(no subject)
Fandom: Harry Potter (post-DH)
Pairing: Draco/Hermione (blink and you’ll miss it)
Prompt: 25 - Strangers
Rating: PG
Words: 1300+
Warning: Spoilers, people! Spoilers! Also, my first stab at the Potter-verse.
* * *
If it hadn’t been sprung upon him so unexpectedly, Draco would have been better prepared to handle this complete nightmare of a situation. But Scorpius was chattering away, out of breath and artlessly grinning, his arm slung around the shoulders of the nervous-looking boy next to him.
“…and I know the train’s leaving in a minute, but I really wanted you to meet him before we left because I just know he’s going to be the other Beater for Ravenclaw with me this year after I put in a good word for him, so you’ll be seeing loads of him, I expect. Eh, Hugo?”
The younger boy whom Scorpius was passionately campaigning for grinned shyly at his trainers before braving a glance up at Draco, revealing a spattering of freckles below a mop of untidy brown curls. “I have been training all summer. My… my dad talks about you all the time, Mr. Malfoy.”
“Bless your misguided little heart,” Draco said, feeling slightly ill. “You’ve befriended a Weasley.”
“A Weasley-Granger, if you please,” put in a cheerful voice from behind him, and Draco tensed like he’d been Petrified. “Hello, Draco.”
It had come to this at last. It seemed that his annual curt nod in Potter’s direction from a safe distance had only forestalled the inevitable. Hermione Granger… Weasley-Granger, he silently corrected with a mental grimace… had crossed the invisible but very real boundary between those-who-had-been-heroes and those-who-had-not-been-suicidal-idiots and was regarding him with a bemused smile and that indefatigable Gryffindor enthusiasm. She had faint lines on her face now, in the corners of her eyes and beside her mouth, etched by a whole lifetime of bemused smiles. Draco’s brain seized upon that fact like it mattered.
He opened his mouth, drawing himself up to speak at last.
And she perfunctorily squeezed past him.
“You’ve run off without your scales again, Hugo,” she chided, handing over a standard Potions kit to the sheepish boy. “If they let you out of Potions just for misplacing your scales, believe me, your father would’ve tried it years ago. Go on, the both of you; you’ve got about two minutes before the Express leaves.”
The presence of all assorted Weasley-Grangers forgotten for the moment, Draco caught Scorpius by the back of his collar before he rushed off. “Merlin’s sake, stay out of trouble this year,” he whispered fiercely into his son’s ear, giving him a little shake.
Scorpius beamed at him. “Don’t worry so much, father. Honestly, you’re worse than mum. I’ll write soon, okay?”
Lucius would have told him to mind his mouth and to make him proud, those invariable final words that would echo like a mantra in Draco’s head for the rest of the school year.
Draco sighed and released his son’s collar. “Run or you’ll be late,” he said. Straightening up, he discovered that Hermione was still there, studying him like he was the most fascinating textbook in the library. He repressed a sigh. Conversation, it seemed, would be inevitable.
*
Father had died the year that Draco turned twenty-seven, struck down in front of the full Wizengamot as he ranted his way through the war trials. The Ministry was still looking for the culprit. The curse in question had been a particularly crafty bit magic, time-delayed and utterly untraceable, which to Draco smacked of a Slytherin-based education. (Draco didn’t believe that the Aurors assigned to the case were looking for the murderer with any particular diligence.)
After that, ten years beyond the point when it would have counted, Draco had begun the slow and sometimes humiliating task of untangling history from his own version of the truth.
He’d always had a bit of a flair for composing stories with the perfect amount of detail and telling them so often that even he had trouble remembering which were based in fact after a while. To this day he wasn’t entirely certain if he had or had not, at the tender age of nine, outrun a Muggle-piloted helicopter while flying near their summer cottage. It felt real enough… but he couldn’t quite remember…
He often found comfort in the knowledge that Potter would never have the nerve to look at the past from any perspective other than his own. Smug, self-aggrandizing, scruffy little… But the point, of course, was that nobody had it entirely right. Not Lucius, not the Ministry, not even Harry ‘Hero of the Century’ Potter.
There were layers upon layers of deception and double-crossing, misinformation and wrong assumptions. Draco’s own little piece of the larger puzzle was hardly spectacular; at times, barely even relevant. A standard-shaped piece off to one corner, probably in beige.
Another comforting thought.
But what unsettled him more and more as he excavated the past was that he hardly even knew the people that he’d so fiercely loathed. It seemed a terrible waste of energy in retrospect. All that time and malice that he’d spent on ‘Potter’s lot’ when they may as well have been strangers for all that he really knew them.
Maybe he was also just a shade bitter. He clearly remembered owling home during his first week, employing all his eleven-year-old diplomacy in an attempt to discern whether perhaps a mistake had been made and the Grangers were actually one of those pureblood families which had inexplicably fallen out of the record books along the way. He knew he hadn’t made that memory up. It was too humiliating to be anything but the truth.
But she wasn’t pureblood, and he was, and back then that had been more than enough to fuel a necessary, practical kind of enmity.
(When Draco did impressions of her in classes, they were always perfect. It may have been a byproduct of having spent just a little too much time over the years watching her.)
*
“Hermione,” he said coolly, after a tongue-tied moment during which he realized that he physically could not bring himself to greet her as ‘Weasley-Granger’. “I take it that you’re aware of this…” He gestured in the direction that the boys had run off. “…fraternization?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “That’s actually why I came over.”
“You think Scorpius is a bad influence,” Draco surmised, his initial surprise turning into something colder.
“What? No, of course not! Well, Ronald had his concerns at first… But that’s hardly my point.” She was a bit flustered now and that gave Draco some satisfaction. He liked them to be on equal footing. “As a matter of fact, I was going to invite you and your wife for dinner, but if you insist on being ridiculous about it then I won’t bother.”
It if weren’t a well-established fact that Malfoy’s didn’t gape, Draco may have been doing just that. Damn. Another point to Hermione.
“Dinner?” he echoed, stealing a glance over her shoulder to see if this was some sort of trick. Given Mr. Weasley-Granger’s rather mottled glower in his direction, Draco began to suspect that she might be in earnest. “Taking your work home with you now, are you? I hate to crush your hopes, but a civil dinner where both myself and your dear hubby are involved might be a challenge even beyond the Ministry’s best diplomat.”
“Harry’ll be there too, of course…”
“It’s funny,” he said, “because you don’t look insane.”
Hermione laughed and shot him another one of those smiles against which Draco had no hope of defending himself. “They’ve both agreed to give this a shot,” she assured him, and promptly threw him even further off balance by putting her hand on his arm with genuine kindness. “Draco, it’s been more than twenty years. Our sons are quickly becoming best friends, and I’m inviting you to dinner. All right?”
Draco thought about how his father had died, and the way that his son looked at life, and these people that he had hated and grudgingly admired and somehow knew nothing about. He thought about the unexpected warmth of her hand on his arm, her thumb just brushing the conspicuously unblemished skin where he had never been quite good enough to receive the Mark.
“Well,” he said, starting to smile, “Who am I to argue with the Ministry’s finest?”
*
Pairing: Draco/Hermione (blink and you’ll miss it)
Prompt: 25 - Strangers
Rating: PG
Words: 1300+
Warning: Spoilers, people! Spoilers! Also, my first stab at the Potter-verse.
* * *
If it hadn’t been sprung upon him so unexpectedly, Draco would have been better prepared to handle this complete nightmare of a situation. But Scorpius was chattering away, out of breath and artlessly grinning, his arm slung around the shoulders of the nervous-looking boy next to him.
“…and I know the train’s leaving in a minute, but I really wanted you to meet him before we left because I just know he’s going to be the other Beater for Ravenclaw with me this year after I put in a good word for him, so you’ll be seeing loads of him, I expect. Eh, Hugo?”
The younger boy whom Scorpius was passionately campaigning for grinned shyly at his trainers before braving a glance up at Draco, revealing a spattering of freckles below a mop of untidy brown curls. “I have been training all summer. My… my dad talks about you all the time, Mr. Malfoy.”
“Bless your misguided little heart,” Draco said, feeling slightly ill. “You’ve befriended a Weasley.”
“A Weasley-Granger, if you please,” put in a cheerful voice from behind him, and Draco tensed like he’d been Petrified. “Hello, Draco.”
It had come to this at last. It seemed that his annual curt nod in Potter’s direction from a safe distance had only forestalled the inevitable. Hermione Granger… Weasley-Granger, he silently corrected with a mental grimace… had crossed the invisible but very real boundary between those-who-had-been-heroes and those-who-had-not-been-suicidal-idiots and was regarding him with a bemused smile and that indefatigable Gryffindor enthusiasm. She had faint lines on her face now, in the corners of her eyes and beside her mouth, etched by a whole lifetime of bemused smiles. Draco’s brain seized upon that fact like it mattered.
He opened his mouth, drawing himself up to speak at last.
And she perfunctorily squeezed past him.
“You’ve run off without your scales again, Hugo,” she chided, handing over a standard Potions kit to the sheepish boy. “If they let you out of Potions just for misplacing your scales, believe me, your father would’ve tried it years ago. Go on, the both of you; you’ve got about two minutes before the Express leaves.”
The presence of all assorted Weasley-Grangers forgotten for the moment, Draco caught Scorpius by the back of his collar before he rushed off. “Merlin’s sake, stay out of trouble this year,” he whispered fiercely into his son’s ear, giving him a little shake.
Scorpius beamed at him. “Don’t worry so much, father. Honestly, you’re worse than mum. I’ll write soon, okay?”
Lucius would have told him to mind his mouth and to make him proud, those invariable final words that would echo like a mantra in Draco’s head for the rest of the school year.
Draco sighed and released his son’s collar. “Run or you’ll be late,” he said. Straightening up, he discovered that Hermione was still there, studying him like he was the most fascinating textbook in the library. He repressed a sigh. Conversation, it seemed, would be inevitable.
*
Father had died the year that Draco turned twenty-seven, struck down in front of the full Wizengamot as he ranted his way through the war trials. The Ministry was still looking for the culprit. The curse in question had been a particularly crafty bit magic, time-delayed and utterly untraceable, which to Draco smacked of a Slytherin-based education. (Draco didn’t believe that the Aurors assigned to the case were looking for the murderer with any particular diligence.)
After that, ten years beyond the point when it would have counted, Draco had begun the slow and sometimes humiliating task of untangling history from his own version of the truth.
He’d always had a bit of a flair for composing stories with the perfect amount of detail and telling them so often that even he had trouble remembering which were based in fact after a while. To this day he wasn’t entirely certain if he had or had not, at the tender age of nine, outrun a Muggle-piloted helicopter while flying near their summer cottage. It felt real enough… but he couldn’t quite remember…
He often found comfort in the knowledge that Potter would never have the nerve to look at the past from any perspective other than his own. Smug, self-aggrandizing, scruffy little… But the point, of course, was that nobody had it entirely right. Not Lucius, not the Ministry, not even Harry ‘Hero of the Century’ Potter.
There were layers upon layers of deception and double-crossing, misinformation and wrong assumptions. Draco’s own little piece of the larger puzzle was hardly spectacular; at times, barely even relevant. A standard-shaped piece off to one corner, probably in beige.
Another comforting thought.
But what unsettled him more and more as he excavated the past was that he hardly even knew the people that he’d so fiercely loathed. It seemed a terrible waste of energy in retrospect. All that time and malice that he’d spent on ‘Potter’s lot’ when they may as well have been strangers for all that he really knew them.
Maybe he was also just a shade bitter. He clearly remembered owling home during his first week, employing all his eleven-year-old diplomacy in an attempt to discern whether perhaps a mistake had been made and the Grangers were actually one of those pureblood families which had inexplicably fallen out of the record books along the way. He knew he hadn’t made that memory up. It was too humiliating to be anything but the truth.
But she wasn’t pureblood, and he was, and back then that had been more than enough to fuel a necessary, practical kind of enmity.
(When Draco did impressions of her in classes, they were always perfect. It may have been a byproduct of having spent just a little too much time over the years watching her.)
*
“Hermione,” he said coolly, after a tongue-tied moment during which he realized that he physically could not bring himself to greet her as ‘Weasley-Granger’. “I take it that you’re aware of this…” He gestured in the direction that the boys had run off. “…fraternization?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “That’s actually why I came over.”
“You think Scorpius is a bad influence,” Draco surmised, his initial surprise turning into something colder.
“What? No, of course not! Well, Ronald had his concerns at first… But that’s hardly my point.” She was a bit flustered now and that gave Draco some satisfaction. He liked them to be on equal footing. “As a matter of fact, I was going to invite you and your wife for dinner, but if you insist on being ridiculous about it then I won’t bother.”
It if weren’t a well-established fact that Malfoy’s didn’t gape, Draco may have been doing just that. Damn. Another point to Hermione.
“Dinner?” he echoed, stealing a glance over her shoulder to see if this was some sort of trick. Given Mr. Weasley-Granger’s rather mottled glower in his direction, Draco began to suspect that she might be in earnest. “Taking your work home with you now, are you? I hate to crush your hopes, but a civil dinner where both myself and your dear hubby are involved might be a challenge even beyond the Ministry’s best diplomat.”
“Harry’ll be there too, of course…”
“It’s funny,” he said, “because you don’t look insane.”
Hermione laughed and shot him another one of those smiles against which Draco had no hope of defending himself. “They’ve both agreed to give this a shot,” she assured him, and promptly threw him even further off balance by putting her hand on his arm with genuine kindness. “Draco, it’s been more than twenty years. Our sons are quickly becoming best friends, and I’m inviting you to dinner. All right?”
Draco thought about how his father had died, and the way that his son looked at life, and these people that he had hated and grudgingly admired and somehow knew nothing about. He thought about the unexpected warmth of her hand on his arm, her thumb just brushing the conspicuously unblemished skin where he had never been quite good enough to receive the Mark.
“Well,” he said, starting to smile, “Who am I to argue with the Ministry’s finest?”
*