I can't save us, my Atlantis, we fall
We built this town on shaky ground
I can't save us, my Atlantis, oh, no
We built it up to pull it down
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i.
Hermione loves sea salt yet her mouth is full of metallic, blood-bitter chlorine.
For some reason, Hermione always puts too much salt into every other dish for their weekly Saturday dinners with Narcissa. She tastes the sauce/spaghetti/chicken and curses under her breath, meeting the familiar pale-blue eyes of an amused Draco.
“And who have you fallen in love with yet again, my darling?” Her husband teases oh so softly, pulling Hermione away from the stove and into his waiting embrace. He leaves a habitual kind of kiss in the corner of her mouth, and Hermione feels like her lungs are overflowing with a bitter, metallic taste of chlorine.
On the inside, she longs for the salt-infused air and lukewarm sand on a deserted beach as the sun sets; yet on the outside, she is firmly rooted to the ground akin to a trunk of a decaying tree, and her eyes are focused right over Draco’s shoulder with laser-like precision, unable to look away from Narcissa’s starved-for-affection face, drained of all color.
Narcissa sits at the kitchen table and watches them oh so attentively, with a porcelain doll smile plastered across her too-pale face. In these moments, she seems so fragile, as if a single push in the wrong direction could break her, make her fall apart. And Hermione knows that Narcissa is falling apart on a weekly basis like clockwork—every Saturday, when she sees the two of them together.
Hermione falls apart along with her, because she had the misfortune to fall in love with nobody but Narcissa.
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ii.
Hermione loves her so much that she's ready to scream off the top of her lungs from a too-tall skyscraper in Muggle London, dressed in see-through glass akin to the subtlety of their feelings for one another. And so when one night, Narcissa is suddenly doubting everything—them, the inappropriateness of it all, the eternity they’ve condemned each other to—Hermione grabs her by her too-thin wrist and apparates them to a skyscraper made of glass in the middle of Muggle London.
They land on the rooftop, and Narcissa stumbles, her body colliding with Hermione’s as if she’s the only thing that can keep her standing. The wind is terribly strong, swooshing around them in gusts and bursts that make Hermione want to hold Narcissa impossibly tighter. The month of November is unusually cold even for gloomy England; the bone-chilling air slips under the sleeves of Hermione's thick woolen sweater like sand.
Yet Hermione takes off her sweater, leaving only a thin long sleeve underneath, and gives the ball of maroon-colored wool concoction to Narcissa. All her warmth, everything she owns and everything she never will—all of it she is ready to give to Narcissa without a second thought. It’s as if her barely beating heart is laid out on the palm of her too-pale trembling hand, and when she hands it to Narcissa with death-like finality, she is ready to subject herself to the cruel twists of fate; yet, secretly, under layers and layers of heavy makeup and endless inches of yellowed parchment, she hopes that Narcissa will choose to bring Hermione back to life every time she is offered the chance to end it.
Narcissa chooses Hermione, always; she grabs the sweater the color of her favorite burgundy with a smile softer than velvet and pulls it over her head in a too-familiar motion. They stand on the roof of a glass-covered skyscraper for hours, basking in the night clouds above them and the tentative knowledge that this is the one place where they cannot be seen. ⠀
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iii.
Hermione and Draco go swimming together every day at eight in the morning, accompanied by teasing text messages from Pansy about being insufferable lovebirds even after almost a decade of marriage. They swim for an hour or two on neighboring lanes, and each time before they part to head to the locker rooms after completing their morning session, Draco kisses her. It tastes like the metallic sting of chlorine, like blood seeping out from the inside of her cheek she can’t stop biting down, and Hermione fights the urge to pull away.
When Hermione is with Narcissa, their kisses taste of sea salt. Because Narcissa cries every single time their lips collide, and the devilish mix of guilt and love splashes in her eyes the color of sea surface, threatening to spill over.
Narcissa is always soft, pliant, melting under her touch.
“This is wrong,” she whispers as Hermione gently runs her fingertips over Narcissa’s bitten-down lips. The tears are streaming down her too-pale cheeks, for she knows that, despite the wrongness of it all, her heart keeps screaming at her that this is right, that they are meant to be, that there will always be a them .
Won’t there?
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iv.⠀
The universe has a different plan.
There won’t be a them anymore. There was them, once, in the past; the past that Narcissa will never be able to share with a single soul.
Because being together becomes a little too dangerous—one day, when Hermione is out of town on a work trip, Draco calls Narcissa and shares his concerns, convinced that Hermione is having an affair, that she betrayed him, has been betraying them for the past couple of months. Nine months, Narcissa thinks to herself and realizes that it’s not Hermione who is betraying Draco—it’s Narcissa herself. Selfishly, she keeps choosing love over her son, all because fate willed her to fall for the most unattainable woman on the planet Earth—her own daughter-in-law.
Narcissa wants to kiss Hermione to the point of no return, even though it is already there, and there is no going forward for them. She wants to grab the suitcases full of knick-knacks, books, and clothes that smell like them and escape to a forever far-away land—somewhere where Draco will never find them. Yet, instinctively, Narcissa knows that she will leave a trail of suffocating guilt and betrayal in her wake; that she will break somewhere along the way and drop the remains of her shattered heart like breadcrumbs. It will be almost too easy to find her.
“If we lived on the moon, we would’ve been together,” Narcissa whispers, tucking a strand of hair behind Hermione’s ears. Her hands shake as much as whenever Hermione offers up her heart to Narcissa, and Narcissa knows, instinctively, that in this flicker of a moment, she is stealing it for the rest of eternity.
Burning-hot tears are streaming down Hermione’s cheeks, swiftly prompted by the softness of a gesture and the cruelty of words. Akin to breadcrumbs, the torn-apart pieces of her heart fall onto the rooftop of a glass-coated skyscraper in the middle of Muggle London, yet Hermione knows that she won’t be able to find her way back home, not after this.
Narcissa knows it, too, and if her heart breaks along with Hermione’s, it’s because they’ve been sharing the same heart for years.
“I don't want the moon. I want here , with you.”
“Hermione—”
“I will leave him, Cissa,” Hermione blurts out, the fateful-fatal words that will change everything, and nothing at all. “Today, right now. Just say a word, and I'm yours.”
The stretch of silence chills Hermione to the bone even more than the December wind on top of a forty-floor skyscraper.
“He's my son, Hermione.” Narcissa is burning the words into her own sternum, pushing them out with all the force she can muster. “There could never be another ending for the story of us.”
The words fall in the tiny space between them in a heavy block of ice; not even the warmth of Hermione’s gaze will be able to melt it, no matter how hard she tries. ⠀
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v.
There isn’t a them anymore.
There is no more Hermione Granger-Malfoy, either.
Instead, there is Narcissa, whose son grieves the loss of his wife, and Narcissa, who mourns the loss of her world.
She never looks at skyscrapers the same way again. In her mind, there is forever an image ingrained of a free fall she was never able to stop.