PROMISES Chapter 8
Chapter 8: Those Who Suffer
Draco apparated into his library and instantly sent a message to the Auror department.
"They forced a window in the dressing-room," Hermione informed the boy as she joined him.
Draco stayed indifferent while a baroque style armchair appeared in the middle of the room. He sat down, straight and dignified as he turned his wand between his fingers. "They can't access the library from anywhere but this door," he said as he pointed the wooden double doors in front of him.
Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and his sister Ginny Weasley chose that moment to make their entrance. The ginger-haired girl quickly positioned herself in front of her accomplices, as if to prevent them from jinxing Malfoy, whose wand was already raised menacingly in their direction.
"Wands down," she ordered to Harry and Ron before looking Malfoy straight in the eyes. "We're not here to confront you."
"Of course you're not. You just wanted a cup of tea," Draco replied sarcastically.
"You know what we're looking for, Malfoy," Harry spoke this time. His tone was serious and the glare he shot Draco was as dark as ever.
"No, sorry, I don't; however I'm sure the Aurors who'll be here any minute will be interested in knowing," Draco replied, matching Harry's death-glare with his own.
"And what do you think they'll do when they hear that Harry Potter suspects you-an ex DeathEater-in the disappearance of Hermione Granger?" Ginny cut in.
"What?" A frown creased Draco's forehead as a tiny wave of panic set in over him.
"We met Mrs. Scalecow," continued the girl.
The tension rose in the air and was almost palpable.
"I don't know who you're talking about," Draco did his best to reply evenly.
"Liar," Ron, who had yet to open his mouth since their arrival, growled. "I saw you leaving the Louvres' Library, and when I asked for Last Dragons of France, the librarian told me an English man had just borrowed it. The description he gave me fit quite well with a ferret."
Draco stood impassible, but took too much time to reply-which Hermione knew Harry had noticed immediately. She held her breath, wishing Draco would find a convincing excuse. The atmosphere seemed to grow more and more oppressive by the second.
"So what?" Draco finally managed. "I needed it for a symposium I had in Paris. Can't I borrow a book without being accused of abduction?"
"Hermione's research had been dealing with the same subject. Mrs. Scalecow, the Louvres'... there are too many coincidences," insisted Harry. "Either you tell us what you know about Hermione's disappearance, or I tell my suspicions about you to the ministry and Rita Skeeter. I trust she will manage the information rightfully."
"I have nothing to do with Granger's disappearance," Draco insisted.
"Why don't you let us have a look on your symposium reports, then?" Ginny proposed.
"Come off it! They're confidential..."
A cough sounded to their right, and everyone turned their heads toward the sound to discover the portrait of a young and handsome wizard looking at them expectantly. "Aurors McGuire and Kirke are requesting authorization to arrive by the drawing room chimney," the portrait spoke calmly.
Uncertain of his response, Draco observed the three intruders.
"We should leave," advised Ginny.
Harry nodded in approval, but turned back to look at Malfoy before stepping out. "Don't think this is the end of this, Malfoy."
"If you're involved one way or another to Hermione's disappearance, you're a dead man," Ron added before following his accomplices out the door.
Draco made no movement for a full minute as he stood in the large room that was now empty of everybody but Hermione and himself. "WEASEL!" he bellowed finally, and a ginger haired house-elf appeared in front of him, bowing so low that his coarse nose was pressed against the flour.
Hermione shook her head in disgust.
"Make sure they go through the front door, and only the front door," Malfoy ordered his servant, who quickly disappeared to make sure his master's request was met.
"You named him Weasel?" asked Hermione when the house-elf was gone.
Draco reckoned it was quite mean of him, but when Vermina, his previous house-elf, died while giving birth, the first thing that came to him as he saw the baby's ginger hair was 'Another Weasel!'. He wisely chose not to relay the story to Hermione.
Hermione inhaled deeply, trying to relax. She was exhausted from the heavy tension which had surrounded them during the confrontation, exhausted from Draco, exhausted from her unproductive research; basically exhausted from everything.
Heart pounding with difficulty, she wondered if Harry and the others were closer to the solution than Draco and herself. She lifted her eyes towards the man of her thoughts. Still sitting in the armchair, he was staring at her, a strange smile across his face. The idiot was having fun!
"What?" he demanded with a snort.
"You and your way to mock everything and everybody...," she started to say through clenched teeth. "You can be so boastful. Don't you understand that this is serious? This is about my life!"
"Don't take me for a fool, I know this is serious."
"So why are you smiling? Why do you behave like nothing is matter except your stupid treasure?"
His grey eyes darkened. In a flash, she saw hurt... but also pride and conceit rearing up at her. "Do you think it's pleasant, Granger, to spend half my day in your company? Do you think I'm delighted to find my personal enemy inside my house, threatening me to death?" his voice was cold but his look betrayed anger, both deep and well-contained at the same time. "Do you think it's easy doing everything I can to save his best friend because I owe him life debt from six years ago?"
Hermione stayed silent as a memory of the Room of Requirement came to her in a blur. Her eyes were fixed on Draco with that same intensity that used to make him feel uneasy as she relived the night when Harry saved Draco from the flames. She felt the bitterness surrounding them, progressively reviving memories and horrors from the past.
"Do you think you're the only one who suffers? Don't take me for a fool. I understand more things than you think. You can find me mocking and provoking but it's not because of heart's dryness," he took a deep breath. He didn't even know why he said that, nor why he felt that way.
Truth to be told, bitterness was eating him to death. He wanted to yell that he was not shallow, that he was not nice but he was not fundamentally evil, that he was not stupid, and that, no, he couldn't accept even six years later being in the same room with Harry Potter. He bore a grudge against life, against everyone who excluded him, against those who loved him anyway, and against those who didn't want to see who he really was because they couldn't understand... because no one could understand.
"Do you think you're the only one...," he began again, but interrupted himself, unable to go farther. The fury subsided, now giving way to a sudden despondency, and in a resigned tone, Draco Malfoy spoke again. "I try not to think about it, but I... Sometimes... sometimes I feel sorry for everything I did...," he finished quietly.
Hermione nodded, a lump in her throat. It was not an actual apology, but nevertheless she felt the importance of this confession. She didn't feel relieved, she didn't feel serene. All she felt were their wounds, slowly but surely beginning to heal.
The sun was finally setting, and the shadow of the manor expanded to the surrounding walls of the park. It looked like a miniature of Versailles's garden, with its rectilinear paths.
Hermione was observing sunflowers bowing their heads when she caught Draco walking toward the greenhouse and decided to follow him.
He was walking fast, along one of the numerous alleys leading to the garden. She finally ran into him at a bend in the path.
"What do you want? Why are you following me?" He asked her, an annoyed expression on his face where she could see a bit of his old insolence.
She just shrugged, smiling shyly."I just thought that you were having a walk around your garden, and that maybe you would accept my company?"
Draco's relaxed slightly, eyes seeming to say 'why not?' as he shrugged and continued his walk,slower this time than before. When Hermione didn't follow, he called in an impatient tone, "So? Are you coming or not?"
They walked in silence for a long time. Hermione felt that he wasn't lost in his own thoughts, and she wasn't either. She didn't speak though, realizing how comfortable they'd become in the other's presence. Oddly, it seemed that the quarrel they had the previous night had definitely hoisted a white flag between the two. They hadn't spoken of it, although they were with each other all day to prepare their expedition to Palestine, and it did not matter: the conversation wasn't finished. It had only just begun, and Hermione was waiting for it to continue.
The silence currently reigning in the garden was different from the one which had filled the mansion before. It was a new kind of silence; a bit weird, but not empty. Not scary.
Finally, he stopped in front of a shrub and took a blade from the bag he was carrying. "Look at this plant, it's a curea-."
"-Anima," Hermione finished. "It's used for reducing anxiety and alleviating worry," she added with a knowing look.
"It's for my mother," he said defensively.
"Excessive use of it can cause dangerous behavior for the drinker, like extreme recklessness or inhibition," she said as Draco cut a mass of leaves from the shrub.
"How boring," he muttered.
Here, in this moment, in his garden, his usually annoying repartee was making Hermione smile.
He stood on his tip toes to examine a taller branch, and Hermione's eyes locked on the pale color of the skin that peeked out from beneath his shirt as his arms raised above his head. She blushed stupidly and quickly bent over the orange ground surrounding the shrub to hide her face.
"What is this? This color?"
"It's orange, Granger."
"Do you take me for an idiot?"
"Naturally."
"I appreciate your honesty."
"Don't you already know what I think about muggle-borns' intelligence? I don't know why you're asking a question for which you know the answer."
Hermione rolled her eyes in response before stating, "The color of this ground reminds me of sopor mortalis..."
"It is sopor mortalis," he confirmed as he hunkered down next to her. He shot a few jinxes and mixed the mud.
"A strong and mortal poison-," Hermione said.
"-which is extremely efficient against parasites and gnomes," Draco continued.
"It's forbidden to sell or buy."
Draco turned his head in her direction and their eyes met, defying each other. Hermione caught a glimpse of dirt on his jaw, and before she realized what she was doing, she passed a thumb over his skin to remove it. Draco tensed up at the contact, his eyes going from her thumb to her face, but he didn't recoil. For a moment, they just sat there, unmoving as their eyes met, as if under some kind of spell.
They finally realized what was happening and jumped, standing up quickly and at the same time.
"Come on," Draco said, and led the witch to one of her favorite parts of the residence, a splendid botanical garden.
Draco himself seemed to relax as they walked across the garden. It had been a nice surprise for Hermione to see him gardening, not hesitating to kneel down on the ground and care for something other than himself.
"Can you cut me some flowers? I want to smell them," she asked gleefully, wanting to enjoy the smell with the wonderful view.
He chose six different types of flowers, all of them competing in beauty, and handed them to Hermione, who thanked him with a bright smile.
She buried her nose into the bunch and whiffed their fine scent, blushing with happiness and pleasure. Draco watched her. He felt as if he should look away, as if he was intruding on a moment too intimate for an audience, but his eyes wouldn't detach from the face he'd always seen as hostile.
She took one flower in her left hand and declared, "This one smells the best."
Draco simply nodded, wondering if the fact that she liked its scent, the same as his cologne, was a simple coincidence.
They went back to the house in a silence that neither of them wanted to break.
The following day, Hermione found him again in the garden. He was walking much more slowly than the previous day, and she could've sworn that he was waiting for her. Without any discussion, they wandered together between alleys every day, until the date of their journey to Palestine finally came.
Springtime may be a better season for the eyes, but only Summer knows how to reveal the sweet odor of certain flowers. At the end of a summer day, to smell the last perfume of roses under an orange sun shining on the pink-colored sky was one of the most simple and fabulous things Hermione had ever experienced.
During the first month of her disappearance Hermione had been completely panicked, before sinking into melancholy. Now, since her time in Draco's company, it was like a new door had been opened inside of her. She'd forgotten what it was to be over-worked-instead she learned how to appreciate boredom, to take time to observe the things around her, and how to enjoy them. Sometimes, those days she'd spent among the four walls of her ministry office, reading book after book, filling file after file, seemed so far off, almost like another life. This reflection of her echoed with the growing curiosity she had for Draco. How could she define their relationship after seven years of hatred, six years of indifference, and almost two month of cooperation?