Fic: Save Me, San Francisco (1/3)
Title: Save Me, San Francisco (1/3)
Rating: T
Word Count: 20,000(ish)
Disclaimer: In its use of intellectual property and characters belonging to JK Rowling and 20th Century Fox, this work is intended to be transformative commentary on the original. No profit is being made from this work.
Summary: In which Hermione has to find Malfoy and return him to his rightful place in Wiltshire.
Warnings: Language (sorry, guys - I just can’t control Malfoy’s mouth!), memory!fic
Author's Note: Written for the second round of dramione-remix, with the prompt being Dimitri and Anastasia from Anastasia.
Betas: eilonwy1, dormiensa, and callarose
PART ONE
“Remind me again why I let you run away to San Francisco?” Ginny Potter looks anything but pleased. Well, at least the parts of her that Hermione can see through the Floo do. Hermione is sitting in front of the fireplace in her hotel room.
“Look, you’re lucky I even found a room with a fireplace.” Hermione doesn’t know how many times she’s told her best friend that she hasn’t run away. “I told you, it’s just a job. Short-term. Plus, haven’t you always said I need to get out of London?”
Ginny scowls. “I didn’t expect there to be such extenuating circumstances, Hermione. I would have been ecstatic for you if you were taking a proper holiday and not working on Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy’s account. I can’t believe you’re actually working for them, of all people!”
Hermione takes a deep breath. “I know; it’s certainly not how I expected this year to pan out.” That’s the understatement of the year. When she was originally summoned to Malfoy Manor, she’d nearly had a heart attack. She hadn’t returned to that house since her first experience there, one she’d much rather forget and she isn’t afraid to admit that, but her curiosity had won out in the end.
Her friend’s eyes widen. “I think it’s far more than that. You don’t have to do this, you know. Why do you care if that man never sees his son again?”
“I don’t.” She sniffs and turns her nose up. “It’s just a job. Nothing different to any other case I’ve taken on this year.”
Ginny’s smile is too knowing for Hermione’s tastes. “That’s a bald-faced lie, and you know it.”
Hermione had been hoping they’d avoid this tangent. Ginny’s laugh makes her bristle, and she tries hard not to glare.
“I know it,” Ginny continues. “Even Harry and Ron know it. You’re not fooling anyone. I haven’t seen you pour yourself into a case like this in years.”
Hermione sighs. “This one’s time-sensitive, Gi-”
“Oh, don’t give me that, Hermione. I know old man Malfoy is on his deathbed, or claims to be. Whatever. I don’t care. And neither should you.”
“That’s the thing with being a personal investigator. I’m paid to care about what my clients need from me and when. This one just so happens to be desperate for an answer as soon as humanly possible.”
“Is that how you rationalise doing this? You haven’t mentioned any of their names once, always referring to them as ‘the client’. What will you refer to him as?” Ginny’s smile transforms into something ugly and … just ugly. “The deliverable?”
Hermione rolls her eyes. “Is he honestly why you think I’m here?”
“If the shoe fits…”
“What do I have to do to convince you it’s just a job, Ginny?” Hermione asks, pinching the bridge of nose. She’s tired of this argument. It’s one she’s had countless times with Ginny alone, not to mention every other being in her social circle that thinks her business is their own.
“I think saying his name would be a start. I almost think you’re afraid to say it.”
“Whatever. I’m here, in San bloody Francisco, to escort Draco Malfoy to England, after which I will wash my hands of the entire Malfoy family. Are you happy? Did I say their names loudly enough for you?” When she looks up, determined to see this argument to its sorry end, she’s surprised to see a sad smile on Ginny’s face. She sighs again. “What is it?”
“I was hoping that I might have been able to convince you to drop the entire thing and come home.”
“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m here to stay.” Hermione glances at her watch. She’s got a half hour until the show starts, so to speak. Before she starts to implement her plan to somehow get Draco Malfoy back across the pond.
“So, I’m curious. What do you get out of this?”
“Just money. Perhaps a decent reference. At best, they’ll spread the word about my services and there will be purebloods galore lining up outside my door.”
Ginny doesn’t so much as crack a smile at her joke. “Are you sure that’s all? Hermione, I know it’s been something like ten years, but … it changed you. I know you don’t like that it did, but that doesn’t change anything. I’m-bloody hell, Hermione, I’m worried about you.”
Hermione meets her friend’s eyes again. “I know.” She sighs, a truth that she’s long since buried bubbling up and out of her throat. “I need the closure.”
Ginny’s lips thin, but she nods.
* * *
She pauses at the bar, taking a deep breath to steady her nerves and prepare herself. In mere seconds, the entire show will start and there’ll be no going back. Gripping her iced coffee tightly, slightly afraid that her sweaty palms will make it slip prematurely, she turns and slowly meanders through the small coffee shop. She sips from the cup, her mouth turning down at the temperature. Hermione’s always been the type to only drink cold drinks when it’s unbearably hot. But, as much as a small part of her would feel vindicated, she can’t justify dropping scalding coffee into anyone’s lap.
As distracted as she may seem to an outsider about god-knows-what-possibly including the beverage in her hand-she is anything but. Hermione honestly feels like one of those fighter planes from those ridiculous American war movies. She imagines herself acquiring her target, and then locking in on it, only to drop the missile perfectly and successfully accomplish the mission. Victory dance optional.
And well, it’s almost the same. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches sight of that ever-recognisable towhead. Target acquired.
Her legs seem to move with more purpose at that point, as she sees the perfect avenue of execution. Target locked in.
She pulls out her Muggle mobile; it has a lot of shiny features she’s barely had a chance to glance at, much less assimilate, before she arrived that morning. A few swipes of her thumb, and she is doing … something interesting, certainly. She almost forgets that she doesn’t care whether what she’s doing on the mobile is interesting or as boring as Ernie Macmillan’s first-date speech. Crashing into Draco Malfoy’s table with the full force of her purposeful walk and dropping her latte-in his lap, no less-soon fixes that. Mission accomplished.
“Shit!”
“Oh my god!” she exclaims as he jumps out of his chair and tries to wipe off some of the scalding coffee with the newspaper in his hand. She quickly grabs her mobile off the floor, having dropped it when she’d crashed into the table, and away from a growing puddle of coffee. “I am so sorry! Please, let me help.”
When Hermione returns from the bar with a fistful of napkins, he’s still standing-silent and on the verge of fury, she can tell-looking down at himself with a look of sad acceptance. She approaches awkwardly, not sure whether she should physically help him or just hand him the napkins. He snatches them out of her hand and solves that mystery in one fell swoop. She stills when he finally looks at her. This is really the moment she’s been waiting for, or at least the first of many. His eyes pass over her face, and she doesn’t relax until she’s sure he hasn’t recognised her. He meets her eyes with a relatively dark glower, and she has to suppress a shudder. It’s been a long time since she’s seen that grey. She presses her lips tightly together, trying to will heart to return to a normal beat so that she can move on.
Well, at least the Glamour is working.
“I feel so bad,” she says softly. He just raises his eyebrow, and she can feel the associated annoyance rise in the pit of her stomach.
“It’s not a big deal.” His voice is husky, as if he hasn’t spoken for several hours. Not surprising, from the information she’s gathered about him in the short time since she was recruited. She’s almost certain she could recite every fact from the file they had given her, and that’s not counting her own investigating.
He keeps to himself, goes back and forth from work to a select few local establishments, never really associating with anyone in particular. There’s this coffee shop in North Shore, a breakfast joint out by San Francisco State, and one of the more touristy piers near the Embarcadero, one of the main streets of the city. She thinks that Ghirardelli Square is probably a big hit for him, but that’s more due to his infamous sweet tooth than anything else.
“No, don’t say that. Of course it is. I’m sure I ruined your trousers,” she whinges, placing her hand on her forehead for what she hopes isn’t too much of a dramatic effect. “Please, let me make it up to you. Can I buy you lunch, or maybe dinner?”
He looks at her blankly. “You want to pay for my dinner?” His up-intonation is so subtle, she almost misses that he had in fact asked a question. Another habit that seems to automatically annoy her.
“Really, it’s the least I could do. Unless of course you’ve already got plans this evening.” She can see hints of the internal battle in his face, and she almost thinks he’ll say no. It would be just typical for him to do that, wouldn’t it?
“Fine, yeah.”
Hermione blinks in surprise. “Oh! Great!”
He looks wary. Distrustful. In other words, normal. “What’s your name?”
The abrupt question shocks her, and she stumbles over her thoughts. “Jeannie. Or, erm … Jean. Or J. Whatever, really whatever.” She wants to stab herself with a pointy object for getting so flustered. It’s embarrassing.
“Really, whatever? So that means you answer to ‘bull in a china shop’ as well?”
Her eyes snap up to his in shock, and she’s even more surprised to see mirth hiding in that grey abyss. “Yeah, I suppose I deserve that.”
* * *
Hermione takes a deep breath as she enters the ladies’ room at the restaurant Draco had chosen. It’s certainly nicer than she’d expected, but on second thought, she can’t see why she didn’t expect Draco Malfoy to pick a fancy restaurant. Although, picking a Michelin-starred restaurant is another story entirely. Thankfully, this one only has one star, so she doesn’t feel like a complete cad. She just has to keep reminding herself that this meal is one of many expenses for which she’ll be charging her client.
With some trepidation, she approaches the mirror. Her hands go to her head almost automatically. Usually, she has a full head of hair, something that has long been a symbol of who she was. Bushy brown hair, that must be Hermione Granger. Uncontrollable, much like she’s always aimed to be. Not necessarily to the point of being a menace to society, but such that society couldn’t use her as a puppet. Merlin knows they’d tried on multiple accounts. To prepare for this job, though, she’d done the unthinkable and cast a Glamour charm, something she’s not at all fond of. Something about these charms has always rubbed her the wrong way. They just make her feel wrong somehow. So now she barely recognises herself when she looks in the mirror. Short, short hair. She’d heard someone refer to it as a “pixie cut,” like it was something adorable and cute. (The woman obviously had no experience with pixies.) Her hair’s still rather similar in colour to her own, but that’s where the majority of the similarities end. Her eyes are now blue, her face more angular and thin, and her skin quite pale. Luckily, her body had retained much of its shape, so she doesn’t have to worry about fitting her clothes to a different height or width. But she still feels like an absolute stranger in her own skin.
With a final swipe of her hand to smooth the non-existent wrinkles from her skirt, she walks back towards the table. The second she’d walked into the restaurant ten minutes prior, she could feel a difference in the very atmosphere to anything else she’s ever experienced. Even the air feels elegant, and she’s almost surprised they’re not charging her for their more pristine oxygen.
“Nice of you to finally join me,” Draco greets her, his gaze wary.
She doesn’t even try to hold back the blush. It seems to ingratiate her to him a little, so perhaps that’s a good thing. “This is a beautiful restaurant. I’ve never been to one with Michelin stars before.”
“Then why’d you agree to come here?” he asks. She can sense the unbidden question: can you afford this?
“I’ve always been curious about what the other side is like,” she answers with a small smile, unsure how exactly to say I have a very rich benefactor who’ll more than cover this meal for us, so don’t worry about it.
He looks unconvinced but shrugs it off, instead pulling out the menu. “Wine?”
She nods. “Do they pair the wines with the meals?”
“Probably.”
With that, they each glance down at the menu, and Hermione tries to ease the tension between her shoulders. So much of her so-called mission depends on this dinner; she needs to be as charming and sweet as possible for this blasted thing to go off without a hitch.
“See anything you like?” she asks, legitimately curious. It seems he’d know better than she what’s good to order here. Although, every bloody item on that menu is probably more delicious than everything she’s eaten in her thirty years combined.
“I always get a bit distracted by the pudding menu.” That makes her crack an involuntary smile. Always the chocolate with him.
Eventually, they each wade through the sparse menu choices and order their food, some of it quite mysterious to Hermione. She sees a silver lining in the fact that it is a four-course meal. She has that much more time to charm this man.
“So, I didn’t get your name earlier,” she says pointedly. She’s mentally kicking herself and hoping she hasn’t slipped and called him by his name before this moment.
He smirks. “You didn’t ask.”
“Well, I am now,” she teases. It’s a relief to see that he’s already flirting. The more at ease he is, the better.
“It’s Draco.” He glares almost immediately after he says it.
She raises her eyebrow. “And why are you glaring, exactly?”
“Almost everyone laughs when they first hear it.”
“Oh.” Hermione nods slowly, searching for the right words. It’s difficult with him looking at her like that. “I mean, it’s certainly unique, but it’s not the worst I’ve heard.” Draco simply raises his eyebrow, unimpressed. She straightens in her chair, pulling her posture as upright as she can. “Do you know why they chose it?”
“Hmm?”
“Your parents, why did they name you Draco?”
“You mean as opposed to something mundane like Jean?”
She can’t help but roll her eyes. “Yes, God forbid you have a boring name like mine.” Hermione pinches her thigh in an effort to curb her tongue. She’d promised them she’d be as civil as possible to him, but she just can’t help it sometimes. It’s like her mouth has a natural reaction to him. Word vomit, she’ll claim. She can’t control her gut reactions to this man, which was more often than not in the form of snide comments, any more than she can control her most primal urges.
“I don’t really know. Probably something to do with the constellation.”
She nods, her head almost automatically turning to the window next to them to look at the night sky. Or rather, what part of it hadn’t yet been blocked out by the San Francisco skyline. That’s the problem she’s always had with big cities. At her parents’ home in Surrey, she’d taken the sky for granted. But there isn’t a place in London where she can climb out on the roof to see the stars. The lights had polluted the sky and continued to obscure the stars, no matter the time of night or year. Also, she’s always been a bit skittish of city roofs, because she’s never been sure whether or not it’s actually legal. And then there’s that whole thing with falling.
“And yours?” Hermione turns her head back to Draco in confusion. He chuckles at what she can only assume is the look on her face. “Any particular reason behind your name?”
“Family tradition. There’ve always been Jeans in my family, and I’m the only child, so I guess there wasn’t really a choice.”
“Do you like it?”
She frowns momentarily. “It’s just a name. I don’t put much stock in them. Some people think your name affects the person you are, but I don’t think I’d be any different had my parents named me Penelope or Claire.”
“So you don’t like it.”
Hermione meets his eyes. And there he goes, putting words in her mouth. “I’m ambivalent about it. Do you like yours?”
“I do.”
“Then why were you so defensive about it?”
“It annoys me when people laugh at my name.”
“Well, a lot of things annoy me, I have to say, but I don’t find it necessary to make it known every time.”
His head tilts ever so slightly. “What annoys you?”
You, she wants to say. Instead, she says with a grin, “Washing dishes.”
Draco smirks. “Is that all? And here I thought you were going to air a string of annoyances a mile long.”
“I could, but I didn’t want to bore you with more of my mundane life.”
When she looks up this time, his smile is one borne more out of contentment, fleeting though it may be, than wry amusement as it has been most of the night. Hermione mentally gives herself one point. She’ll get through to him if it’s the last thing she does.
* * *
She is so happy she wore a dress. It means she has avoided the embarrassment of having to unbutton her trousers after dinner to make room for her protruding belly. Instead she can walk around with no such qualms. Her wardrobe problem comes in the form of heels. And walking. It’s a magical feat, especially for walking disasters like her.
“So, what are you doing in San Francisco?” Draco asks. They’re walking towards the Bay Bridge, a pretty sight if you like seeing city lights in the dark, he’d said.
“How do you know I’m not from here?” she teases.
“First, your accent doesn’t exactly say, ‘I’m from the Bay!’”
“I wouldn’t say your accent is so different to mine, good sir.”
He laughs. “Touché.” She blames the wine for the small pleasure she gets from that sound. “Second, when I mentioned going towards Bay Bridge, you started walking west.”
She blushes. “I did say I’ve never been here before. You were forewarned.”
“Not going to answer my question, then?”
She blinks up at him in confusion before she remembers the question. “Oh! Right, sorry.” She can almost feel him smile at the recurrent apology. It’s always been like she vomits apologies; they just come, unbidden sometimes. Like it’s her default for everything. “I’m on holiday, actually.”
“Nothing in particular brought you here?”
“Just wanted to escape London for a bit. Get some of that sunshine I keep hearing about.”
“And you came alone?”
She nods with a quick shrug.
“That’s pretty impressive, I must say. Most wo-people aren’t brave enough to travel without companions.”
Hermione raises her eyebrows, in lieu of the ability to lift just one. It takes almost all of her self-control not to call him out on what he’d almost said just then. “Brave?” She sees him shrug, noncommittal. All she can think is how much different his idea of bravery was ten years and another life ago. “I don’t know that I’d call it brave. I hopped on a plane and secured a hotel room. And then proceeded to spill my latte on a hapless stranger,” she finishes with a small smile.
Draco chuckles, and that pit in her stomach reappears at the sound. She pinches herself, trying to move past it.
“What do you do when you’re not on holiday?” he asks.
“I’m a headhunter for a firm in London.”
“Are you any good?” he asks with a smirk, which she can’t help but return.
“Only the best.” She grins. “I’ve always had a penchant for research, but it’s nice to be able to channel that into something that will actually pay my bills. Being able to make my own hours is a perk, though.”
“I can only imagine.”
“So what’s your story? What do you do here?”
“I’m a designer for a firm in the Financial District.” He points over his shoulder in the general direction of the neighbourhood. “Marketing, brand identity, interface design, that sort of thing.”
She smiles, although she sadly has no idea what interface design is. The topic has been mentally filed away as a future research topic. “Do you love it?”
“What?” His head snaps to her, the surprise evident on his face.
“Is it really such a strange question? Do you enjoy what you do?”
“No,” he hesitates, “I suppose it isn’t. Just not something you expect to hear every day.” He pauses again, licking his lips, and she tries not to get distracted by the familiarity of his habits.
She joins him when he sits on a bench facing the water and the Bay Bridge, one of the main streets at their backs, running along all the piers. She feels surrounded by the essence of San Francisco. The sight of the city’s lights reflecting off the water is breath-taking. It may be next to impossible to see any part of the night sky within this city’s limits, but Hermione has always thought that cities are at their most beautiful at night, when the full force of the people within them shines in the lights. Perhaps it’s fair, trading one sky of lights for a skyline of them. Both make her appreciate the insignificance of her problems.
“No, I wouldn’t say I love it.” Draco’s voice sounds, and Hermione would be lying if she claimed she hadn’t jumped. “But something’s got to pay the bills, right?”
He almost sounds defeated, and if she’s really honest with herself, it digs deep. “I guess it depends on whether you need to love your job. Unless it’s a means to a job that does make you happy.”
He shrugs. “With this economy, I’m just glad I have a means to pay my bills at all. I’ve always just figured happiness will follow eventually.”
She nods. The economy really is horrendous and has been for a while, so far as she can tell. “Must be thankful you’re not flipping burgers.”
“Too right.”
Hermione sits further back against the bench. She’s still rather amazed that he’d managed to secure a job as a designer at all. Through the war, everyone had had their therapy. For some it’d been sex, for others cooking, for her reading. Draco’s therapy had been a pen and a locked door.
“Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?” she asks, puzzled. As far as she can tell, she hasn’t done anything besides talk to him and maybe stare at the sky for the past ten minutes.
“You keep reaching towards your neck and … grabbing air.” He looks almost concerned for his safety. And well, that is unfortunately an expression she’s familiar with.
She blushes, still cursing how easily she does that after all these years. “I keep forgetting I don’t have long hair anymore. It’s habit,” she apologises.
He nods slowly. “How long ago did you cut your hair?”
She hesitates, but then offers, “A day or two.” She’d always been told-and by him, no less-that the best lies are always closest to the truth. It’s something she lives by when she has to use a cover like this.
He tilts his head slightly, as if sizing her up. Perhaps he’s trying to imagine her with longer hair. “It looks nice.”
She looks down at her lap as she feels the blush continue to creep into her cheeks. “Thank you. I’m still getting used to it.”
“Does your head feel lighter?” Her head snaps up, her expression incredulous, and he continues quickly, “I couldn’t tell you how many girls I’ve seen around that go on about how much lighter they feel after a massive hair cut. I always thought they were absolute loons.”
“Oh!” Hermione tries and fails to suppress her giggles. “I hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah, I suppose it does.”
Draco smirks. It looks like he still enjoys being proven right, she thinks. “So, how long are you in town, Jean?”
It takes her a second to realize that he’s speaking to her. “Oh, about a week. I’ve got to be back after the weekend.”
“Would you like a bit of a tour of the city sometime?” He seems to hesitate, as if he’s chewing over his words. “I figure I owe you something at least, after letting you pay for that dinner,” he says with a small smile. Almost bashful. It looks unnatural.
Hermione grins widely. “I’d love that.” She loves when things go according to plan.
* * *
They begin with brunch at a delicious little breakfast place on the west side of the city called Squat and Gobble, where the conversation is a little stilted and awkward until she challenges him to a game of people-watching. He seems to enjoy the creative, and sometimes cruel, nature of the game. The boy-man, she has to keep reminding herself-relaxes then, and Hermione feels her own posture slacken just a little in response. It’s still jarring, looking into that face after all these years. Age and the States have been good to him, she thinks wryly. A small part of her wishes it hadn’t. But then, she’s never really understood how men seem to grow more attractive with age.
As he regales her with the stories behind each of that skinny blonde’s tattoos, she tries to smile in all the right places. He mentions lovers and beloved movies, but the girl’s favourite is the first, arguably the ugliest, which he claims was for her first love. Hermione wonders how he justifies his own tattoo, not to mention the scars that line his body with no war in his memory.
Narcissa had deigned to give her some information last night that the blonde had felt was superfluous; they had great reason to believe, apparently, that Draco had no memory of his magical life. When pressed, Mrs Malfoy had given nothing else, stubbornly insisting that their reasons for believing it shouldn’t matter to her.
Just like how you hadn’t thought this little fact was important to me? Hermione had wanted to ask.
She asks him, “Do you have any tattoos?” It’s partially because she’s still so angry with his mother, but the other side of it is that she’s curious to know his explanation.
He stills, but eventually nods. “Just something from when I was a kid.”
“You don’t like it anymore?” she pushes. “What is it?”
“Some combination of a skull and a snake. Luckily it’s on my forearm, so it hasn’t been a problem at work or anything, but I’m not crazy about it. To be honest, I don’t even know why I got it.”
She offers a small smile. “Has it been that long?”
“No.” He frowns. “Well, maybe. It’s rather faded, so I imagine I got it a long time ago. To be honest, I don’t remember much before a decade or so ago.”
Hermione’s eyes widen and her jaw drops a little. She honestly never expected him to admit to such a thing-the vulnerability of it all. “Oh,” she pauses, chewing the inside of her lip. “I can’t even imagine…”
Draco purses his lips, obviously uncomfortable. Luckily for her, the waitress appears shortly after, carrying their meals. Hermione smiles up at her, possibly more grateful to her than anyone in her recent memory, before digging in to her crepe. She has to stop herself from staring longingly at Draco’s, which is stuffed with Nutella and various other things.
After brunch, Hermione and Draco work their way through many of the typical tourist traps, most of which she is only vaguely interested in. At Haight and Ashbury, Draco explains what little he knows of the political background to the streets, and he looks surprised each time she passes a storefront without batting an eyelash, but she’s never been a big fan of shopping. Especially when her nerves are this frayed. Retail therapy isn’t her fix of choice, and never has been.
However, on their walk from Chinatown-where they’d grabbed take-out for a late lunch-towards the piers, she stops dead in her tracks at the sight of City Lights bookstore. Her eyes widen and she’d be damned if her jaw didn’t completely slacken. It takes almost too much of her self-control to shut her eyes to the storefront and turn back towards the piers again.
Draco is looking at her with a strange expression on his face. Perhaps it’s concern that looks so strange on him. He must think her absolutely mad, but at least she hadn’t drooled, she thinks.
“Sorry,” she mumbles. “I just really like bookshops.”
He doesn’t look convinced. “We could go in, you know.”
Immediately, Hermione shakes her head, perhaps more violently than is considered normal. “No, no, it’s fine. I’ll just go in sometime this week.”
“Really, if you want to, you should go in there and have a look.”
“No, you don’t understand. If I go in there, I probably won’t leave until they force me out at closing time.” She chuckles when he just raises an eyebrow. “There’s no reason to waste your time when I can just come back and spend all day there tomorrow.”
“I see.”
Well, at least he looks amused now, not concerned. The lesser of two evils, she supposes.
* * *
Hermione smiles as a small group of teenagers bolts past them. Her eyes immediately take in how carefree they seem with the California sun beating on their backs. The sight is rather bittersweet for her, as it’s a reminder of everything their youth should have been and wasn’t. From what she can guess, the biggest issue in those kids’ lives is figuring out what they’ll have for dinner this evening. What she would give to have had such trifling problems at seventeen.
The man standing next to her is reminder enough of the things she and her friends and classmates suffered. Not just once, but twice, it seems he’s been forced to give up the joys and security of being a young man. You’re forced to grow up a whole hell of a lot faster when your mistakes don’t cost your parents trivial bits of money but rather their very lives. That had certainly been a point of commonality between the two of them.
But that was years ago.
Hermione shakes those incredibly unwelcome thoughts from her head as they continue towards the more touristy piers. It’s been a long day of walking around the city, sometimes aided by one of its several public transportation systems, and the sight of the San Francisco Bay is spectacular. They are now walking down the Embarcadero, the road that each of the city’s piers calls home. There are at least forty of them, if the numbering of the piers means anything. The sidewalks are lined with street vendors selling everything from on-the-spot caricatures to miniatures of Alcatraz, the infamous prison on an island in the Bay. She tries not to let the sight of the old prison (now museum)-or the various knick-knacks based on it-make her think of the wizarding equivalent.
As they walk down one of the piers-Draco had mentioned something about sea lions and of course she’d insisted on seeing them-they walk in silence, each mostly concentrated on finishing off the melting ice cream cones in their hands. While Hermione had insisted on seeing the sea lions, Draco had insisted on a requisite visit to Ghirardelli’s for some ice cream. She wasn’t surprised, but neither was she particularly reticent. Merlin knows she’s always been a fan of ice cream, and one doesn’t just pass up the opportunity to get sweets from Ghirardelli Square. Besides, she’s glad for an excuse not to talk constantly to Draco, and she’s almost sure he feels the same way. Part of it is that it’s a comfortable silence.
The silence also gives her a chance to really take in her surroundings; so far on this trip, she hasn’t had much time to do so outside of planning every word that escapes her mouth. As she continues nibbling on the cone, Hermione leans on the side railing of the pier, her eyes locked on the water. The promised sea lions look magnificent. Several are napping on rafts placed randomly near each pier and some are taking their time swimming about the channel between the piers. The most entertaining bit, though, is when a pair fight over a nap spot on a raft.
She feels so at ease, so much more than she has in years, with the wind just barely tangling through her curls and the sun kissing her bare shoulders. She’s always been so concerned with working herself to the bone that she rarely notices things happening in the physical world around her. It only makes this experience sweeter.
Having finished her own cone, she finally turns to face her companion. He’s standing next to her, elbows propped on the railing much like hers. She’s momentarily distracted as she watches him methodically suck on each of his fingers, presumably to clean the sticky ice cream off of them. Hermione immediately closes her eyes, then moves her head to reopen them to the water and the sea lions. Funny how they don’t seem half as enchanting now as they had mere seconds before.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Hermione swallows, hopefully inaudibly, at the sudden sound of his baritone. She offers a quick smile and turns her gaze towards him finally. A small smirk is on his face, but she’s long since wondered if it had become permanent over the years. “I was just thinking how I need to do this more often.”
“This?”
She gestures towards the water. “I don’t know-enjoying life, I guess. I don’t usually take vacations or stop to see what’s going on around me, to be honest.”
“Haven’t you heard that idiom? All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl.”
“I’ve never been much good at balancing a social life with everything else. The only thing my friends complain more about than that I never make time for them is that I never take a holiday.”
“And no boyfriend, then?”
“Not at the moment, no,” she says softly, very much thrown off by this tangent. “I’ve been focussing more on my job lately than my love life.”
“From the sounds of it, there’s never been a time that you haven’t.”
Hermione smirks through the annoyance that rises from the pit of her stomach. “I’d much rather be career-driven than driven by that.”
She gestures her head towards a couple several metres from where she and Draco are standing. The man is caging his girlfriend-or at least, Hermione hopes she’s his girlfriend-into the railing. She’s giggling up a storm, and Hermione can hear every personal rule she has against public displays of affection being shattered. She’s more than a little pleased when Draco’s mouth turns down in obvious distaste.
“Not a huge fan of public affection either, are you?” she asks.
He chuckles, almost sardonically. “No, can’t say that I am.”
Hermione sneaks another look at the couple in question. “I’ve never much understood why people in love can’t just reel it in whilst in public. Honestly, it isn’t like the love is going to disappear if you don’t constantly prove it to the world.”
“I don’t really believe in it at all, to be honest.”
“Believe in what?”
“Love. I can’t say that I’ve ever really been in love with anyone-that I can remember.”
Hermione’s eyes close almost immediately in reaction, and it pains her more than she’d ever admit that he doesn’t-can’t-recognise the effect of his words. “I’m sure there’s a girl out there somewhere who might be surprised to hear you say that.”
He shrugs. “What about you?”
“Almost, once,” she claims. “But it ended weirdly and never went anywhere.”
“Weirdly?”
“He basically took off one day, left a note, the end.”
“What a dick.”
Hermione blinks; she keeps forgetting he’s spent so long in the States-it’s enough to make anyone pick up Americanisms like that.
“Mmm,” she hums. “But that was a long time ago. Ten years, almost, I think.”
“You seem like the type of girl who’d have picked a huge fight over that.”
She laughs. “Maybe.”
“And you haven’t fallen in love since?”
She shrugs. “Something’s always been off, I guess.”
He nods, like he understands. “Something always is, isn’t it? It never seems worth it anyway.”
Her brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
Draco looks down at the railing, his long fingers following the old grooves in the dark wood. “You put all that work into a relationship and more often than not, you’ll start off with something like that,” he cocks his head quickly towards the couple in question, “but then something’s not right with one or the other and somebody always ends up on the shitty end of things. Why even bother, honestly? Seems like an utter waste of time and energy.”
Hermione watches him with wide eyes as he continues to massage the panel beneath his fingers. It’s almost distracting, how reverently he’s worshipping the wood that’s holding them safe and dry. But even that isn’t enough to activate the filter that usually censors her thoughts.
“What are you scared of? Nobody’s ever died of a broken heart.” It sounds more bitter than she wanted it to-which was not at all.
“That you know of,” he quips, but his smile is still a bit too sad.
Part Two
Part Three
Rating: T
Word Count: 20,000(ish)
Disclaimer: In its use of intellectual property and characters belonging to JK Rowling and 20th Century Fox, this work is intended to be transformative commentary on the original. No profit is being made from this work.
Summary: In which Hermione has to find Malfoy and return him to his rightful place in Wiltshire.
Warnings: Language (sorry, guys - I just can’t control Malfoy’s mouth!), memory!fic
Author's Note: Written for the second round of dramione-remix, with the prompt being Dimitri and Anastasia from Anastasia.
Betas: eilonwy1, dormiensa, and callarose
PART ONE
“Remind me again why I let you run away to San Francisco?” Ginny Potter looks anything but pleased. Well, at least the parts of her that Hermione can see through the Floo do. Hermione is sitting in front of the fireplace in her hotel room.
“Look, you’re lucky I even found a room with a fireplace.” Hermione doesn’t know how many times she’s told her best friend that she hasn’t run away. “I told you, it’s just a job. Short-term. Plus, haven’t you always said I need to get out of London?”
Ginny scowls. “I didn’t expect there to be such extenuating circumstances, Hermione. I would have been ecstatic for you if you were taking a proper holiday and not working on Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy’s account. I can’t believe you’re actually working for them, of all people!”
Hermione takes a deep breath. “I know; it’s certainly not how I expected this year to pan out.” That’s the understatement of the year. When she was originally summoned to Malfoy Manor, she’d nearly had a heart attack. She hadn’t returned to that house since her first experience there, one she’d much rather forget and she isn’t afraid to admit that, but her curiosity had won out in the end.
Her friend’s eyes widen. “I think it’s far more than that. You don’t have to do this, you know. Why do you care if that man never sees his son again?”
“I don’t.” She sniffs and turns her nose up. “It’s just a job. Nothing different to any other case I’ve taken on this year.”
Ginny’s smile is too knowing for Hermione’s tastes. “That’s a bald-faced lie, and you know it.”
Hermione had been hoping they’d avoid this tangent. Ginny’s laugh makes her bristle, and she tries hard not to glare.
“I know it,” Ginny continues. “Even Harry and Ron know it. You’re not fooling anyone. I haven’t seen you pour yourself into a case like this in years.”
Hermione sighs. “This one’s time-sensitive, Gi-”
“Oh, don’t give me that, Hermione. I know old man Malfoy is on his deathbed, or claims to be. Whatever. I don’t care. And neither should you.”
“That’s the thing with being a personal investigator. I’m paid to care about what my clients need from me and when. This one just so happens to be desperate for an answer as soon as humanly possible.”
“Is that how you rationalise doing this? You haven’t mentioned any of their names once, always referring to them as ‘the client’. What will you refer to him as?” Ginny’s smile transforms into something ugly and … just ugly. “The deliverable?”
Hermione rolls her eyes. “Is he honestly why you think I’m here?”
“If the shoe fits…”
“What do I have to do to convince you it’s just a job, Ginny?” Hermione asks, pinching the bridge of nose. She’s tired of this argument. It’s one she’s had countless times with Ginny alone, not to mention every other being in her social circle that thinks her business is their own.
“I think saying his name would be a start. I almost think you’re afraid to say it.”
“Whatever. I’m here, in San bloody Francisco, to escort Draco Malfoy to England, after which I will wash my hands of the entire Malfoy family. Are you happy? Did I say their names loudly enough for you?” When she looks up, determined to see this argument to its sorry end, she’s surprised to see a sad smile on Ginny’s face. She sighs again. “What is it?”
“I was hoping that I might have been able to convince you to drop the entire thing and come home.”
“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m here to stay.” Hermione glances at her watch. She’s got a half hour until the show starts, so to speak. Before she starts to implement her plan to somehow get Draco Malfoy back across the pond.
“So, I’m curious. What do you get out of this?”
“Just money. Perhaps a decent reference. At best, they’ll spread the word about my services and there will be purebloods galore lining up outside my door.”
Ginny doesn’t so much as crack a smile at her joke. “Are you sure that’s all? Hermione, I know it’s been something like ten years, but … it changed you. I know you don’t like that it did, but that doesn’t change anything. I’m-bloody hell, Hermione, I’m worried about you.”
Hermione meets her friend’s eyes again. “I know.” She sighs, a truth that she’s long since buried bubbling up and out of her throat. “I need the closure.”
Ginny’s lips thin, but she nods.
* * *
She pauses at the bar, taking a deep breath to steady her nerves and prepare herself. In mere seconds, the entire show will start and there’ll be no going back. Gripping her iced coffee tightly, slightly afraid that her sweaty palms will make it slip prematurely, she turns and slowly meanders through the small coffee shop. She sips from the cup, her mouth turning down at the temperature. Hermione’s always been the type to only drink cold drinks when it’s unbearably hot. But, as much as a small part of her would feel vindicated, she can’t justify dropping scalding coffee into anyone’s lap.
As distracted as she may seem to an outsider about god-knows-what-possibly including the beverage in her hand-she is anything but. Hermione honestly feels like one of those fighter planes from those ridiculous American war movies. She imagines herself acquiring her target, and then locking in on it, only to drop the missile perfectly and successfully accomplish the mission. Victory dance optional.
And well, it’s almost the same. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches sight of that ever-recognisable towhead. Target acquired.
Her legs seem to move with more purpose at that point, as she sees the perfect avenue of execution. Target locked in.
She pulls out her Muggle mobile; it has a lot of shiny features she’s barely had a chance to glance at, much less assimilate, before she arrived that morning. A few swipes of her thumb, and she is doing … something interesting, certainly. She almost forgets that she doesn’t care whether what she’s doing on the mobile is interesting or as boring as Ernie Macmillan’s first-date speech. Crashing into Draco Malfoy’s table with the full force of her purposeful walk and dropping her latte-in his lap, no less-soon fixes that. Mission accomplished.
“Shit!”
“Oh my god!” she exclaims as he jumps out of his chair and tries to wipe off some of the scalding coffee with the newspaper in his hand. She quickly grabs her mobile off the floor, having dropped it when she’d crashed into the table, and away from a growing puddle of coffee. “I am so sorry! Please, let me help.”
When Hermione returns from the bar with a fistful of napkins, he’s still standing-silent and on the verge of fury, she can tell-looking down at himself with a look of sad acceptance. She approaches awkwardly, not sure whether she should physically help him or just hand him the napkins. He snatches them out of her hand and solves that mystery in one fell swoop. She stills when he finally looks at her. This is really the moment she’s been waiting for, or at least the first of many. His eyes pass over her face, and she doesn’t relax until she’s sure he hasn’t recognised her. He meets her eyes with a relatively dark glower, and she has to suppress a shudder. It’s been a long time since she’s seen that grey. She presses her lips tightly together, trying to will heart to return to a normal beat so that she can move on.
Well, at least the Glamour is working.
“I feel so bad,” she says softly. He just raises his eyebrow, and she can feel the associated annoyance rise in the pit of her stomach.
“It’s not a big deal.” His voice is husky, as if he hasn’t spoken for several hours. Not surprising, from the information she’s gathered about him in the short time since she was recruited. She’s almost certain she could recite every fact from the file they had given her, and that’s not counting her own investigating.
He keeps to himself, goes back and forth from work to a select few local establishments, never really associating with anyone in particular. There’s this coffee shop in North Shore, a breakfast joint out by San Francisco State, and one of the more touristy piers near the Embarcadero, one of the main streets of the city. She thinks that Ghirardelli Square is probably a big hit for him, but that’s more due to his infamous sweet tooth than anything else.
“No, don’t say that. Of course it is. I’m sure I ruined your trousers,” she whinges, placing her hand on her forehead for what she hopes isn’t too much of a dramatic effect. “Please, let me make it up to you. Can I buy you lunch, or maybe dinner?”
He looks at her blankly. “You want to pay for my dinner?” His up-intonation is so subtle, she almost misses that he had in fact asked a question. Another habit that seems to automatically annoy her.
“Really, it’s the least I could do. Unless of course you’ve already got plans this evening.” She can see hints of the internal battle in his face, and she almost thinks he’ll say no. It would be just typical for him to do that, wouldn’t it?
“Fine, yeah.”
Hermione blinks in surprise. “Oh! Great!”
He looks wary. Distrustful. In other words, normal. “What’s your name?”
The abrupt question shocks her, and she stumbles over her thoughts. “Jeannie. Or, erm … Jean. Or J. Whatever, really whatever.” She wants to stab herself with a pointy object for getting so flustered. It’s embarrassing.
“Really, whatever? So that means you answer to ‘bull in a china shop’ as well?”
Her eyes snap up to his in shock, and she’s even more surprised to see mirth hiding in that grey abyss. “Yeah, I suppose I deserve that.”
* * *
Hermione takes a deep breath as she enters the ladies’ room at the restaurant Draco had chosen. It’s certainly nicer than she’d expected, but on second thought, she can’t see why she didn’t expect Draco Malfoy to pick a fancy restaurant. Although, picking a Michelin-starred restaurant is another story entirely. Thankfully, this one only has one star, so she doesn’t feel like a complete cad. She just has to keep reminding herself that this meal is one of many expenses for which she’ll be charging her client.
With some trepidation, she approaches the mirror. Her hands go to her head almost automatically. Usually, she has a full head of hair, something that has long been a symbol of who she was. Bushy brown hair, that must be Hermione Granger. Uncontrollable, much like she’s always aimed to be. Not necessarily to the point of being a menace to society, but such that society couldn’t use her as a puppet. Merlin knows they’d tried on multiple accounts. To prepare for this job, though, she’d done the unthinkable and cast a Glamour charm, something she’s not at all fond of. Something about these charms has always rubbed her the wrong way. They just make her feel wrong somehow. So now she barely recognises herself when she looks in the mirror. Short, short hair. She’d heard someone refer to it as a “pixie cut,” like it was something adorable and cute. (The woman obviously had no experience with pixies.) Her hair’s still rather similar in colour to her own, but that’s where the majority of the similarities end. Her eyes are now blue, her face more angular and thin, and her skin quite pale. Luckily, her body had retained much of its shape, so she doesn’t have to worry about fitting her clothes to a different height or width. But she still feels like an absolute stranger in her own skin.
With a final swipe of her hand to smooth the non-existent wrinkles from her skirt, she walks back towards the table. The second she’d walked into the restaurant ten minutes prior, she could feel a difference in the very atmosphere to anything else she’s ever experienced. Even the air feels elegant, and she’s almost surprised they’re not charging her for their more pristine oxygen.
“Nice of you to finally join me,” Draco greets her, his gaze wary.
She doesn’t even try to hold back the blush. It seems to ingratiate her to him a little, so perhaps that’s a good thing. “This is a beautiful restaurant. I’ve never been to one with Michelin stars before.”
“Then why’d you agree to come here?” he asks. She can sense the unbidden question: can you afford this?
“I’ve always been curious about what the other side is like,” she answers with a small smile, unsure how exactly to say I have a very rich benefactor who’ll more than cover this meal for us, so don’t worry about it.
He looks unconvinced but shrugs it off, instead pulling out the menu. “Wine?”
She nods. “Do they pair the wines with the meals?”
“Probably.”
With that, they each glance down at the menu, and Hermione tries to ease the tension between her shoulders. So much of her so-called mission depends on this dinner; she needs to be as charming and sweet as possible for this blasted thing to go off without a hitch.
“See anything you like?” she asks, legitimately curious. It seems he’d know better than she what’s good to order here. Although, every bloody item on that menu is probably more delicious than everything she’s eaten in her thirty years combined.
“I always get a bit distracted by the pudding menu.” That makes her crack an involuntary smile. Always the chocolate with him.
Eventually, they each wade through the sparse menu choices and order their food, some of it quite mysterious to Hermione. She sees a silver lining in the fact that it is a four-course meal. She has that much more time to charm this man.
“So, I didn’t get your name earlier,” she says pointedly. She’s mentally kicking herself and hoping she hasn’t slipped and called him by his name before this moment.
He smirks. “You didn’t ask.”
“Well, I am now,” she teases. It’s a relief to see that he’s already flirting. The more at ease he is, the better.
“It’s Draco.” He glares almost immediately after he says it.
She raises her eyebrow. “And why are you glaring, exactly?”
“Almost everyone laughs when they first hear it.”
“Oh.” Hermione nods slowly, searching for the right words. It’s difficult with him looking at her like that. “I mean, it’s certainly unique, but it’s not the worst I’ve heard.” Draco simply raises his eyebrow, unimpressed. She straightens in her chair, pulling her posture as upright as she can. “Do you know why they chose it?”
“Hmm?”
“Your parents, why did they name you Draco?”
“You mean as opposed to something mundane like Jean?”
She can’t help but roll her eyes. “Yes, God forbid you have a boring name like mine.” Hermione pinches her thigh in an effort to curb her tongue. She’d promised them she’d be as civil as possible to him, but she just can’t help it sometimes. It’s like her mouth has a natural reaction to him. Word vomit, she’ll claim. She can’t control her gut reactions to this man, which was more often than not in the form of snide comments, any more than she can control her most primal urges.
“I don’t really know. Probably something to do with the constellation.”
She nods, her head almost automatically turning to the window next to them to look at the night sky. Or rather, what part of it hadn’t yet been blocked out by the San Francisco skyline. That’s the problem she’s always had with big cities. At her parents’ home in Surrey, she’d taken the sky for granted. But there isn’t a place in London where she can climb out on the roof to see the stars. The lights had polluted the sky and continued to obscure the stars, no matter the time of night or year. Also, she’s always been a bit skittish of city roofs, because she’s never been sure whether or not it’s actually legal. And then there’s that whole thing with falling.
“And yours?” Hermione turns her head back to Draco in confusion. He chuckles at what she can only assume is the look on her face. “Any particular reason behind your name?”
“Family tradition. There’ve always been Jeans in my family, and I’m the only child, so I guess there wasn’t really a choice.”
“Do you like it?”
She frowns momentarily. “It’s just a name. I don’t put much stock in them. Some people think your name affects the person you are, but I don’t think I’d be any different had my parents named me Penelope or Claire.”
“So you don’t like it.”
Hermione meets his eyes. And there he goes, putting words in her mouth. “I’m ambivalent about it. Do you like yours?”
“I do.”
“Then why were you so defensive about it?”
“It annoys me when people laugh at my name.”
“Well, a lot of things annoy me, I have to say, but I don’t find it necessary to make it known every time.”
His head tilts ever so slightly. “What annoys you?”
You, she wants to say. Instead, she says with a grin, “Washing dishes.”
Draco smirks. “Is that all? And here I thought you were going to air a string of annoyances a mile long.”
“I could, but I didn’t want to bore you with more of my mundane life.”
When she looks up this time, his smile is one borne more out of contentment, fleeting though it may be, than wry amusement as it has been most of the night. Hermione mentally gives herself one point. She’ll get through to him if it’s the last thing she does.
* * *
She is so happy she wore a dress. It means she has avoided the embarrassment of having to unbutton her trousers after dinner to make room for her protruding belly. Instead she can walk around with no such qualms. Her wardrobe problem comes in the form of heels. And walking. It’s a magical feat, especially for walking disasters like her.
“So, what are you doing in San Francisco?” Draco asks. They’re walking towards the Bay Bridge, a pretty sight if you like seeing city lights in the dark, he’d said.
“How do you know I’m not from here?” she teases.
“First, your accent doesn’t exactly say, ‘I’m from the Bay!’”
“I wouldn’t say your accent is so different to mine, good sir.”
He laughs. “Touché.” She blames the wine for the small pleasure she gets from that sound. “Second, when I mentioned going towards Bay Bridge, you started walking west.”
She blushes. “I did say I’ve never been here before. You were forewarned.”
“Not going to answer my question, then?”
She blinks up at him in confusion before she remembers the question. “Oh! Right, sorry.” She can almost feel him smile at the recurrent apology. It’s always been like she vomits apologies; they just come, unbidden sometimes. Like it’s her default for everything. “I’m on holiday, actually.”
“Nothing in particular brought you here?”
“Just wanted to escape London for a bit. Get some of that sunshine I keep hearing about.”
“And you came alone?”
She nods with a quick shrug.
“That’s pretty impressive, I must say. Most wo-people aren’t brave enough to travel without companions.”
Hermione raises her eyebrows, in lieu of the ability to lift just one. It takes almost all of her self-control not to call him out on what he’d almost said just then. “Brave?” She sees him shrug, noncommittal. All she can think is how much different his idea of bravery was ten years and another life ago. “I don’t know that I’d call it brave. I hopped on a plane and secured a hotel room. And then proceeded to spill my latte on a hapless stranger,” she finishes with a small smile.
Draco chuckles, and that pit in her stomach reappears at the sound. She pinches herself, trying to move past it.
“What do you do when you’re not on holiday?” he asks.
“I’m a headhunter for a firm in London.”
“Are you any good?” he asks with a smirk, which she can’t help but return.
“Only the best.” She grins. “I’ve always had a penchant for research, but it’s nice to be able to channel that into something that will actually pay my bills. Being able to make my own hours is a perk, though.”
“I can only imagine.”
“So what’s your story? What do you do here?”
“I’m a designer for a firm in the Financial District.” He points over his shoulder in the general direction of the neighbourhood. “Marketing, brand identity, interface design, that sort of thing.”
She smiles, although she sadly has no idea what interface design is. The topic has been mentally filed away as a future research topic. “Do you love it?”
“What?” His head snaps to her, the surprise evident on his face.
“Is it really such a strange question? Do you enjoy what you do?”
“No,” he hesitates, “I suppose it isn’t. Just not something you expect to hear every day.” He pauses again, licking his lips, and she tries not to get distracted by the familiarity of his habits.
She joins him when he sits on a bench facing the water and the Bay Bridge, one of the main streets at their backs, running along all the piers. She feels surrounded by the essence of San Francisco. The sight of the city’s lights reflecting off the water is breath-taking. It may be next to impossible to see any part of the night sky within this city’s limits, but Hermione has always thought that cities are at their most beautiful at night, when the full force of the people within them shines in the lights. Perhaps it’s fair, trading one sky of lights for a skyline of them. Both make her appreciate the insignificance of her problems.
“No, I wouldn’t say I love it.” Draco’s voice sounds, and Hermione would be lying if she claimed she hadn’t jumped. “But something’s got to pay the bills, right?”
He almost sounds defeated, and if she’s really honest with herself, it digs deep. “I guess it depends on whether you need to love your job. Unless it’s a means to a job that does make you happy.”
He shrugs. “With this economy, I’m just glad I have a means to pay my bills at all. I’ve always just figured happiness will follow eventually.”
She nods. The economy really is horrendous and has been for a while, so far as she can tell. “Must be thankful you’re not flipping burgers.”
“Too right.”
Hermione sits further back against the bench. She’s still rather amazed that he’d managed to secure a job as a designer at all. Through the war, everyone had had their therapy. For some it’d been sex, for others cooking, for her reading. Draco’s therapy had been a pen and a locked door.
“Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?” she asks, puzzled. As far as she can tell, she hasn’t done anything besides talk to him and maybe stare at the sky for the past ten minutes.
“You keep reaching towards your neck and … grabbing air.” He looks almost concerned for his safety. And well, that is unfortunately an expression she’s familiar with.
She blushes, still cursing how easily she does that after all these years. “I keep forgetting I don’t have long hair anymore. It’s habit,” she apologises.
He nods slowly. “How long ago did you cut your hair?”
She hesitates, but then offers, “A day or two.” She’d always been told-and by him, no less-that the best lies are always closest to the truth. It’s something she lives by when she has to use a cover like this.
He tilts his head slightly, as if sizing her up. Perhaps he’s trying to imagine her with longer hair. “It looks nice.”
She looks down at her lap as she feels the blush continue to creep into her cheeks. “Thank you. I’m still getting used to it.”
“Does your head feel lighter?” Her head snaps up, her expression incredulous, and he continues quickly, “I couldn’t tell you how many girls I’ve seen around that go on about how much lighter they feel after a massive hair cut. I always thought they were absolute loons.”
“Oh!” Hermione tries and fails to suppress her giggles. “I hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah, I suppose it does.”
Draco smirks. It looks like he still enjoys being proven right, she thinks. “So, how long are you in town, Jean?”
It takes her a second to realize that he’s speaking to her. “Oh, about a week. I’ve got to be back after the weekend.”
“Would you like a bit of a tour of the city sometime?” He seems to hesitate, as if he’s chewing over his words. “I figure I owe you something at least, after letting you pay for that dinner,” he says with a small smile. Almost bashful. It looks unnatural.
Hermione grins widely. “I’d love that.” She loves when things go according to plan.
* * *
They begin with brunch at a delicious little breakfast place on the west side of the city called Squat and Gobble, where the conversation is a little stilted and awkward until she challenges him to a game of people-watching. He seems to enjoy the creative, and sometimes cruel, nature of the game. The boy-man, she has to keep reminding herself-relaxes then, and Hermione feels her own posture slacken just a little in response. It’s still jarring, looking into that face after all these years. Age and the States have been good to him, she thinks wryly. A small part of her wishes it hadn’t. But then, she’s never really understood how men seem to grow more attractive with age.
As he regales her with the stories behind each of that skinny blonde’s tattoos, she tries to smile in all the right places. He mentions lovers and beloved movies, but the girl’s favourite is the first, arguably the ugliest, which he claims was for her first love. Hermione wonders how he justifies his own tattoo, not to mention the scars that line his body with no war in his memory.
Narcissa had deigned to give her some information last night that the blonde had felt was superfluous; they had great reason to believe, apparently, that Draco had no memory of his magical life. When pressed, Mrs Malfoy had given nothing else, stubbornly insisting that their reasons for believing it shouldn’t matter to her.
Just like how you hadn’t thought this little fact was important to me? Hermione had wanted to ask.
She asks him, “Do you have any tattoos?” It’s partially because she’s still so angry with his mother, but the other side of it is that she’s curious to know his explanation.
He stills, but eventually nods. “Just something from when I was a kid.”
“You don’t like it anymore?” she pushes. “What is it?”
“Some combination of a skull and a snake. Luckily it’s on my forearm, so it hasn’t been a problem at work or anything, but I’m not crazy about it. To be honest, I don’t even know why I got it.”
She offers a small smile. “Has it been that long?”
“No.” He frowns. “Well, maybe. It’s rather faded, so I imagine I got it a long time ago. To be honest, I don’t remember much before a decade or so ago.”
Hermione’s eyes widen and her jaw drops a little. She honestly never expected him to admit to such a thing-the vulnerability of it all. “Oh,” she pauses, chewing the inside of her lip. “I can’t even imagine…”
Draco purses his lips, obviously uncomfortable. Luckily for her, the waitress appears shortly after, carrying their meals. Hermione smiles up at her, possibly more grateful to her than anyone in her recent memory, before digging in to her crepe. She has to stop herself from staring longingly at Draco’s, which is stuffed with Nutella and various other things.
After brunch, Hermione and Draco work their way through many of the typical tourist traps, most of which she is only vaguely interested in. At Haight and Ashbury, Draco explains what little he knows of the political background to the streets, and he looks surprised each time she passes a storefront without batting an eyelash, but she’s never been a big fan of shopping. Especially when her nerves are this frayed. Retail therapy isn’t her fix of choice, and never has been.
However, on their walk from Chinatown-where they’d grabbed take-out for a late lunch-towards the piers, she stops dead in her tracks at the sight of City Lights bookstore. Her eyes widen and she’d be damned if her jaw didn’t completely slacken. It takes almost too much of her self-control to shut her eyes to the storefront and turn back towards the piers again.
Draco is looking at her with a strange expression on his face. Perhaps it’s concern that looks so strange on him. He must think her absolutely mad, but at least she hadn’t drooled, she thinks.
“Sorry,” she mumbles. “I just really like bookshops.”
He doesn’t look convinced. “We could go in, you know.”
Immediately, Hermione shakes her head, perhaps more violently than is considered normal. “No, no, it’s fine. I’ll just go in sometime this week.”
“Really, if you want to, you should go in there and have a look.”
“No, you don’t understand. If I go in there, I probably won’t leave until they force me out at closing time.” She chuckles when he just raises an eyebrow. “There’s no reason to waste your time when I can just come back and spend all day there tomorrow.”
“I see.”
Well, at least he looks amused now, not concerned. The lesser of two evils, she supposes.
* * *
Hermione smiles as a small group of teenagers bolts past them. Her eyes immediately take in how carefree they seem with the California sun beating on their backs. The sight is rather bittersweet for her, as it’s a reminder of everything their youth should have been and wasn’t. From what she can guess, the biggest issue in those kids’ lives is figuring out what they’ll have for dinner this evening. What she would give to have had such trifling problems at seventeen.
The man standing next to her is reminder enough of the things she and her friends and classmates suffered. Not just once, but twice, it seems he’s been forced to give up the joys and security of being a young man. You’re forced to grow up a whole hell of a lot faster when your mistakes don’t cost your parents trivial bits of money but rather their very lives. That had certainly been a point of commonality between the two of them.
But that was years ago.
Hermione shakes those incredibly unwelcome thoughts from her head as they continue towards the more touristy piers. It’s been a long day of walking around the city, sometimes aided by one of its several public transportation systems, and the sight of the San Francisco Bay is spectacular. They are now walking down the Embarcadero, the road that each of the city’s piers calls home. There are at least forty of them, if the numbering of the piers means anything. The sidewalks are lined with street vendors selling everything from on-the-spot caricatures to miniatures of Alcatraz, the infamous prison on an island in the Bay. She tries not to let the sight of the old prison (now museum)-or the various knick-knacks based on it-make her think of the wizarding equivalent.
As they walk down one of the piers-Draco had mentioned something about sea lions and of course she’d insisted on seeing them-they walk in silence, each mostly concentrated on finishing off the melting ice cream cones in their hands. While Hermione had insisted on seeing the sea lions, Draco had insisted on a requisite visit to Ghirardelli’s for some ice cream. She wasn’t surprised, but neither was she particularly reticent. Merlin knows she’s always been a fan of ice cream, and one doesn’t just pass up the opportunity to get sweets from Ghirardelli Square. Besides, she’s glad for an excuse not to talk constantly to Draco, and she’s almost sure he feels the same way. Part of it is that it’s a comfortable silence.
The silence also gives her a chance to really take in her surroundings; so far on this trip, she hasn’t had much time to do so outside of planning every word that escapes her mouth. As she continues nibbling on the cone, Hermione leans on the side railing of the pier, her eyes locked on the water. The promised sea lions look magnificent. Several are napping on rafts placed randomly near each pier and some are taking their time swimming about the channel between the piers. The most entertaining bit, though, is when a pair fight over a nap spot on a raft.
She feels so at ease, so much more than she has in years, with the wind just barely tangling through her curls and the sun kissing her bare shoulders. She’s always been so concerned with working herself to the bone that she rarely notices things happening in the physical world around her. It only makes this experience sweeter.
Having finished her own cone, she finally turns to face her companion. He’s standing next to her, elbows propped on the railing much like hers. She’s momentarily distracted as she watches him methodically suck on each of his fingers, presumably to clean the sticky ice cream off of them. Hermione immediately closes her eyes, then moves her head to reopen them to the water and the sea lions. Funny how they don’t seem half as enchanting now as they had mere seconds before.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Hermione swallows, hopefully inaudibly, at the sudden sound of his baritone. She offers a quick smile and turns her gaze towards him finally. A small smirk is on his face, but she’s long since wondered if it had become permanent over the years. “I was just thinking how I need to do this more often.”
“This?”
She gestures towards the water. “I don’t know-enjoying life, I guess. I don’t usually take vacations or stop to see what’s going on around me, to be honest.”
“Haven’t you heard that idiom? All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl.”
“I’ve never been much good at balancing a social life with everything else. The only thing my friends complain more about than that I never make time for them is that I never take a holiday.”
“And no boyfriend, then?”
“Not at the moment, no,” she says softly, very much thrown off by this tangent. “I’ve been focussing more on my job lately than my love life.”
“From the sounds of it, there’s never been a time that you haven’t.”
Hermione smirks through the annoyance that rises from the pit of her stomach. “I’d much rather be career-driven than driven by that.”
She gestures her head towards a couple several metres from where she and Draco are standing. The man is caging his girlfriend-or at least, Hermione hopes she’s his girlfriend-into the railing. She’s giggling up a storm, and Hermione can hear every personal rule she has against public displays of affection being shattered. She’s more than a little pleased when Draco’s mouth turns down in obvious distaste.
“Not a huge fan of public affection either, are you?” she asks.
He chuckles, almost sardonically. “No, can’t say that I am.”
Hermione sneaks another look at the couple in question. “I’ve never much understood why people in love can’t just reel it in whilst in public. Honestly, it isn’t like the love is going to disappear if you don’t constantly prove it to the world.”
“I don’t really believe in it at all, to be honest.”
“Believe in what?”
“Love. I can’t say that I’ve ever really been in love with anyone-that I can remember.”
Hermione’s eyes close almost immediately in reaction, and it pains her more than she’d ever admit that he doesn’t-can’t-recognise the effect of his words. “I’m sure there’s a girl out there somewhere who might be surprised to hear you say that.”
He shrugs. “What about you?”
“Almost, once,” she claims. “But it ended weirdly and never went anywhere.”
“Weirdly?”
“He basically took off one day, left a note, the end.”
“What a dick.”
Hermione blinks; she keeps forgetting he’s spent so long in the States-it’s enough to make anyone pick up Americanisms like that.
“Mmm,” she hums. “But that was a long time ago. Ten years, almost, I think.”
“You seem like the type of girl who’d have picked a huge fight over that.”
She laughs. “Maybe.”
“And you haven’t fallen in love since?”
She shrugs. “Something’s always been off, I guess.”
He nods, like he understands. “Something always is, isn’t it? It never seems worth it anyway.”
Her brow furrows. “What do you mean?”
Draco looks down at the railing, his long fingers following the old grooves in the dark wood. “You put all that work into a relationship and more often than not, you’ll start off with something like that,” he cocks his head quickly towards the couple in question, “but then something’s not right with one or the other and somebody always ends up on the shitty end of things. Why even bother, honestly? Seems like an utter waste of time and energy.”
Hermione watches him with wide eyes as he continues to massage the panel beneath his fingers. It’s almost distracting, how reverently he’s worshipping the wood that’s holding them safe and dry. But even that isn’t enough to activate the filter that usually censors her thoughts.
“What are you scared of? Nobody’s ever died of a broken heart.” It sounds more bitter than she wanted it to-which was not at all.
“That you know of,” he quips, but his smile is still a bit too sad.
Part Two
Part Three