Pitfalls

[NOW]

The full moon hanging over the sky is gleaming in a pale, deathlike glow over the dilapidated mansion. The row of neat, organised rooks on the roof are darkened against the light of the moon… And it somehow fascinates Draco. The hide and seek. How the moon seems to avoid the deep, dark entryways of the Venetian windows. The Ruins stands—or rather stood—like a towering mantle of wealth and affluence. Now desolated, it still holds an aura of the old-age aristocracy. Chipped roofs of lichen gray stones, flaying walls and vines clinging at all corners and moving upward to the moon. A hundred generations of lords might have lived here had it not been destroyed in World War II. 

“The decaying work of a giant,” whispers Draco Malfoy, not really knowing where he’s heard it from. The place, strangely, reminds him of home. The Manor was older and prouder and more unbreachable, at times, even to him. But there was a presence, a shadow of belonging that he hardly felt anywhere else. Not even Hogwarts, with his friends and his own sense of propriety, did he feel so at ease. 

But these are thoughts Draco would rather not duel on.

His stomach grunts disapprovingly as he tosses another stale cracker in his mouth and chews it as he waits. He’s had two protein pills since this morning, his body is starting to rebel against itself. He tries to not wonder about what his mother might think, or say, or do if she sees him. As if he’s still the teenage boy marooned by his mother. As if his mother is still just a weekend away from him.

Draco shivers despite the fact that there’s no wind. A silent, still cool is hovering over the mansion. As if the object they’re searching is hidden into its own magnetic force. Even the pale and impersonal moonlight seems to bend around the house, cowering into the magnetic gravity and shrouding it. The coordinates were right. It’s here, he can feel it.

Like all other times, the realisation fills him with a peerless agitation. Suddenly, the world’s too alive, humming in strange disharmony with the air and the mud and the grass. The clicking noises of the cicada are as loud as sirens. The sky is buzzing with dotted, burnt-out stars. Before the feeling consumes him entirely, a sound ripples in the scene. The soft whoosh andthud, telltale of apparation, yanks him back to his senses. And even though he sweated and ached everywhere, he can’t help but smile as Hermione’s shadow comes into his periphery. It takes less than a second and she’s right behind him, letting out a strangled breath of her own. 

“It’s here,” Hermione says, memerised, gripping his free hand. 

Draco nods, even though she’s too busy to stare at the giant. They look over at The Ruin as the moonlight hangs in slits of shadows over its eerie, crumbling structure.

[THEN]

Horcruxes are—for the lack of a better word—beautiful. More than beautiful. They are transcendental, shape-shifters of the most complex mechanism. Each atom works like separate cells, almost lifelike, independent with its own energy cycle, somehow both supplying and feeding off from the microscopic stretch of soul latched into it. It must be a kind of animal, Draco thinks. A molecular mimicry. A monster by the general definition. It breathes, it eats, it multiplies, it even lets out its own form of excreta. Each of its parts shift in a hundred different lights. He’d destroyed a vase once, a sixteenth century artifact from the Mugal dynasty. When the pieces shattered, they shriveled like insects. Each separate piece trying and failing to blend together in strange compulsion. 

He sometimes likes to wonder how he came to hunt something like that. He wonders what he would do if she hadn’t saved him by sharing her obsession.

Obsession. Many would consider it to be ominous, but Draco does not.

Draco Malfoy knows there are certain things you cannot achieve if you don’t have a little bit of compulsion. It’s a sickness, yes, but a necessary one. It’s his sick mind—obsessed, compulsed—that allows him to trudge through the hundreds of encrypted messages to find that one key word, that one address leading to a broken vase, or a coin, or the broken wing of a 150 CE marble statue of Eros. It was breathtaking to see them morph into countless shapes for survival. Like a moth caught in flame, they shriveled and scorched and died little by little. 

His personal favorite was a Matryoshka doll they found in Norilsk, Russia. A moderately light wooden thing, forever shivling and giving birth to another doll, on and on.. He kept looking at it even when Hermione had decapitated the doll. He couldn’t look away, that weird, nasty thing, looking up at him in audacity.

“It isn’t your fault,” Hermione had said later, resting her face on his elbow as they slept. “They stimulate a sort of primitive impulse in people.”

“That’s what it was, wasn’t it?” Draco had mumbled, eyes on her hair. “Primitive.”

He still remembers the gleam in her eyes as she was that first day, twisted the battered, beaded bag in her hand. They were at the Shell Cottage, a nice little place he wanted to spend the rest of his life in. The grey morning light was hitting her eyes in a fascinating way. In his mind, her eyes bleed into the scene, trickling down into the space between them over the coffee table and into him like a drug. Like something indescribable. Like magic.

“What do you know about horcruxes, Malfoy?” she had asked.

He only stared at her. Horcrux, he repeated in his head. He didn’t know what it was but something about it felt familiar. The name buzzed between his lips, sizzling into too low vibration and intelligible consonants. 

“Horcrux,” the word tasted like acid. He resisted the urge to say it again. “Is that what I brought last night?” 

She’d offered him soup instead of answering, the first warm food he had had in weeks.

He thinks Hermione knew everything that was going to happen when she told him about the horcruxes. He thinks, on some subconscious level, she was counting on him to be obsessed with them so she wouldn’t be alone in this. And he gets it, you see. It isn’t for everyone, always skipping stones and moving, running to the next move, the next crucial, desperate information for survival. It certainly wasn’t fit for Weasley. But for them it’s a habit, it’s adrenaline. Sometimes finding the next horcrux is the only thing that matters. He knows this and knows that it’s why she keeps him with her. She’s more attuned to using people for leverage than she’d like to believe.

[NOW]

“So what do we do?” she asks after a moment, and even her voice, brimming with careful anticipation, rattles his senses. 

He blinks hard at the ruin, then at the piece of paper in his hand. “We… uh, I think he’s hid it somewhere in the near vicinity of… here—The coordinates seem to be aimed at that wing.” He points at the north of the house. “It also could be the drawing room, or right beside that… a reading room, the map kept shifting when I tried to enchant it… Could be the reading room, it fits the scene. Our sensors tracked the vibration of something of similar size to the Russian doll from last year. So this thing is large enough, and from the frequency it seems that there’s no direct charm hiding it. No transfiguration or invisibility charm.” He coughs. “Just a plain, old lamp.”

Hermione leans in to stare at his map. Her curls, locked up in a braid, swish at her neck. Draco ponders a moment before tracing his thumb on the heap of it, smiling to himself when she leans in, just a little, to his touch. “Hmm,” she mumbles finally. “Seems about right.”

Draco hangs back while Hermione does their routine diagnostic charm to weed out any protective magic around the house. He watches with blunt admiration as she lifts her hands and the whole of nature comes alive with her magic. She’s hardly ever aware of this, the singed air of her presence, even as she stands in her unassuming muggle jeans. Her hair, tied loosely in a french braid, drops past the shoulder of her t-shirt. The moonlight gleams off from her hair.

She hums as her spells die out. “Interesting.”

“What?”

“There’s nothing concrete here. Nothing is going to block us. But… there’s a shield. Sort of like a resilience charm. It would resist our magic.”

Draco smudges at the sweat on the back of his neck, just below his hairline. Thoughtfully, he twirls his wand and mutters the charm. A row of azure-blue canaries shrivel out from the tip of his wand. They croak out a tangy, sweet cry in unison before bursting into blue smoke. For the next batch, he concentrates hard on the color of the birds, and the tangy sweetness of their call. As he casts the spell, louder, clearer, five canaries burst out of his wand. Their calls ring high and heavy in the stillness of the night.

Hermione smiles peculiarly after they die out. 

“We can do magic,” she says, “but it would drain us. So clever.”

There are different ways a horcrux can trap a person. Sometimes it’s fear, some of the time it’s curiosity. Sometimes the devices themselves act as bait. This one’s a sucker.

“Brilliant,” he agrees, nodding at the ruin.

The idea of being drained by yet another bloody horcrux is not really appealing to him. Philippines’ weather was not agreeing with him. The humidity and the crude warmth had already sucked on his tattered resilience. To walk into this disaster seems awfully like a mistake.

But then again, everything does.

As if reading his mind, Hermione says, “Have you eaten anything since morning?”

He toes at the empty packet of crisps at their feet. He had to choose between breakfast or sleep. And since the bombing incident, lack of sleep nowadays meant a lost chance of blunting his senses. Between the two he chose the latter. Hermione rolls her eyes. With a faint exasperated sigh, she reaches into her beaded bag. After jostling around in the heapless mass of necessities, she fishes out two foil wrapped sandwiches.

Draco narrows his eyes at the food. “Where did you get the money?”

Hermione purses her lips. “Just take it.”

He can’t help letting out a disbelieving laugh. “Granger, did you steal?”

“Only with pure intentions to feed the weak and weary,” she snaps. “Let’s sit somewhere away, we do need to conserve our energy.”

He’s still smiling as Hermione finds a spot, far enough but still overlooking the decrepit mansion. The place is entirely empty now, but it was bristling with tourists the entire day. He’s seen a tourist couple sharing their lunch right here while he was mapping the place out, posing as a tourist himself. Hermione takes one of the tuna sandwiches for herself. Even though there’s no one in sight, Draco can hear the muted sounds of people moving about. Another impact of the magnetic force of the house, trapping memories in it. The entire haunted ground has an air of death in it, like a carcass left and forgotten by everyone else but them. She can feel it, too, though not as comfortable with it as he was. Hermione announces that they have exactly eight minutes to spare.

“It’s almost like a date,” he muses in answer.

[THEN]

He had found the ring by mistake. After he’d decided to escape, he ran into the thing like running headfirst into a brick wall. It felt like a scripted scene, almost, how he reached into his grandfather’s portrait to get money. Instead he brought out an outstanding Edwardian ring with a ruby encrusted on the centre. He kept it unwittingly, thinking that he could pawn it. Not even thinking that it was too distinct, the thing was too alluring, the thing was a mistake.

Those were fever-dream days, delirious and fevered. He had to run his head through every single detail, polish over any loose ends. There was no room for any mistake, or chance of fate as he knew. He had been handling everything fine—with his teeth gritted, eyes fixed, his heart angry and sullen and scared—before. He figured he could bite his skin through it all. After all, the war would end some time, wouldn’t it? 

But then.

It was after the fateful night when three familiar strangers wandered into his house, his home, that everything changed. It was a tireless string of days after Harry Potter had escaped from their grasp, even when the Dark Lord came and awashed his home in his fury, cursed everything in sight—his aunt, his mother and father; him. Draco gritted his teeth when he could endure the Cruciatus, and screamed for mercy when he couldn’t. Then at night, with cool, detached tears streaming from his eyes, he calculated his escape. He’d do it fast, before the house can recover from the masacre. Before his aunt can come into full force about finding his three former classmates. In darkness, with his heart beating hot and loud, he picked his mother to be the one to take with as he ran away. He planned to leave his father in the mansion to rot. He begun to scavenge for supplies.

In his house, money was stored like discarded puzzle pieces. A nonsensical amount of money was scattered across the mansion. He decided that he would take as much as he could. Enough to last them for a year or two. He planned to get his mother to safety. And then..

He had found it by mistake. 

[NOW]

The gates to the mansion are closed with a heavy, rusted iron padlock. Draco would’ve expected something more restrictive, but with almost all the valuables being donated to the national museum, he guess the house only offers the theatricals of it all. The stout, porky guide who led the flock of tourists at noon had sighed at the vast expanse of nothing. “Nothing but memories of grandeur, here,” he said in a thick, accented English. “That’s all we sell.”

Hermione’s bag produces a sterling screwdriver. Draco lets her handle it—she was always better with muggle equipment—as he hangs back to check on his map again. Tries to memorise the ant-like marks of footsteps interspaced between the rooms. He senses that something has yet again changed. It’s by no means the first time. Anything regarding the horcruxes changes by their accord. He rubs his thumb across his jaw in concentration. The reading room is on the second floor beside the master bedroom… just like in the Malfoy Manor. The library was his solace for the longest time. The cinnamon, dusty smell of old books had always enchanted him.

After a minute of meddling, Hermione finally opens the door. The screech of the heavy iron gate pierces the night and the house comes alive. Like the sizzle of a coke bottle after it’s been shaken, everything hums, whirling together with the sounds of cicadas outside, the curious rustle of the grass, and their heartbeats. Restless. Hermione grabs onto his forearm.

“What’s that?” Her voice is full of childlike, fearful wonder.

“Premonition,” he answers, leading her inside. Despite the abundance of light outside, the corridor is thick in the dark. Draco mutters the lumos charm and the light of his wand pierces in the empty space like a knife through skin. Hermione follows suit with her hand on his arm. They walk inside the moonless hallway. Draco’s aware of the portraits on the walls and he is aware that muggle portraits cannot move or follow them, but he doesn’t look anyway. 

Together they reach a room, the living room, he knows. The guide had given the tourists a preposterously intimate description of the use of this room. Children playing house, a mother looking at them with unbound and unimaginable love, a father who is almost always absent. Something about that scenery striked home. Hermione steps forward to inspect the antique settee with lions engraved on its wooden handles. There’s a small table on the side of it. She touches the paperweight on it with careful hands. Draco watches her squint in disappointment. So it goes.

It’s tedious. The horcruxes are becoming more and more elusive as they are reducing in number. Survival instinct, Draco guesses. Magic is no good anymore for finding them. So together they touch every object in the room, trying to decide whether any of it is unnaturally cold, if they are somehow heavier than they should be, if a phonetic, unignorable vibration radiates from its core like a living thing. A horcrux exerts itself in different ways. Much like a human being.

Draco follows suit, touching the antiquated carpet on the floor, chenille; a miniature grandfather clock; a forgotten postcard. The walls in the room are dark mahogany in colour, just like the colour of his room at the Manor. The darkness of the mahogany red is absorbing more light. Something about it hums, mellow and elusive. Serene. If he closes his eyes he can draw up memories from his childhood.

As they step to the end of the foyer, and Draco tries his best to ignore the sound of his heart, Hermione lets out a small, broken sound.

“What?”

“Nothing. I—” She squeezes his hand. “Just… Do you think you could ever do it?”

“Do what?”

“Make a horcrux?”

He stops to stare at her. “Why?”

A flush blooms on her cheeks. He can’t help but trace the blush with his fingers. She feels warm on his skin. Of course he’s thought about it. Of course she’s thought about it. They are just so fascinating. Scrupulous, devious little lives. He wondered if he’d have enough magic in him to do it. Or that dark, bastardy heart. What if it wasn’t vanity? What if he just wanted to stick around in a visceral form. In a locket, perhaps. Tied around the slim neck of some dark and lovely girl, a part of his soul close to her chest?

He shakes his head to get rid of the thoughts. Really, they should be getting their head straight and present in the crime scene.

Hermione presses her lips and—as if she can read his thoughts—nods.

“You’re right,” she says. “Why would we want to know if we’re capable of that?”

“Right.”

The room they’ve finally settled on has a bed, a table, and a loveseat cornered at the window. The painting of the mistress of the house who has blonde hair, scathing smile and a brilliant, dazzling pair of dark eyes. Though Draco knows it is a muggle painting, he can’t help but feel that the dark, depthless eyes of the woman are following their every step. He touches the portrait, dragging his finger from her jaw to her shoulder, the dip of her hair. It isn’t the horcrux, but a shiver runs down his spine anyway.

Can he do it? 

The floor is a kaleidoscope, virescent mosaic covering their every step. It’s much like the hotel room he and Hermione rent out when they have time. A snug, faraway place where they are no one, not spies or soldiers or comrades. The room is built like that place, with a lone window facing a garden. He would spend forever in that place if he could, with her, for her. He turns his head and finds her smiling at him.

Can he make a horcrux to always have a way back to Granger? To keep living and living horribly so that he’d never leave her?

The answer scares him.

[THEN]

The world is always short of light.

Draco doesn’t exactly remember when he realised this the first time. But ever since he can remember, it has bothered him to no end. No corner of the world is entirely, entirely within his view. It shines, periodically and sparsely, for him to remember precarious details and colours and nonsensical habits of other people. Draco stores things in his mind like an amateur archaeologist, never really knowing what to keep or not. In this mind everything is of infinite importance, every action has had innumerable possibilities. The world is short and inefficient with its light. Somehow Draco can never perceive something completely.

And here she stands, a bright, shiny blot in the great horizon of the world. Hermione Jean Granger, brilliant and dazzling. Was it with or within? she mused quiescently, seemingly unaware of the fact that they were both naked on her bed. Seriously, I think this makes the definition so—oh, Draco.

He had flipped her suddenly, so he was hovering over her. Her breast bounced deliciously at the impact. She giggled before sighing in pleasure when he cupped one.

Focus, she chided jokingly. 

I am, he answered. He circled the nipple with his index and made a satisfied note of the way she moaned.

The definition of Sentient is…

I don’t give a fuck, he mumbled before bending down to kiss her and shut her up. She laughed into the kiss, her hand sneaking deftly between their bodies to guide him inside her. He moaned into her mouth as hers fell open in a gasp. You’re incorrigible, Granger.

That’s why you love me.

[NOW]

“I saw Harry today at the base,” Hermione says pensively, carefully working on the drawer. With the mind of conserving their magic, they’ve decided to check for the dark object by hand for as long as they can.

Draco is inspecting an antiquated, bronze telephone. The sly, intent lilt of her voice makes him confused for a moment. She isn’t always so chatty when they are at work. He asks, “Was Pansy with him?”

She gives him a look.

“Ugh.”

“They were actually holding hands.”

He scrunches his nose, vaguely disturbed. “Details of Potter’s sexual proclivity with my best friend doesn’t interest me.”

“Well, I’m more talking about the lack of it,” she says chidingly, lips quirked in a half-amused smile.

“That, too.”

“Hmm.” She narrows her eyes at the lock, suddenly focused. It seems to be jammed in a peculiar way. She murmurs something and twists the key. The lock doesn’t click.

“I don’t trust him,” he says flatly, dropping the paperweight and turning to her. “Not about… all that Chosen One, Our Only Hope stuff. He’s good for that. But in general. I don’t trust him.”

To his abject annoyance, she doesn’t even blink at that. As if his words didn’t mean anything. “Should I act surprised? You don’t trust anyone.”

“He’s too idealistic.”

“The definition of idealistic is not being able to see anything beyond what is ideal according to a person,” she says primly. “You know a person like that?”

“Fuck you.”

The corners of her mouth lift. He can almost taste her smile. “Not yet.”

That sly, intent lit. Familiar. Somehow his ears ring again. The colourful mosaic of the floor burns brighter in the sparse moonlight. He feels transported to another place entirely.

That’s why you love me, she had said.

They were both within the heat of their proximity that he didn’t stop, or drop dead, at the sound of it. It was true, and whether she knew it consciously or not was a question that would trouble him that night and all the nights after that one. But in that moment he only mumbled her to shut up and kiss him. Which she did. And it took only a minute of coarse moving before they found their rhythm, like countless times before. The bed creaked and groaned with the sound of his thrusts. Hermione arched her back, her chest meeting with his and she drew him closer, planting kisses on his shoulder, his neck, his cheeks and his lips. And the world capsized, contorted and reshuffled into his view. 

There was nothing else in the world but that sweetness of her, nothing but those dusty-pink freckles, pale against her blush.

[THEN]

“So, you love her?”

What he wanted to say was, What the fuck even is that? Love? 

But he only groaned and slipped further against his knee, refusing to look back at Pansy. She was quiet for a second before bursting into a chiding, joyous laugh. 

“Congratulations,” Pansy said chidingly. “You’re fucked.”

“Oh god.” 

He felt a surreptitious pat on his back as she dropped beside him, their shoulders touching. The smell of her lavender perfume brought back memories of childhood when they used to be together always, telling each other everything. After a moment he laughed along, breaking out of the posture and leaning into his friend. “How does it feel? It is rainbows and unicorns?”

“It’s like I’m slippering into this… this dark hole.”

“That’s because you have a sick little head, Draco,” Pansy said. He rested his head on her shoulder as she ruffled his hair. “Everything you love turns into an obsession.”

He laughed again, struck by the insanity of this conversation. Of the fact that they’re at the attic of the Burrow, with Mrs. Weasley making pot roast to celebrate her husband’s birthday. They could hear the chatter of people downstairs. Draco had gifted Mr. Weasley a muggle portable telephone he made from scratch. When the man was slapping him on the back in excitement, he had caught Hermione looking at him in a way that sent shockwaves through his skin. So now he’d run away in the dusty, overstuffed attic with his friend who saw the whole thing and would make no attempt at unseeing the whole thing. This mess. His heart.

“What’s the thing you love most about her?”

He scoffed softly at the greying, wooden wall of the room. A sliver of light struck through the old woods at their feet. He himself had thought about it many times. What exactly was it? Her mind that was as deep as it was wide? The way it made sense out of anything? That curious stubbornness in the way she fought for everything right? Or what about her beauty? The chameleon-like, evasive beauty… here and not here. Always catching him off-guard. She has freckles scattered like stars on her cheeks, only appearing when they’ve been in the sun for too long. When the sunlight hit her eyes, at just that right angle, Draco could swear their colour changed from earth to honey.

“We were at this park in Reno once. It’s a city in the US. We’d had a false intel that there was a horcrux at a museum there. It wasn’t. And I was—” He chuckled at the memory. “It was July, okay? It was hot in the middle of the day. I was sweating all over and pissed beyond everything and suddenly Hermione said that she wanted to stop at a local park. There was supposed to be an eclipse on exactly two twenty three and she wanted to see it. I was livid. But she was so excited that I followed her.

“So we were at the park where everyone from a ten mile radius came. I mean, couples and families with children. It was chaos. Somehow she found us a place and we spread a cloth over the grass and laid down side by side and waited silently in the chatter. Waited for hours, it seemed to me. When the eclipse came, everyone fell silent. You could hear a pin drop, not even a gasp. And it was so mesmerising. To see that sun get covered in a ring of light and the entire place darkeing… like we were shrouded, you know? And when the moon completely hid the sun, and the world was dark, I felt her touching my hand. It was…” He could feel the telltale heat of his blush spreading all over his cheeks. Those few minutes felt like forever, shimmering and elusive, like something bright just within the tip of his fingers as he watched her, helplessly mesmerised. “I couldn’t stare at her but I saw everything. All of her. And everyone else, too. Everyone at the park was breathing at the same rhythm, I could feel their pulse like I could feel hers. All these people we didn’t know.

“After it ended she turned to me and said, ‘See, Draco? We’re not doomed.’ Her eyes were…” He didn’t exactly know how to elucidate what that sentence did to him. There was a spark in the middle of his chest, alight with all the terrifying possibilities. “She was so earnest, Pans. I believed her.”

When he turned to Pansy he found her looking at him just as earnestly. There was a sliver of smile on her lips, just around the edge, teeming with possibilities. And before she could say anything and encourage him further, he said—

“Maybe I’m just deficient in vitamins.”

She laughed. 

“Dead serious, Pans. It’s making my head spin.”

Constant irregular diet had made its mark on him. He had never known this type of hunger before. On the exception of that day, every other day it was watery bean soup, stale bread, sour sausages to give him some sense of sustenance. He was pretty sure he was severely lacking in protein, the real kind, not the bottled and charmed and pulverized ones the members of the Order are required to swallow every day. His skin, forever smooth and unbroken, was flaying in places. It came off if he scratched too hard, which he did too often when he was on edge. He could trace the curves on his bones on his arms and torso, if he tried. 

So it went. His bodily equilibrium was fucked. He was thoroughly scared about the future. Why would something even resembling love come at him now? He was mad, surely. Entirely bonkers. A week ago he had watched with bleak disgust at the clump of silvery blond hair clogging the shower drain. Hermione had noticed it as well—herself a fogged reflection of Draco—and vanished it without a word.

“Do you love him?” he found himself asking. Wondering, more like, as he did often. He didn’t mean to toss it out like that, with his grimace and hopeless disdain. But the strain of the look in her eyes was too much. He wanted to stop thinking about Hermione.

She smiled strangely, not thrown off balance even the slightest. “Maybe… falling, fell. I don’t know. It’s such a slippery slope, isn’t it?”

“Like tightroping hundred feet high.”

“Like free falling without safety.”

“No rope, nothing on the ground.”

“Only hoping that someone would catch us.”

Hope.

“Yeah,” the word left a sour taste in his mouth. “Hope.”

Hope, he thought with disdain. Is the death of logic.

“He’s good, you know,” Pansy was saying, her voice suddenly lighter, softer. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like him. He’d die for you even if he didn’t like you. Went through so much and still believes…” She took a deep breath, flushed. “He’s beautiful, really. Breathtaking. He makes everything seem… less bright.”

He could hear the aching timbre of hope in his friend’s voice. It felt like hoarding something that isn’t supposed to be inside you, that you aren’t quite equipped to handle. It reminded him how caring for Hermione felt heavy. The spark of her presence felt untamable, raw electricity. He wasn’t supposed to touch it.

“She’s brilliant, Pans,” he said softly. “I don’t know what she’s doing with me.”

It’s all achingly hopeful before reality sneaks in. In the attic with his friend, saying that he loved Hermione Granger felt good, felt right. But it was only for a moment. A moment before a memory slipped into his mind. He was twelve years old, Hogwarts was brimming with chaos. He remembered buzzing with rapturous excitement as the Chamber of Secrets proclaimed to be opened again. 

I bet you’ll be next, Mudblood.

He hated her. He had hated her half his life. He wanted her dead when he was twelve. What can possibly change in less than a decade? There was an unbreachable gap separating them since the beginning of everything. How dare he love her now? How dare she let him?

[NOW]

There’s a whistling sound to his ear, humming distantly against the sounds of the seemingly still night. Draco stares at the paperweight in his hand. Spherical with one flat surface, it has a map of the cosmos inside it. He watches impassively at the scattered, shining stars looking back at him. It looks like something he saw in his…

“I used to have a dress like this,” Hermione says, snatching him out of his thoughts.

“What?”

She points to a painting on the wall. A dark-haired, pretty woman in a periwinkle blue gown. Draco doesn’t have a hard time picturing her in something like this.

“She looks like you,” he says. His head buzzes as soon as he says it. Like something insidious is crawling to them.

“What?”

“Her hair… I thought it was—” Wasn’t it lighter? He turns around to find the portrait he first saw when he entered the room. It’s there. But why didn’t he notice this one too?

“What?”

“It’s uncanny.” 

“Draco, what are you thinking?” 

“Why does she look like you?”

Hermione blinks, surprised. “Does she? A coincidence then.”

Draco nods impassively. He ignores the ringing in his ear, a result of the explosion he was moron enough to execute a few months ago. Five months, to be exact. Now if even something remotely suspicious makes a noise, his ears ring in blaring idiotic defiance. The irony of being even more on guard makes him smirk. His father was right, disease reflects the person.

“Let’s search another place,” he says softly. Still, the room swivels in the sound. Everything feels dwindling, like the right end of a mercurial high.

Hermione stares at him as if she’s worried. Unsure. “Of course. We just have this one last thing.”

“We saw everything here.”

She points to something behind him and his heart leaps up, sudden and sure, burning. The comfort that has been clinging to him suddenly gives out. He doesn’t know what it is but his ears are ringing again viciously. Hermione’s eyes mirror his, the same fathomless dread catching up to her too. Right before finding another horcrux, he knows they both wish they hadn’t come here, wish they could’ve apparated somewhere else, be someone else. 

“What about that?”

He turned back, his heart thumping wildly. There is a lampshade in the design of a flower at the table beside the bed. It’s bronze in colour at the stem of the flower, the petals are violet, dark and dropping below.

“Was it here before?” his voice shakes. There was almost nothing in the room. He would’ve noticed if it was here before.

Hermione’s voice is low, careful. He can hear her even before she says, “It’s here now.”

[THEN]

It happened like this.

Cocaine. Reminiscence. A shot of adrenaline and a fuckload of audacious courage.

They were sitting on the cool, hard floor of Bliss, a dilapidated motel in downtown Texas. Something insidious and dark was slithering inside him and he wanted nothing more than to pass out into oblivion. But somehow she kept pulling him back. Draco couldn’t remember what happened exactly without a shot of migraine piercing his head. They’d touched a cursed ring and Draco’s entire body was spasping with a dark, terrible dread. Hermione had vomited three times in the last forty five minutes and he wasn’t sure if there was any point to anything at all.

“You okay?” he asked her out of habit if anything. He knew she wasn’t.

“Not really.”

So they scrambled out of the forest and patched themselves up as much as they could. Anti-epileptic charms and spells for analgesia and band aids for the truly nonsensical amounts of tiny cuts on thier bodies. When he felt his spasms dissipating, he suggested snorting from their special stash to calm their nerves. 

So now they sat facing one another, Draco leaning against the wall and Hermione against the single, conspicuously small bed. The only window in the room was on his left and he saw, from time to time, birds flying over the concrete buildings that surround them.

They didn’t really know what they were doing. The aftereffect of the drug was grazing his nerve ends like sandpaper, like powdered glass. He feels the tailend of the buzz in his toes, trying to dissipate some of the sensations.

It didn’t always help. But sometimes, when the drugs hit, just at the right in just the right place—the hollow of his throat, his kneecaps, his stomach, sometimes, he felt like a time traveler. Weightless and aimless, like someone who’d gilded through past and present and all the other banalities of time that, in time, it all felt useless. Time has lost its gravity for him somewhere along the way. And he sat there, on his bed, or beside a dumpster in some muggle town, feeling the past and present all mashing up, time moving in its strangely passive-agressive way, too fast and too slow and too fucking incomprehensible.

“I could die right here,” Hermione said, staring at the rectangular afterlight smooth over their legs. Something leapt out of his heart. “I wouldn’t even care.”

“I know.”

It wasn’t their first rodeo. And it wasn’t the first time he felt himself tied to Hermione Granger in some tragic, unavoidable way. Sometimes, when they are tied like this, they tell each other the truths. It was a game Hermione had started. He isn’t still sure if it was to test his loyalty or find an empty vessel to dump her impulsive thoughts in, but Draco inclined with every request she made. Little ways to keep her around. Little ways to make sure they were tied together, inseparable.

“I’d just have one little, tiny regret,” she said, not softly, but with the same hazy conviction he knew so well.

“Just one?”

“Just one. Would you have any regrets, Draco? If we were to die right now?”

Hermione’s hair wispy and beguiling, the shimmering tail of a comet. He wanted to touch it so badly his fingers shook. “Maybe. Maybe, just one.”

“What is it?”

“What will you regret?”

“There’s a theory,” Hermione said, not answering, but the smile of hers was entirely too aware of her not answering; her syllables lilting and inviting. “That the world is a crooked space.”

His palm dropped on his sides. The floor trembled. “I think I can get behind that theory.”

She was looking at him with a strange intensity. An aftereffect of the drug, Draco would think. “It theorises that the world is always tipping on the wrong axis for each person. Diverging the gravity. And if that person gets one thing, exactly one thing, that the world would… reshuffle the gravity. Tip to the right axis. Everything balanced. Everything right.”

“Yeah?”

“If you could ask for one thing, what would you ask for?”

Draco couldn’t answer. His mind was swimming in and out of depth with thoughts of warm coffee and heart shaped lips and freckles, a heck of a lot of them, brownies his mum made, and the way his clothes would smell like roses after Hermione borrowed them.

“It changes, too,” she egged him. “What you need in the morning may change by afternoon. It’s alright to want things you weren’t supposed to need.”

Draco hesitated. He wasn’t sure, for a moment, if she was saying that to him or herself. If it mattered that they both had the same thing in mind, the same impulse. If it mattered that he wanted to kiss her greedily, like a starved man, and she wanted to allow it. 

But it felt too unreal, too painful to admit. So he decided to admit to another thing.

“The last time I met my mum, I told her ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at seven am. Wait for me at the front door of Sénanque’... We’d spent a summer in Provence a lifetime ago. We both loved that place… when the lavenders bloomed it didn’t quite look real. I told her I had some loose ends. I’d meet her at the old church in the morning.” He licked his lips, the words tasted stale, like regret. “I didn’t really need to lie about something that specific. I could’ve told her, ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow’ or ‘I’ll meet you soon’ or even ‘Be safe’. But I said those words… It almost felt real, you know? I wanted that to hang to my mouth for a while. It almost felt like truth. But it was the biggest lie I ever said. Bigger than anything, than me. It was to keep her safe but. But.

“I’m afraid she’ll run back to father, though. She loves the man too much. Even though she knows he can’t save her. I’m afraid… that someday I’ll hear the news that they’re both dead.” He didn’t much see the point of this love. But he couldn’t deny its existence. His parents loved each other desperately. Loud enough to do something dangerous, wild enough for not regretting it ever. 

“But when I meet her—if I meet her, the first thing I’d like to do is tell her something true. Preferably, ‘It’s over’. Preferably, ‘We’re safe now’, or ‘I’m sorry, I love you’ but anything really. I’d like to look in her eyes and know that she loves me and tell her something true.”

The impact of his confession felt monstrous. A heavy, dropping weight fell on his chest. She was looking at him like she never did before, and he waited for that to pass. He waited for her to realise how pathetic it all was.

“You could’ve made it the truth, you know,” Hermione said quietly after a lifetime. “You could’ve run away with her. Keep her safe with you.”

He smiled at the idea. “No one can do that. No one can keep anyone safe from their worst instinct, Hermione. Hers is that she wants to keep me and my father safe and near at all costs. That’s why I couldn’t tell her what I was doing.” 

“But you could’ve—”

“And I couldn’t stay. Not after…”

“What?”

His throat hurt, for some reason. “You would’ve died that day, Granger.” He didn’t specify which day, but he didn’t need to. At once her face flickered with some dark, terrible pain. The sun was setting outside, the tiny, rectangular sky from their window was darkening, and he could almost hear her think, That day. That fateful day was sunk into their skin like a tattoo, a curse. It was a mark in her arm. That day was, and would always be, linking them inextricably with each other. So he tried to ignore her expression. He repeated what he said.

“You would have died that day. And I would not move a muscle to save you.”

She stared at him stiffly. He waited for her to shake her head in defiance, telling him that he wouldn’t have done it, or that she didn’t need saving even if he hadn’t. Or that she hadn’t forgotten, of course, how could she?

But her eyes flickered again to his feet. His great toe, invisible after a blast… happened during an excursion to find the seventy-fifth horcrux. Yet sometimes when he was agitated, he could swear he felt it itching.

“You’re not that person anymore,” she said finally.

“I hope not.” He’d rather die than be that person again, caged in fear and spite and selfishness. If he ever got the chance, he’d die for her without hesitation. It’s guilt, he told himself for a long time. Just guilt. He groaned. “Hermione, I need… I want—”

What he needed was a punch in the gut. What he needed was an adrenaline shot to wake him up from this dream where Hermione Granger looked at him softly. He needed that softness, he wanted to bite into it. With a great unending chasm in his throat, he said, “I need to kiss you, Hermione.” And he wished, afterwards, that he had phrased it better, more sentimental, more coherent. But that was that. Sometimes the truth comes out in the most inconvenient way.

She licked her lips, somehow they were both leaning. Somehow her hand was at his knee. 

“Hey.” He nudged her, unsure again. 

“Want or need?” she asked, softly. “Do you want to or—”

“I don’t know.”

Brown eyes stared a beat too long at his lips. She hesitated.

“Would you regret it if we kissed?” he asked. It felt unreal to have this conversation.

“No.”

“Come on, Granger. Tell me the truth.”

She was still someone who seemed quite unachievable to him. He watched her as something you were supposed to admire, but never touch.

“No,” she said louder. “But you might. Later. Immediately. Sometimes, I fear I am quite unloveable.”

He blinked. A heady rush of blood sprung straight to his head. “Granger,” he whispered, touching her chin with his index. “Do you even see yourself?” His fingers traced on her cheekbone, light as a feather. “Who wouldn’t want you?” 

Her lips trembled. A heady rush of blood sprung straight to her head and heart and cheeks. The freckles bloomed like lavender fields in June. “Draco?”

He hummed, still mulling over the color in her eyes. Earthy, brown, and warm. It always came as a surprise when the warmth was aimed at him.

“Kiss me.”

[NOW]

“I hope you fall in love someday,” his mother had mused one summer evening. He was nagging about Pansy and her million mood swings, from the fit of her dress to the inherent meaninglessness of life. Everything within the fabric of the universe terrified her. Everything in herself made it impossible for her to admit to it.

His mother was listening with her absolute undivided attention, her smiling face was unguarded in a way that was equally strange and beautiful. Few people looked at him like that. He cherished every moment, even if he was too into his hubris to realise that at the time.

“I hope you fall in love someday,” she said suddenly, smoothing out the top of his hair. “It brings a sweetness in your life you wouldn’t know any other way.”

“With Pansy?” he asked carefully. He didn’t see how they could get married ever.

“Anyone you like.”

As he stares at Granger muttering wandless charms on the flower-like lamp, he wondered if his mother’s acceptance of anyone would ever venture this far.

It’s strangely calm to think of his mother when she was far away and safe. Away from all this mess. It is so strange to think of her as a memory at all. Doesn’t he feel it all here, still? A hint of lavender, her perfume? The curious stack of books on the bedside table made every brush of air a rustle against the pages. There was a painting in her study as well. A portrait of Druella Black, his grandmother. He used to stare at the noble lady and feel—not for the first time, certainly not the last—the enormity of the manor swallowing him whole.

“I think this is it,” Hermione says nervously, taking a step back from the horcrux. An inconspicuous piece of light. Draco wishes he was at Malfoy Manor instead of here.

Like an instinct, he holds her hand. She responds instantly, slotting their fingers together, waiting for something to strike. Some invisible figure from the wall or the curtains. Something to fight back as Hermione turns to the tiny, bronze statuette of a human figure on the loveseat that wasn’t there a moment before. Draco half expects the lady from the portrait to turn into a siren.

The air swivels. There’s a microscopic shift in the wind. The house had been cold since the moment they entered. But somehow he’d forgotten that. Something about the air felt pleasant, like entering into his library after a long walk in the winter garden. At the Malfoy Manor. He shakes his head. He was a thousand miles away from home. He had less than zero chance of ever going back again.

“Do you feel that?” he says instead of thinking about the fireplace in his library. He whispers in fear of waking the muggle painting. It’s senseless. It’s idiotic.

Her fingers tremble in his grasp. “What?”

“It’s warmer in here.”