murdered in a dodgy bed and breakfast. Besides, it was a well-known fact that the Malfoys had more money than they knew what to do with, and the room had already been paid for...
And, she thought, trying to reason with herself, Pansy had probably meant well, or maybe hadn’t realised that Malfoy would go out of his way to set Hermione up somewhere nice. She had probably just mentioned running into Hermione and had casually brought up her living situation in passing. The two were close, after all. Like siblings, Malfoy had said.
So she thanked the inn owner for her stay, lugged her suitcase all the way to central London and checked into the hotel, feeling like a fraud all the way from the opulent hotel lobby and up to her suite on the top floor. You don’t deserve this, a little voice in the back of her mind whispered, after she had slotted the plastic key into the lock and opened the door to her room and stood on the threshold of the suite, her mouth wide open, her eyes taking in every detail of the suite that was all hers for the next two weeks.
She rolled onto her side and clutched one of the hotel pillows—not too firm, not too soft—to her chest. A couple of days had passed since then and the voice still nagged Hermione.
You don’t belong here.
~
The question of why Malfoy had done this hung like a stormcloud over her head. It woke up next to her, tangled in soft sheets. It peeked out from behind the French doors whenever she sat on the balcony outside, admiring the view of the city. It sat and watched her whenever she ordered room service, which she was informed upon first checking in was included with her stay.
Even if he was sorry for being a right royal arsehole during their last Astronomy lesson, the gesture seemed excessive, borderline grandiose.
Maybe, Hermione’s anxiety theorised one night, when sleep evaded her and her thoughts ran wild, maybe he isn’t apologising at all. Maybe this was just another way of humiliating her or indebting her to him. Of making her owe him something. Favours were another form of currency in their world. She knew this; had seen it displayed first hand. “You owe me” , Theo had said that time when she had eavesdropped on his and Malfoy’s conversation behind the staircase.
Pansy owed Malfoy, who owed Theo for getting Pansy out of whatever situation she had been in, and Theo then used his favour to ask Malfoy to bring Hermione to Pansy’s 18th.
The cyclical nature of it gave her a headache.
What could Malfoy possibly want? She wasn’t in possession of anything that Malfoy would ever be interested in. At least, not materially. She thought back to the way his fingers had slid into her hair, the way his body had pressed hard against hers when they had kissed.
Money and favours and debts and suites in hotels that Hermione would never in a million years have been able to afford otherwise.
Hermione grabbed one of those perfect pillows from next to her and used it to muffle her scream, the sound drowned by duck down and silk.
She was in over her head.
The fact of the matter was, Malfoy had done one of the nicest things that anyone had ever done for Hermione.
And it made her feel sick.
~
She sat staring at the blank piece of paper for a long time, thinking of what to say. After half an hour of scribbling and scrunching and slowly filling the wastebasket with discarded drafts and empty disposable coffee cups, she finally had her response.
Thank you for the room.
H.
It was short but succinct. Besides, whenever she tried to write anything more she inevitably wound up spewing words on the page, bringing up a stream of consciousness monologue that was borderline unreadable both in prose and in handwriting.
She folded the note and taped it to the carefully wrapped copy of Unquiet Soul: Biography of Charlotte Brontë. She had spotted the book in a vintage bookstore specialising in old and rare books, slotted in between Chronicles of the Luminous Fungus: Mycology and the Mind and The Serpent’s Tongue: Decoding the Language of Shadows .
Hermione recalled Pansy’s birthday and the copy of Jane Eyre that she’d seen on Malfoy’s floor, when he had brought her up to his room. He had nearly finished the book; it was laying face down with only a few dozen pages left to go. She remembered, also, what he had said.
“I like reading about how different people have lived their life. I like knowing that there’s different paths out there. It’s comforting. I… I like knowing that even if I mess up, or take a wrong turn, that I can always turn back, or go down another route… All these people, so different on the surface, but so similar at their core. And all of them have been through something, trials of some sort. Family, friendships, inner doubts. No one has had it easy. That’s comforting too...”
Finding Malfoy’s home address wasn’t as difficult as she had anticipated. The Malfoy family wasn’t in any directory but she had found their address in a book of old English estate homes from that same bookstore.
The Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire. Built in 1782 by Septimus Malfoy. Currently in care of: Lucius Malfoy II, his wife Narcissa Malfoy (neé Black), and their son.
Draco Malfoy.
Her eyes lingered over the last name on the list before she snapped the book shut.
~
She received a reply two days later. The letter rested on the silver tray that was brought to her room alongside her scrambled eggs. She dove for the letter, ignoring her breakfast.
Hermione’s heart thumped loudly in her ears as she stared at his reply, at her name written in his elegant hand.
A decent read, Granger. Although I think I prefer Brontë’s own work.
M.
~
She wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but they started writing to each other. Letters that started with their thoughts on Jane Eyre, that then delved into their thoughts on other authors, other books.
It was easy to write to him, easy to forget who was on the other side of the correspondence. They never seemed to be able to have a civil conversation in real life without getting at each other's throats or without the aid of alcohol, but this animosity seemed to disappear over the written word.
It was so much easier to speak to him when he wasn’t physically there, his tall figure towering over Hermione, his blue-grey eyes boring into her, making her stomach summersault. When she was writing to him, she could focus on what she really wanted to say. And, surprisingly, none of it involved the words “rich arrogant prick”.
She wrote back as soon as she received one of his letters, rushing to pen back a response and slot it into a Royal Mail postbox right outside the hotel. And he must have done the same, because she received a letter from him almost every other day.
He had been underselling himself, Hermione quite quickly realised; he had read a lot more than just biographies. Hermione found herself writing to him about some of her favourite novels, sure that they were obscure enough for him to not recognise their names, but he had heard and even read many of the ones that she mentioned.
She was surprised to learn that they had similar thoughts. And when they didn’t, she was even more surprised to learn that she liked hearing his opinion, seeing why it differed from hers.
She thought that she’d caught a glimpse of the Malfoy underneath his cold, distant demeanor at Pansy’s party, when he had shown a kindness towards her that she did not think him capable of. But it had only been a glimpse, so brief that she couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t a trick of the light.
This though…this wasn’t a trick of the light. This was physical evidence, tangent pieces of Malfoy’s being—who he was, what he thought, what he liked and disliked—neatly condensed into one page letters, penned in black ink and sealed with the Malfoy family crest.
She knew that it wasn’t Malfoy’s entire being on the page, of course. They stuck to safe, established ground and there was a limit to how much their conversation about books allowed for a true display of personality. But it was impossible to talk about literature without also saying something about yourself, without revealing something deeply personal about who you are and how you view the world.
How could Hermione have shared her favourite quote from Jane Eyre without unzipping her chest, revealing a little bit of her soul?
“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
Interesting , Malfoy wrote back. Mine was this: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
She had a dream that night, of a white bird trapped inside of a beautiful, cold mansion, batting itself against its tall windows while other birds watched from the walls, unblinking.