I’ll get down on my knees | Dramione (Harry Potter) Fanfiction

Some debts are paid in flowers, some in whispered prayers. His was paid in seven years of silent Sundays until she knelt beside him and the debt became something neither could name. We are about to hear this story right now. The rain had been falling since dawn. The kind of slow, deliberate rain that did not so much fall as settle. On the slate roofs of Ottery St. Catchpole, on the bowed shoulders of the oaks lining the lane, on the rot iron gate of the old cemetery that Hermione Granger pushed open with a gloved hand. The hinge gave its familiar complaint, a thin metallic sigh that she had come to know the way one knows the creek of a stair in one's own home. 7 years she had been walking through that gate. Seven years of Sundays, give or take the weeks when grief had made her cowardly, and she had stayed in bed with the curtains drawn and a book she did not read open on her chest. Today she had peies, white ones, because Fred had once said with that particular weasly grin that turned mischief into affection, that white flowers were wasted on weddings when they'd look far better at a good funeral. She had laughed then. She remembered laughing. The memory arrived now the way all her memories of him arrived, sudden, bright, and followed by a hollowess that took her a full breath to climb out of. She shifted the peies to her other arm and walked the gravel path between the headstones. The rain had soaked the flowers at the stems, and a drop rolled down one of the petals and onto her wrist, cold enough to make her flinch. Above her the ut trees held their dark green silence. The cemetery was empty, or so she thought. Empty the way it always was on a Sunday afternoon in November when the village was at its lunch and the tourists were in exat and the dead were left to the weather and to her. She turned the corner past the angel with the broken wing. Fred's grave lay in the far western row where the Weasley's had bought a plot on a rise of ground that caught the last of the evening light. Molly had insisted on that. He'll want the sun, she had said in a voice that did not crack, that had not cracked since the funeral, as though her voice had made a decision and her heart was still catching up to it. Hermayan had held Molly's hand at the burial and felt the tremor that ran beneath the older woman's stillness, and she had known then that there were griefs that did not end. They only learned to walk quietly. Hermione turned the corner, and her steps stopped. Someone was already there. A figure knelt in the wet grass at the foot of Fred's grave. Not standing, not stooping, kneeling fully the way one kneels in a chapel or before something one has lost the right to approach upright. The figure wore a long dark coat, the hem of it black against the green, and the hood was down in spite of the rain, so that his hair, pale, almost colorless in the gray light, was plastered to his skull in wet threads. She knew him at once, the way one knows a face one has not so much remembered as failed to forget. Draco Malfoy, she did not move. She could not have said afterwards whether it was shock that held her or some older instinct. The hunter's stillness that tells you that what you are looking at has not yet seen you and might, if you are careful, reveal itself. She stepped sideways slow and the peianies brushed the rough bark of the utree and she slipped behind the trunk as though the tree had been waiting to hide her. From there through a gap in the needles she watched. He was not weeping. That was the first thing that struck her and it struck her harder than weeping would have. His face, in the three quarter view she had of it, was arranged in a composure so complete that it looked almost sculpted. The jaw set, the mouth closed, the pale lashes lowered. A face built for a courtroom. A face that had learned probably in childhood and certainly in the years since that feeling was a currency you did not spend in public. And yet, and yet there was something in the set of his shoulders, a concave, a sinking in at the chest, as though a great weight pressed down on him from above. And he had stopped years ago, trying to straighten against it. His hands rested on his thighs, palms up, fingers slightly curled, a posture of offering, a posture of surrender. The rain ran down his temples, his throat, into the collar of the coat, and he did not wipe it away. He carried no flowers. He had no wand out. He spoke no word that she could hear. He simply knelt and breathed and looked at the headstone with an expression Hermione could not name and did not for a long disordered moment want to name because naming it would mean admitting that Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy who had called her by a word she still sometimes heard in her dreams was capable of the thing she was witnessing. She pressed her cheek against the bark of the U. The woods smelled of wet moss and old resin. The peies in the crook of her elbow were beginning to bruise under the pressure of her arm, and she did not loosen her grip because loosening her grip meant moving, and moving meant being seen. How long he knelt there, she could not have said. 10 minutes, 15. Long enough that her calves began to ache from the stillness of standing. Long enough that the rain slackened and the light shifted and a thrush somewhere in the hedge tried a few tentative notes and gave up. Then, without ceremony, he stood. He stood the way a man stands, who has done this a great many times, economically without haste, brushing the wet grass from his knees with the flat of one gloved hand. He looked at the headstone a moment longer. His lips moved. She could not see what the shape of the word was, only that it was a single word, brief, almost private. The word one speaks to a friend one is leaving. The word that means until next time or forgive me or perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps only a breath taken out of habit. He turned. Hermione pressed herself flat against the U and held her breath absurdly as though he might hear it across 30 ft of wet churchyard. He did not look her way. He walked, coat heavy with rain, down the gravel path by which she had come, and passed through the iron gate, and was gone. She stayed behind the tree for a long time after. When at last she stepped out, her legs were stiff, and her fingers were numb around the flower stems. She crossed the grass to Fred's grave, slowly, almost cautiously, as though the ground itself had become strange to her. The indentations of his knees were still visible in the wet earth. Two dark ovals pressed into the grass. She looked at them and something in her chest performed a small uninvited lurch, the way the floor of a lift does when it begins to descend before you have braced for it. She laid the peies on the stone. Fred Gideon Weasley, 1st April, 1978 to 2nd May 1998. Beloved son, brother, friend. Laughter was his spell. I don't understand, she said aloud, and her voice surprised her, small and rough in the churchyard. Hush. Fred, I don't understand. The wind moved in the U above her, and did not answer. She walked home through the lanes in a days, the mud of the cemetery path drying on her boots. And at the burrow that evening, when Jinny asked how her afternoon had gone, she heard herself say, "Fine, love, the usual." And something in her rib cage tightened at the lie, because it was a lie, and she had never before had a secret from the Weasley's that concerned one of their dead. She did not sleep well that night. She lay in the narrow guest bed under the sloping attic ceiling and stared at the beam of moonlight that fell across the coverlet. And in her mind she kept seeing the bent line of his shoulders, the upturned palms, the colorless hair plastered to his skull like a drowned man's. She kept hearing the small private shape of the word his lips had made. Why? she thought. Why in the name of every reasonable thing would Draco Malfoy kneel at Fred Weasley's grave in the rain? There was, of course, a sensible answer. There were always sensible answers. He had come to gloat, perhaps, though gloating did not explain the posture, the stillness, the absence of an audience. He had come out of some perverse Slytherin penance pressed upon him by his mother, or by the lingering gossip of the pure blood circles in which the Malfoys still, against the odds, held court. He had come because he was mad, because he was drunk, because he was paid. Any one of these explanations should have satisfied her, and she reached for each of them in turn, the way one reaches for a blanket against the cold, and each of them fell short and let the cold in. Because she had watched him, she had watched him for a quarter of an hour through the needles of a utree, and she had seen the thing she could not now unsee. He had looked like a man keeping a vigil. She turned onto her side and drew the covers up to her chin. Outside the little attic window, the moon sailed clear of a rag of cloud, and the fields beyond the burrow shone pale and strange. Somewhere down the lane, a dog barked once, and was quiet. Next Sunday, she thought. She had not decided it. The thought arrived already decided the way some thoughts do, the way her body had decided long before her mind caught up to step behind the U and watch. Next Sunday she would come earlier. She would come before him. She would hide properly this time somewhere she could see his face fullon. She would watch and she would learn and she would not confront him. Not yet. Because there was a thing happening in that cemetery that she did not understand. And Hermione Granger had never in all her life been able to walk away from a thing she did not understand. She closed her eyes. Behind her lids, the image of two oval indentations pressed into wet grass refused for a long time to fade. She arrived at the cemetery 40 minutes early the following Sunday, and by the time the church bell in the village struck one, she had already found her place. Not behind the U this time, but further down the slope, behind the crumbling stone wall that divided the old graves from the new. From there, through a gap where the mortar had given way, she could see Fred's headstone clean across the grass, and she could see, too, the whole length of the gravel path by which anyone would have to approach it. She had brought a book, not to read. She did not mean to read, but because a book in her lap made her feel less like a spy and more like a woman who had merely sat down to wait out the weather. The weather this week was not rain, but a low, dense fog, the sort that blurred the edges of everything, and gave the churchyard the appearance of a place half drawn, half remembered. The headstones rose out of it like the masts of ships. Her breath steamed in the cold. She heard the gate before she saw him. The hinge sigh, unmistakable, and then the particular sound of boots on wet gravel, measured, unhurried, the step of a man who had made this walk too many times to rush it. Through the gap in the wall, she watched him come. He was dressed almost identically to the week before. Long dark coat, no hat, hands bare in spite of the cold, no umbrella. He did not look about him. He did not scan the churchyard for observers. He walked with the preoccupied steadiness of someone inside his own head. And Hermione realized, watching him, that the reason he had not noticed her last week was simple. He had long since stopped expecting anyone to be here. He reached the grave. He stood a moment, looking down at it, and she could see his face now at an angle she had not had before. The fog gave it a one quality, the pale skin almost translucent, the dark hollows beneath the eyes very dark indeed. He looked, she thought, like a man who did not sleep well, or perhaps like a man who slept too much in the wrong way, the restless sleep that leaves one more tired on the rising than on the lying down. He knelt. This time she counted. She counted because counting was a thing she could do, a discipline, a way of keeping the watching from becoming something else, something she was not yet prepared to call by its proper name. She counted his breaths. They came slow and even, in for four, out for six, the measured rhythm of a man who had been taught, perhaps by necessity, how to keep his body from betraying him. The ring on his right hand caught the gray light. Silver, she saw now, a broad band with a dark stone set flush. He twisted it once, twice, with a pad of his thumb, and then was still. 13 minutes, she counted. 13 minutes of kneeling in the wet grass before a headstone. He had no reason, in the order of the world, as she understood it, to visit. When he rose, she saw him do something she had not seen the week before. He reached into the breast of his coat and drew out a small object too small for her to make out clearly at the distance, a thing the size of a coin or perhaps a button. He looked at it a moment, then he closed his hand around it and held it against his sternum over the place where the heart sits. and stood like that for the space of three breaths. Then he slipped it back into his coat and turned away. He left by the same path. The hinge sigh, the fading of boots on gravel, the gate swinging shut behind him with a soft metallic clap. Hermayan sat behind her wall for a long time after. The book in her lap was opened to a page she had not read. The fog had thickened while she watched, and her fingers had gone so cold she could no longer feel the binding. She pressed them between her knees to warm them, and found that her knees were trembling. Not violently, only the faint continuous tremor of a body that had been holding itself too still for too long. She walked to the grave when she was sure he was gone. The indentations were there again. Two ovals in the grass slightly deeper this week, perhaps because the ground was softer. She stared at them and at the headstone above them and at the pees she had left the Sunday before. Brown now curled at the edges, their whiteness gone to rot. She gathered them up and took them with her when she left. She did not leave new ones. It felt obscurely like the wrong thing to do, to lay her flowers on a place where another person had knelt in silence. a trespass of a kind she could not quite articulate. At the burrow she found Jinny in the kitchen, flower to her elbows, shaping rolls for the evening meal. Molly was out at her neighbors. Arthur was in the garden wrestling with something mechanical that did not wish to be wrestled. Hermione sat down at the scrubbed pine table and watched Jinny work and tried for a full minute to think of how to begin. You're quiet, Jinny said without looking up. Quieter than usual, I mean. You're always quiet on Sundays. I went to see Fred. I know you always do. Jinny turned a roll on the board, deaf and absent. Did you bring him the peies? I did. Good. A pause. He liked peies. Or he would have. He liked anything that annoyed mom. And mom always said peies were a funeral flower. Hermione smiled. It was a small uneven smile, and it did not reach her eyes. And Jinny, who had known her for the better part of 15 years, sat down the rolling pin. Hermione, what is it? She opened her mouth to say nothing. She closed it again. She said instead, "Does anyone else visit him? Apart from the family, I mean, do you know?" Jinny's brow pulled together. "What do you mean anyone else? Old friends? Lee, Jordan, maybe? Angelina, people from the shop?" "Oh, yes, now and then. George goes Tuesdays. Mom goes whenever she can bear it, which isn't as often as she used to. Lee was there on the anniversary last year. I know that. Why? Only curious. Jinny watched her a moment and Hermione watched her back and the kitchen filled with the warm smell of rising dough. And between them passed one of those silences that older friendships have. The silences that say, "I will not press you now, but I have noticed and I will remember." Then Jinny picked up the rolling pin again. "You'd tell me," Jinny said, if something were wrong. Yes, it was the second lie of the week. Hermione felt it settle in her chest like a small cold stone. She returned the next Sunday and the Sunday after that and the one after that. He came every time. It became, in a way she would not have been able to explain to anyone, a ritual of her own. She would arrive early, take up her place behind the stone wall, open her book to a page she did not read. She would watch him walk up the gravel path, kneel in the grass, and perform his quarter hour of silent vigil. She began to notice things she had not noticed before. the way his hair needed cutting by the third week and was cut by the fourth. The way once he had arrived limping slightly, favoring the right leg, and by the following Sunday the limp was gone. The way he never, not once, looked around. He came for the grave, and for the grave only, and the churchyard around it might as well have been empty of every living thing. She began to notice things about herself, too. She began to notice that she had started choosing her Sunday clothes with a certain care. "Not for him," she told herself firmly. "Not for him, she would not have been seen. It was impossible that she was dressing for him. but with care nonetheless, a particular wool coat, the scarf her mother had given her. She began to notice that she looked forward to Sundays in a way she had not looked forward to them in years, and that the looking forward was tangled up with something she did not wish to examine too closely, because examining it would mean naming it, and naming it would change it. Four weeks became six, six became 10. In the 10th week, the weather turned. A cold front moved in from the Atlantic, and the rain came down in sheets so heavy the churchyard path ran like a small brown river. Hermione huddled behind her wall in a cloak already soaked through, hood up, watching the gate. He came. Of course he came. He came hatless and coatless looking in the sense that his coat was so saturated with water it might as well not have been there. And he walked up the path through the rushing water with the same measured gate. And he knelt in the mud at Fred's grave and did not flinch at the cold or the wet or the wind that drove the rain almost sideways across the stones. Hermione watched him, and her chest did a thing it had never quite done before. A small, sharp clench, as though a hand inside her had closed suddenly around her heart. He will make himself ill, she thought. He will catch his death out here. And beneath that thought, unbidden another. Why does he do this? Why does he come? What in the name of all that is reasonable did Fred Weasley mean to Draco Malfoy that he should kneel in a rainstorm to honor him? She thought of Fred. Fred at 16. Fred at 17. Fred tossing a dung bomb down the Slytherin table at breakfast. Fred winking at her across the common room. Fred's face, as he had died, which she had not seen, but which Ron had described once haltingly, and which she carried now as a thing she had seen anyway, and she could not, for the life of her, fit Draco Malfoy into any shape Fred had ever occupied. And yet here he was, every Sunday. For weeks she could count, and she suspected with a mounting disqu, for weeks she could not. She walked to the grave after he had gone that 10th Sunday, and knelt herself in the mud beside the two ovals his knees had left. She laid her palm on the wet grass between them. The ground was warm where he had been, the faintest residual warmth, almost too faint to feel, but she felt it, or she thought she did. "Fred," she whispered. "Fred, what did you do?" The rain answered as the wind had answered the week before, which was to say, it did not answer at all. That night, by the fire in her flat in London, she opened her journal for the first time in two years, and wrote in a hand that was not quite steady, a single line across the top of a fresh page. Next Sunday, I am not going to hide. She underlined it. Then she closed the journal and sat very still in her armchair and listened to the clock on the mantle mark out the minutes and felt for the first time in a long time that something in her life was about to tilt. Not break, not shatter, but tilt the way a picture on a wall tilts when a door has been closed too hard in another room. She did not know yet that it had already tilted. She only knew that on Sunday she would walk up the path in full view of the grave and kneel in the grass beside him and wait for him to turn his head. She did not sleep at all on Saturday night. She lay in her flat with the window cracked an inch so she could hear the sounds of the street below. A taxi idling at the corner, the late night bin lorry with its hydraulic sigh, a pair of voices raised in laughter, and then a block on quieter. And she turned the coming morning over in her mind, the way one turns a stone one has picked up from a riverbed, looking at each wet facet in turn, she rehearsed what she would say, and found that every sentence she composed was wrong. I've been watching you. Wrong. It sounded like a confession and an accusation at once. I know you come here. Wrong. Too bare. Too much like a trap snapping shut. I want to understand. Closer perhaps. But closer was not right. And right was not a thing she seemed able to find. Not in the dark. Not with the bin lorry grinding down the street. and her heart doing the small erratic thing it had been doing all week whenever she thought of him. In the end, she decided to say nothing. She would walk up the path. She would kneel in the grass beside him. She would wait. If he chose to speak, she would hear him. If he did not, she would have at least done the thing her body had been insisting upon for 10 weeks. she would have stopped hiding. Morning came gray and windless, the kind of still lowkeyed morning that feels as though the world has been placed under a glass dome. She dressed without deliberation this time. A dark wool coat, sensible boots, her hair pulled back in a plat she did not fuss over. No flowers. She had thought about flowers and had decided after a long pause in the kitchen that flowers were for the dead. And today she was not going to see the dead. She took the flu to the village and walked the last half mile. The gravel of the lane was pale under the overcast. The hedge were black with wet. She met no one. She pushed through the cemetery gate at a quarter to 1 and took up her old place behind the stone wall, heart hammering so loudly in her ears. She thought for a foolish moment that he might hear it from outside the gate. He came as he always came on the stroke of the hour. She watched him walk up the path. She watched him stop at the grave. She watched him lower himself into the grass in that economical practiced way, palms settling on his thighs, back straightening. She counted to 20 slowly to steady herself, and at the count of 20, she stood up from behind her wall and walked. The gravel gave her away long before she reached him. It would have been impossible for it not to. She heard her own footfall as loud as hoof beatats on the quiet path, but he did not turn. He did not so much as tilt his head. His shoulders registered her coming perhaps in the smallest of tightenings, a drawing in of the muscles along the spine, but his face remained bent toward the stone, and his hands remained open on his thighs. She stopped three places short of him. Her throat had closed up. The rehearsed sentences had all fled as she had suspected they would. She stood there looking at the back of his pale head and the dark wet of his coat, and she thought, "Well, now," and she walked the last three paces and lowered herself into the grass beside him. The ground was colder than she had expected. The wet soaked through her coat at the knees in an instant, and the cold of it traveled up her thighs in a slow shiver. She settled herself anyway, mirroring his posture without meaning to, palms on her own thighs, back straight. She did not look at him. She looked as he looked at the headstone, Fred Gideon Weasley. 1st April 1978 to 2nd May 1998. Laughter was his spell. She had read the inscription so many times it had gone smooth in her mind like a pebble worn by water. Today the words felt freshly cut. The F of Fred, the W of Weasley, the small sharp dates. A full minute passed. Then another. She could hear him breathing, the slow, measured, in for four, out for six, that she had watched from behind the wall all those Sundays. She could hear her own breath, which was not slow and not measured, which was trying and failing to match his. She could hear somewhere at the back of the churchyard a blackbird beginning a tentative song and thinking better of it. When he spoke, he spoke so quietly she almost missed it. I knew you'd come sooner or later. The voice was not the voice she remembered. The malfoy voice she carried in her head from school was pitched for an audience. A little too loud, a little too pleased with itself. The voice of a boy who had been taught that volume was a kind of authority. This voice was pitched for one listener, and the listener was perhaps himself, or perhaps the stone in front of him, or perhaps, she realized with a small interior lurch. Perhaps her, and only her, and only for this moment. She did not turn her head. She looked at the headstone. "How long did you know I was there?" she asked. "The third week," she let out a breath. She had not been aware of holding. And you said nothing. There was nothing to say, a pause. You were welcome to watch. She did turn. Then she turned her head just enough to see his profile, the straight line of his nose, the lowered lashes, the faint stubble on the jaw that told her he had not shaved this morning or perhaps yesterday. He did not turn to meet her eyes. He kept his own on the stone. Draco, she said, his given name. She had not said it aloud, she thought, in all her life. It tasted strange in her mouth, shorter than she had expected, a single small stone of a word. Why are you here? He did not answer at once. His thumb moved to the silver ring on his other hand and turned it once all the way around. It was a gesture she had seen a dozen times from behind the wall, and seeing it now, close enough to hear the soft scrape of silver against the skin of his knuckle, something tightened low in her chest. "I come every week," he said. "I know. I have come every week for 7 years. The number landed in her the way a stone lands in still water, the sound first, then the spreading. 7 years. From the May after the war, from the beginning. He had been 18 years old. She did her arithmetic in a silent scramble at the back of her mind, and the arithmetic told her what her heart had already guessed. He had begun this before the trials, before the verdicts, before the quiet sentencing of his father to Aszkaban, and the quieter sentencing of his mother to a house emptied of everything but her rose garden and her memories. He had begun this when he was scarcely more than a boy. Seven years, she repeated, because her mouth needed to say it to believe it. Yes. Why? He was silent for a long time. She watched him breathe. In for four, out for six. She watched the small muscle in his jaw tighten and release. She watched his pale lashes lower further as though whatever he was looking at inside himself was too bright to meet directly. Not today, he said at last. Draco, not today, Granger. the old surname. And from his mouth, it was not the weapon it had once been. It was something else, something careful, something that was trying very hard to keep a distance. He had not, she understood suddenly, decided yet whether he wished to keep. You have sat with me. That is already more than I. He stopped. He closed his mouth. A small visible swallow. That is already more than I expected to have. She did not know what to say to that. The blackbird began again, further off, this time, a thin thread of song that unraveled into the hush. Somewhere beyond the u hedge, a door closed, muffled by distance. He moved. Then he drew one knee up, pressed his palm flat against the cold earth to steady himself, and rose with that same economy she had watched from behind the wall. He brushed the grass from his trousers with the flat of his gloved hand. She remained kneeling. She could not just then have trusted her legs to lift her. He looked down at her for the first time. His eyes, she had forgotten, were very gray, not the dramatic silver of poetry, but a cold, clear gray, like slate after rain. And at the moment he looked at her. There was a thing in them she did not know how to read. A gathering, a holding back, the expression of a man who was deciding in real time not to say a thing he had almost said. next Sunday, he said. It was not a question. It was not quite a command. It was something in between offered low, and she understood without needing to ask that he was saying, "You may come," and saying, "I will be here," and saying beneath both of those, "Please." Though the word please would not have crossed his lips if he had been hexed into saying it. She nodded. He held her eyes a moment longer. Then he turned and walked down the path, coat moving heavy around his calves and was gone through the gate with its familiar metallic sigh. She stayed in the grass for a long time. The cold had begun to climb her bones, the wet of the ground reaching her skin through the wool. Her hands on her thighs had gone stiff. She did not move. She looked at Fred's headstone, and at the indentations in the grass beside her, where his knees had pressed, and at the faint silver scrape across the back of her mind, where his voice had been. I knew you'd come sooner or later. Something in her rearranged itself very slowly, very quietly, the way furniture is rearranged in an empty room when one is alone and has all afternoon to decide where things should go. She did not know yet what the new arrangement was. She knew only that the old one had ended. When she finally stood, her knees cracked audibly, and she laughed once, a startled, unamused laugh that came out of her before she could catch it. She pressed her cold hand to her mouth. She looked once more at Fred's name on the stone. I don't know what this is, she said to him aloud, because there was no one to hear, and because saying it to Fred felt absurdly like the only honest thing she had done all week. Fred, I truly don't, but I'm going to find out. She walked home along the lanes with the wet of the cemetery grass drying on her coat and the wet of something else entirely pressing behind her eyes. And she did not let it fall because Hermione Granger had never been the sort of woman who wept in public lanes, and she was not going to begin today. Not for a thing she did not yet understand. Not for a man whose first name she had said aloud for the first time in her life 20 minutes ago and could still taste in her mouth like cold metal and winter air. At the burrow that evening she did not go in. She stood at the gate for a long time in the gathering dusk, watching the yellow squares of the kitchen windows, and then she turned around and apparated home without knocking, and she did not that night write anything at all in her journal. She only sat in her armchair with her hands folded in her lap and waited, the way she had watched him, waiting, for the next Sunday to come. The week passed with the strange elasticity of weeks in which a single appointment has become the gravitational center of one's days. Monday felt near to Sunday. Wednesday felt very far. Thursday folded back in on itself and seemed at moments to be both the day after Sunday and the day before it. Hermione went to work at the ministry. She sat in meetings about the regulation of experimental charms, and she took neat notes in her small, precise hand, and she thought, with a low, persistent hum beneath everything of gray eyes, and a voice pitched for one listener, and a silver ring turned by the pad of a thumb. On Saturday evening, she did a thing she had not planned to do. She went into her small kitchen and made tea. Not for herself. She had already drunk two cups that afternoon, but a full thermos of it, strong, the way she took it when she wanted warming rather than refreshing, with a little honey stirred in at the end. She screwed the cap on the thermos and set it on the counter. And then she stood looking at it for a long moment with her arms folded across her chest because she was not entirely sure what she intended to do with it, only that she intended to do something. She slept better that night than she had expected. When she woke on Sunday, the light at the edges of the curtains was the pale yellow of the winter morning that had decided against the odds to be clear. She dressed with the same care she had not been admitting to for weeks. She picked up the thermos on her way out. At the cemetery, she did not take up her place behind the wall. She walked instead straight up the path to Fred's grave, and she sat down in the grass at the foot of the headstone, not kneeling, not yet, sitting cross-legged the way she had sat at a thousand study sessions in the common room at Hogwarts, with the thermos beside her, and her gloved hands folded in her lap. The sun was low and thin. Her breath made shapes in the cold air. She waited. He came on the hour as he had come every week for seven years. And when he rounded the angel with a broken wing and saw her sitting there, his step faltered only for an instant, only long enough for her to see it. And then he kept walking and knelt beside her as though the faltering had not happened. She unscrewed the thermos. She poured a measure of the dark steaming tea into the cap and held it out to him without looking at him. He took it. He took it without speaking with a gloved hand that was not quite steady, and he wrapped both hands around the little metal cup, the way a man wraps his hands around the first warm thing he has touched in a long winter. He did not drink at once. He held it and breathed the steam and closed his eyes for the length of a heartbeat. And then he opened them again and drank. Hermione watched his throat move as he swallowed. "Thank you," he said. "You're welcome." She poured herself a measure in the inner cup she had thought to bring, and she drank. And for a small while there was no sound in the churchyard, but the sound of two people drinking tea in the cold and the distant intermittent cry of a rook somewhere past the hedge. When he had finished, he set the cap down carefully on the flat stone edging of the grave. He looked at the headstone. He drew in a long, slow breath through his nose and let it out through his mouth. And he said, "Without preamble, without ceremony, the way a man says a thing that he has carried so long, the saying of it is less a decision than a handing over. He saved my life." She did not move. She did not turn her head. She did not so much as shift her weight in the grass. Something inside her had become very still. the stillness of an animal that has heard a sound in the undergrowth and does not yet know whether it is predator or prey. And she held that stillness with every discipline her body possessed because she understood in some preverbal way that if she moved he would stop and if he stopped he might never begin again. at the battle," he said. His voice was low and even and did not break, which was somehow worse than if it had in the seventh floor corridor near the tapestry of the witches. I had lost my wand. Crab had, you know what Crab had done? I was running. I don't remember what from. The wall came down. A section of the upper gallery. Someone had blasted it. The whole thing gave at once. His hands had settled on his thighs, palms up, fingers slightly curled. The old posture. She kept her eyes on the headstone. I saw it coming, he said. I remember thinking quite clearly, this is it, then. There was a peculiar relief in it. I had spent a year waiting for it to be it in one form or another. And here it was at last. Stone and timber and an end to everything. And I only had to stand still and let it happen. A pause. She heard him swallow. I did not stand still. Someone hit me from the side hard enough to knock the breath out of me and send me across the corridor into the far wall. I struck my head. I was for a few seconds somewhere else entirely. When I came back, the corridor was full of dust and a ringing sound. And when the dust settled enough that I could see, he stopped. She waited. He was under the stones. He said his legs, the lower half of him. He had pushed me clear and he had not got clear himself. He was Granger. He was still smiling. He was looking at me and he was still smiling. Can you imagine? With his legs under half a wall and the blood coming. And he said, he said, his voice did break. Then only slightly, a small fissure, a hairline quickly sealed. He said, "Tell my brother the punchline was worth it." And then he closed his eyes. I didn't know which brother. I sat with him for I don't know how long. Percy found us. Percy pulled me off him and told me to run. And I I ran. I ran because Percy told me to. because I did not know what else to do. I never said the punchline line to anyone. I have never known which brother. He turned his face then and looked at her for the first time since he had knelt. His eyes were dry. That was the thing that undid her. Not tears, which he could have borne, which he had braced for, but the absolute dryness of his eyes, the way the grief in them had long since passed the stage at which grief weeps, and entered the stage at which grief simply sits behind the face like a lamp burning down to the wick. "I never told anyone," he said. Not my mother. Not the ministry at the trials. Not He stopped. His mouth worked. The Weasley's had buried their son. They had a shape for him. A hero's shape. And I thought I thought, what would it do to them to know that the last thing he chose was to save a death eater's son? I thought it would tear the shape to pieces. I thought Molly Weasley would have to rearrange every memory she had of him around the fact of me and I could not. I could not ask that of her. I could not ask that of any of them. So you came here, Hermione said. Her voice was not quite her own. Every week? Yes. For seven years? Yes. Alone? Yes. She was quiet. The rook called again further off. Her hand, which had been folded with the other in her lap, moved of its own accord across the cold grass toward his. It moved slowly, the way one approaches a thing that might startle. It stopped an inch from his. She did not close the distance. He did not close it either, but he did not pull his hand away. They stayed like that a long time. two gloved hands, an inch of winter grass between them, and above them Fred's headstone with its small, sharp dates, and above all of it a sky that had begun at last to lower toward the gray it preferred. "Why are you telling me?" she asked at last. He considered it. "Because you came," he said. "Because you knelt. Because I have been carrying this for seven years and I have not in seven years been able to think of a single person in the world who could be told and not be. He searched for the word, destroyed by it. And then you sat down in the grass next to me and you did not ask. And I thought I thought perhaps you would not be destroyed. I thought perhaps you were made of something that could hold it. Draco, his name again, and still strange in her mouth and still metallic. I don't know if I can hold it. You are holding it now. She looked at him. His face in the thin winter light was very tired and very young at once. The young man he had burned at 18, showing through the skin of the man of 25, as though the intervening years had been a long illness he had not fully recovered from. "What do you want from me?" she said. And she did not mean it harshly. She meant it as the honest question of a woman who was trying very hard to understand the shape of the thing she had just been handed. What do you want, Draco? Do you want me to tell them? Do you want me to keep it? Do you want absolution? Because I can't. I am not. I have no authority to give that to you. I don't want absolution. Then what? He was a long time answering. I want, he said at last slowly, for there to be one other person in the world who knows. I am not asking you to do anything with it. I am not asking you to tell them or not tell them. That is that is another conversation and not today. Today I am only he made a small helpless gesture with his hand, the first ungoverned gesture she had seen him make. Today I am only tired of being the only one. Something behind her sternum gave way. It did not give way loudly or all at once. It gave way the way old floor timbers give way under a foot that has crossed them a thousand times. with a small creek, a lowering, a sense that the floor had been less solid than she had believed and that she was not in fact going to fall through, but that she would never again walk that particular floor without remembering how it had felt. Her hand moved the last inch. The back of her gloved fingers touched the back of his gloved fingers. That was all. A contact of leather on leather, mute with every barrier of winter fabric between them. And yet she felt it as though her bare palm had been laid against his bare palm, as though the cold of the churchyard had suddenly concentrated itself into the one inch of contact. and then reversed, pouring warm up her arm. He did not move his hand. He did not turn his head. He closed his eyes. and Hermione looking at him, at the pale lashes resting on the cheekbones, at the small tired line between the brows, at the throat where she could see very faintly the beat of her pulse. She had not earned the right to watch and was watching anyway. Understood with a clarity that frightened her that she was not going to tell the Weasley's today. She was not going to tell them next Sunday either. She was going to sit in this grass with this man until he had learned how to stop being the only one. and she was going to carry for however long it took half of a weight that she had not asked for and could not now that it had been offered refuge. She closed her own eyes. Their gloved hands stayed where they were, not laced, not holding, only touching along the outermost edge. And the rook called once more, and the cold went on, climbing up through the grass, and neither of them moved for a long, long time. She did not remember afterwards walking out of the cemetery. She remembered standing up from the grass at some point. He had risen first and had offered her his gloved hand, and she had taken it without thinking, and her own hand had been so cold and stiff in his that neither of them had registered the touch as anything but the practical assistance of one person helping another to their feet. She remembered him saying next Sunday the same way he had said it the week before, "Low and not quite a question." She remembered nodding. She remembered the metallic sigh of the gate. What she remembered most clearly and what she would carry for days was not the telling itself, but the moment after the telling. The moment when he had closed his eyes, and she had understood, with a clarity that would not leave her alone, that she was now the second person in the world to know a thing that had lived in one man's chest for seven years. She apparated home and stood in her kitchen with her coat still on and her hair still damp at the temples. And she looked at her own clean familiar flat. The cookbooks in their row on the high shelf, the kettle on the hob, the cushion on the armchair with a small burn mark where she had once set a hot teapot down without a trivet. and she understood suddenly that she had brought something home with her that did not belong in a flat like this. A flat like this was for a woman who took minutes in meetings and drafted legislation on charms reform and went to Sunday dinner at the burrow and laughed at Arthur's jokes about rubber ducks. A flat like this was not built to hold the weight of Fred Weasley's last words spoken in a seventh floor corridor under a falling wall. She took off her coat. She hung it on the hook. She set the thermos on the counter and unscrewed the cap and poured the last cold inch of tea down the sink and stood watching it disappear. And then she went into her bedroom and lay down on top of the covers in her clothes and looked at the ceiling for a very long time. She was expected at the burrow that evening. She had been expected at the burrow every other Sunday evening for 7 years. It was one of the fixed points of her life, one of the small gravitational centers around which the rest of it arranged itself. And the thought of not going had never in all those seven years crossed her mind. The thought of going now filled her with a dread so specific that she could almost have named it in a diagnostic manual. Acute anticipatory guilt onset sudden precipitating factor. She got up off the bed at 5 and dressed carefully and apperated to the lane at the bottom of the burrow's garden because there were some things one did not skip and Sunday dinner was one of them and because not going would have required an explanation and she did not have one to give. The kitchen was loud. It was always loud. That was one of the things one loved about it. or one of the things one endured about it, depending on the day and the state of one's nerves. Molly was at the stove with three things on the go at once. Arthur was showing Ron some muggle object, a small plastic thing with a button about which he was enthusing in a way that made Ron's eyes go very faintly glazed. Jinny and Harry were at the table with the baby between them, and George was in the chair by the fire with his long legs stretched out, turning the pages of a Quidditch magazine without, Hermione thought, actually reading them. Hermione, Molly cried, which was how Molly always greeted her, and came across the kitchen in a swirl of apron, and pulled her into the hug that smelled of onion and wool, and the faint, always present ghost of lavender. Hermione hugged her back. Hermione hugged her back and felt Molly's soft arms around her and smelled Molly's hair and thought Fred said, "Tell my brother the punchline was worth it, and he does not know it, and she does not know it, and I know it." And the thought was so loud inside her head that she was certain for one buzzing instant that Molly must have heard it through the skin of her temple. Molly did not hear it. Molly patted her back and released her and asked after her week and Hermione said something. She did not know what afterwards and sat down at the table next to Jinny. You look tired, Jinny said low under the noise. I haven't slept well. Anything on your mind? Only work. The third lie of the autumn. It was becoming easier, which frightened her. Dinner came to the table. Molly had made the lamb, which she made when she wanted to feed people rather than only feed them. The plates were passed. The conversation wheeled through its familiar orbits. Harry's latest trouble at the Aura office, Ron's shop, Arthur's plastic button object, Jinn's story about the baby and the garden hose, and Hermione ate and nodded and laughed in the right places, and felt beneath it all the steady pressure of a thing not said, pressing up under her sternum the way a palm presses up under a closed door. And then George spoke. He did not speak often at Sunday dinner. He spoke these days perhaps a tenth as often as Fred had spoken for both of them. When he did speak, the table quieted around him, not deliberately, but by habit, the way a room quiets when a cat enters it. Mom, George said, did you ever find out who the other person was? the other person. Love in the corridor when Fred He did not finish the sentence. He never did. Percy said there was someone else there. Someone Fred pushed clear. Percy never got a look at them. I always wondered. Molly set down her fork. Hermayan had taken a mouthful of bread a moment before George spoke, and she was now sitting very still with the bread half chewed in her mouth, and she did not know how she was going to swallow it because her throat had closed like a fist. I don't know, darling, Molly said. Her voice was careful. It was the voice she used. Hermione knew when she was speaking about Fred at a volume lower than the one that would break her. I asked at the time I asked Percy. I asked McGonagal. There was no no one came forward in all the chaos. You know, people were hurt. People were running. Whoever it was, they never She trailed off. She picked up her fork again and did not use it. I hope they lived. I hope wherever they are, they know. That's all really. I hope they know. George nodded slowly. His eyes were on the middle distance on nothing. I hope so, too, he said. Hermione swallowed the bread. It went down like a stone. She excused herself 10 minutes later. She said she had a headache, which was nearly true. She said she was sorry. She kissed Molly on the cheek, and Molly gave her a small packet of the leftover lamb wrapped in greaseroof paper for her lunch tomorrow. And she walked out into the garden in the dusk, and stood for a minute with her hand on the gate. and she understood that if she did not move in the next 10 seconds, she was going to be sick into Molly's rose bushes. She apparated. She arrived in her flat in the dark, and she did not turn on the lights. She walked to the sink and leaned over it and waited. But the nausea passed without issuing into anything, and what she was left with was a trembling in the hands and a sound in the ears like a kettle a long way off. I hope they know. Molly had said it. Molly, who had every right to be told, whom Hermione had known for half her life, whom Hermione loved with a steady, uncomplicated love. Molly had sat at her own kitchen table and said aloud, "I hope they know." And Hermione had sat three feet from her with the answer in her mouth and had said nothing. She sank down onto the kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard and put her face in her hands. She stayed there a long time. When she was able at last to stand, she went to her writing desk and took out a sheet of paper and a quill, and she wrote, "Malfoy, I cannot do this. I sat at their table tonight." And Molly said she hoped whoever Fred saved knew it, and I said nothing, and I do not think I can go on saying nothing. I am sorry. I know what you asked of me, and I know why, but I am not built for it. Hermione. She read it over. She folded it. She reached for the wax and the seal, and she stopped, the seal halfway to the folded edge, and she sat looking at the paper in the circle of her lamp. She thought of him. She thought of his face that afternoon, as he had said, "Tell my brother the punchline was worth it, and the small fisher in the voice, and the way his eyes had been dry and tired past weeping." She thought of, "I have not in seven years been able to think of a single person in the world who could be told and not be destroyed by it." She thought of Molly's voice saying, "I hope they know." And she thought of Molly's voice saying instead the thing it would say if Molly knew. The voice that would say it and the face that would say it, and the long quiet afterwards in which Molly would have to decide what to do with the new shape of her son. She unfolded the paper. She read it again. She set it aside. She took a fresh sheet. Draco, she wrote, and stopped because she had never written his name before, and the shape of it on the page was as strange as the shape of it in her mouth. Draco, she wrote again and continued. I went to the burrow tonight. George asked his mother if she had ever found out who the other person in the corridor was. She said she had not. She said she hoped they lived. she said. She hoped they knew. I did not tell them. I sat there and I did not tell them. I am writing this to you because I do not know who else in the world to write it to. I am writing because I am sitting on my kitchen floor and my hands will not stop shaking. And I have understood tonight that you have been sitting on your own kitchen floor every Sunday for seven years. And I did not. I did not know before today what that was like. I am not sure I know now. But I know more than I did. I am not going to tell them yet. I am not saying I will never. I am saying not yet. I am saying I need to understand the shape of this thing before I decide what to do with it. And I cannot understand the shape of it alone. Will you meet me? Not at the cemetery. Somewhere there are living people. Somewhere a cup of tea costs money. And someone you do not know brings it to you on a tray. There is a place in a village called Upper Barton, the muggle side. A cafe called the blue heron. Wednesday evening 7. I do not know what I am asking you. I am asking you to come. Hermione. She sealed it before she could change her mind. She called her Owl, a small, sleepy, gray female who blinked at her with offended dignity at the lateness of the hour and tied the letter to the offered leg and opened the window onto the London sky. The owl took off into the dark. Hermione stood at the open window for a long time with the cold air on her face and the letter already beyond her reach. And she watched the small pale shape of the owl diminish against the bruised orange of the city sky until she could no longer see it at all. And then she kept watching because there was nothing else left to do. And because somewhere under the trembling and the nausea and the guilt, a small, quiet, unfamiliar thing had begun, very carefully, to unfold itself inside her chest. The Blue Heron sat at the end of a lane in Upper Barton, tucked between a bookshop that closed at 5, and a green grosser whose crates of apples and Swedes had been brought in for the night. The cafe kept later hours than its neighbors. A sign in the window advertised soup and toast until 8, and above the door, a handpainted heron lifted one thin leg against a background of faded blue. Hermione arrived at 10 to 7. She had chosen the place for its obscurity. She knew no one in Upper Barton, had never had reason to visit it, had found it by the simple expedient of spreading an ordinance survey map on her kitchen table, and putting her finger down at random. The Blue Heron had turned up by lucky accident in a muggle guide book she owned, for reasons she could no longer reconstruct. She had walked past it once on Tuesday to make certain it was real and to look at the tables through the window. And she had decided that the corner table in the back half hidden by a coat rack hung with a confusion of other people's scarves would do. She sat at that table now with a cup of tea already cooling in front of her and her gloves in her lap and her coat folded over the back of her chair. She had taken the seat that faced the door. She had taken it twice, in fact, because she had first taken the seat that faced the window, and then she had moved because she had not liked the idea of him walking in and seeing her back before she could see his face. She watched the door. The cafe was not busy. A white-haired man was reading the paper at the counter. A woman with a child in a wool hat was sharing a piece of cake at a table by the window. The waitress, a tall girl with a long platt and a ring through her eyebrow, moved between the tables with the absent competence of someone who had done the job long enough to do it half asleep. The door opened now and then, and each time the little bell above it gave a small bright chime, and each time Hermione's heart did an ungoverned thing behind her sternum that had not, she thought, grimly, any right to be doing what it was doing. At 7 precisely, the bell chimed, and he came in. He was in muggle clothing, which surprised her. A dark coat she had seen before. Yes. But beneath it, a plain charcoal sweater over a gray shirt, dark trousers, leather boots, no cloak, no robes, no outward sign of the life he lived on the other side. He had taken off the silver ring she noticed. Or perhaps he was wearing gloves. She could not tell from the door. He paused on the threshold, scanning the room with the economical glance of a man who had been taught by a childhood and a war to know the exits of a room before he walked into it. And then he saw her. He walked over. He did not speak at once. He pulled out the chair across from her, set his coat on the back of it, sat down. His eyes found hers, held them a fraction of a second, dropped to the cup in front of her. The waitress came over with the menu. He said, "Ta, please. Just tea." He said it in a voice pitched low for the setting, not the low pitched for one listener voice of the cemetery, but something in between. And Hermione noticed with a small interior lurch that he had said please to the muggle waitress as easily as she might have said it herself. The waitress went away. They were alone as much as one could be alone in a small cafe with three other people scattered about it. A radio on a shelf behind the counter was playing something soft and inoffensive. a singer Hermione did not recognize, and the heaters along the wall were ticking faintly, and it was so ordinary a setting for the conversation they were about to have that she felt for a moment slightly unhinged. "Thank you for coming," she said. "I was going to come," he said. "I had already decided before your letter, I would have found you one way or another this week." She looked at him. You would have? Yes. He did not explain. He moved the salt cellar a half inch to the left with his forefinger and then a half inch back. What happened at the burrow? She told him. She told him quietly without embellishment in the flat factual voice she used at work for reporting the outcomes of things. George's question, Molly's answer, the lamb gone to stone in her mouth, the rose bushes. She watched his face as she spoke, and she saw the small tightening at the corners of his mouth when she said, "I hope they know." And she saw the way his hand, unglloved, she had been right, unglloved and ringingless, flattened on the table beside his saucer, as though to brace itself against a wind. He said nothing for a long time after she had finished. The waitress came with his tea. He thanked her. He poured a little milk and did not stir it. He looked at the small swirl the milk made in the dark tea and he said without looking up, "I should never have asked this of you. You didn't ask. I told you." Which was asking. He raised his eyes. They were tired and very gray in the cafe's yellow light. Granger Hermione. I have been carrying this for seven years, and I had long since made my peace with carrying it alone. I did not set out last Sunday to put any of it on you. You sat down. You waited. You were. He stopped. He seemed to be searching for a word and not finding it and choosing instead to go around the place where the word should have been. I was unguarded. I should not have been. I am sorry. I don't want you to be sorry. What do you want? She opened her mouth and found, as she had found the week before, that the rehearsed sentences had fled. She picked up her teacup for something to do. She set it down again. I want, she said slowly, to understand something. May I ask you a question? Yes. Why not tell George? Not Molly if you cannot face Molly. Not Arthur. George. He asked tonight. He has been asking for seven years in his own way. He is the one who has lived with the half of him. That was Fred walking around without him. Why not George? He was quiet a long moment. Because of the punchline, he said. The the punchline. The line Fred said, "Tell my brother the punchline was worth it. I do not know which brother. I have never known which brother. I have spent seven years turning that sentence over trying to work out which of them he meant and I cannot. Percy because Percy had come to them late. Ron because Ron was his youngest brother and he adored him. Charlie, Bill, George. Of course, George. Of course, it was probably George. But he broke off. His hand on the table had curled very slightly into a loose fist. If I go to George and I say the line to him and it was not meant for him. If I take from George the last words his brother might have sent to someone else. I do not know how to undo that. Do you understand? Once I say it to George, the sentence belongs to him. It cannot then belong to Ron or Percy or Charlie or Bill. I would be choosing. I would be choosing on Fred's behalf. I do not have the right to choose on Fred's behalf. She stared at him. She stared at him with a hand halfway to her teacup, and her breath caught somewhere beneath her collarbone because she had been prepared for a great many answers to her question, a great many forms of cowardice and self-p protection and malfoy pride. and she had not been prepared for this answer, which was not any of those things, which was a kind of fidelity to a dead boy's last words so scrupulous it had kept a man silent for seven years. "Draco," she said. "Yes, you absolute." She did not finish. She did not know how to finish. She laughed, one short, startled breath of a laugh that had nothing funny in it, and pressed her fingers to her mouth, and she saw his eyes widen a fraction because he had not, she thought, been laughed at in that way in a great while. You have been punishing yourself, she said, for seven years. Because you would not presume to tell one brother something that might have been meant for another. Draco. Draco. You could have said the line to all of them. You could have said he said to tell his brother, and I do not know which. You could have put it in their hands. You did not have to carry it. You carried it because you decided you did not have the right to hand it over. Yes, he said as though this was self-evident, as though she had restated the problem rather than solved it. Because I did not. You did? I did not. Who gave you the authority to decide you did not? He opened his mouth. He closed it again. For a long moment, his face did a thing she had never seen it do. A small fracturing at the edges, a crack running up from the mouth toward the eyes, quickly caught and held. He looked down at his tea. "I was not in a position," he said very quietly. "At 18, just out of a war, I had fought on the wrong side to walk into the burrow and claim a dying boy's last words. I could not have done it. I do not think they would have believed me. I do not think I would have believed me in their place. But now, now is not then. No, she said, "Now is not then, and you are not 18. And I am sitting across from you and I believe you and I will go with you." He looked up. You will? If you want to tell George. When you want to tell George, I will go with you. I will sit in the room. I will say what I saw in the cemetery. I will say what you told me. You will not have to stand in Molly Weasley's kitchen alone with a 7-year-old sentence in your mouth. Do you understand me? That is what I am saying. His face did the thing again, the small fracturing, and this time he did not quite catch it. His hand on the table unfolded from its fist and his fingers spread. And then slowly, slowly, the way a wounded thing comes toward a hand held out. His hand moved across the tablecloth and stopped beside hers. He did not take her hand. He did not touch her hand. He laid his own an inch from hers, palm down, fingers long and pale on the white cloth, and left it there. She looked at his hand. She looked at the ring mark on his finger, where the silver had been for long enough to leave a faint band of paler skin. She looked at the small scar across the knuckle of his second finger, a thin white line she had never been close enough to notice before. She looked at the slight uneven tremor in the index finger, so small he probably did not know it was there. She laid her hand beside his on the cloth, not touching, mirroring, palm down, an inch of white linen between them. The radio sang. The heaters ticked. The white-haired man at the counter turned a page of his newspaper and did not notice the two hands on the table at the back of the cafe or the way the light from the lamp above them fell on two sets of knuckles held a breath apart. I am afraid, Draco said. He said it to the table. I am afraid that if I tell him, he will not want the line. I am afraid he will tell me to take it away again. I am afraid he will say, "You should not have come, Malfoy. You should not have lived. You should not have." He stopped. He did not finish. He might, Hermione said. I won't lie to you. He might. Yes. And if he does, we will survive it. You and I, we will survive it together if that is what happens. But Draco, she let her breath out. He might not. He looked at her at last. His eyes were not dry this time. They were not weeping. They were only bright, very bright, the gray gone translucent in the low yellow light. and she saw in them something she had not seen in a Malfoyy's face in all the years she had known him. A hope so careful it was almost not hope at all, only the bare readiness of a man who had spent seven years not hoping, and was tonight for the first time allowing himself the dangerous luxury of not being certain. His little finger moved on the cloth. It moved half an inch, no more. It came to rest against the side of her hand. Neither of them spoke. The waitress came and went. The bell above the door chimed as the woman with the child in the wool hat left, and the cold of the January street blew in for a moment and was gone. And the heaters ticked up a degree to compensate. And somewhere on the radio, a new song began with a slow piano and a voice singing about a light left on at a window. They sat with their hands touching along the edge of one finger, and neither of them, for a long and particular stretch of time, looked down. The weeks that followed did not belong to the cemetery. They still went there, both of them, on Sundays. It had become a thing neither of them could have named, but neither of them considered stopping. But the cemetery ceased to be the only place they met. There were Wednesdays at the Blue Heron, and then a Thursday when she found him waiting for her outside the ministry at 6, collar up against the sleet, asking if she had eaten. There was a Saturday afternoon in the reading room of a muggle library in Bloomsbury, where they had both, by some private embarrassment, chosen to do the same research on the same date, and had looked up from opposite ends of the long oak table, and seen each other at precisely the same instant. There was the evening he left a book for her at the porter's lodge of her building. A slim volume of order, no note, no name on the fly leaf, only her address on the parcel in a thin, careful hand she would have known at 50 paces. They did not touch. That was the thing. 8 weeks after the first tea in the cafe, 10 weeks after her gloved hand had met his gloved hand on Fred's grave, and they had not touched. Not really, not in any way her body could gather up and keep. The little finger against the side of the hand had been the high water mark, and they had both since then retreated an inch or two, as though the sight of the tide line had frightened them. She was frightened. She admitted this to herself in the small hours of a February morning, lying on her side in the dark with a sleet on the window, and she thought the word frightened and did not flinch from it. She was frightened of what she was beginning to feel, and she was frightened of the possibility that he felt it, too. And she was frightened of the possibility that he did not. and she was frightened most of all of the thing they had both been carefully not saying for 2 months that they had not yet gone to George. They had spoken of going. They had spoken of it in the way one speaks of a difficult journey one has not yet packed for. When I am steadier, he had said once, his hand around a cup of tea, not looking at her. when I can do it without. He had not finished. He had not needed to finish. She had nodded. And the weeks had gone on, and the going to George had receded, and something else had taken up the space the going to George had been meant to fill, and the something else was the two of them, and the something else was more frightening than the errand they were postponing. and she understood with a slow horror and a slower joy that she had become. In some sense, she had not yet measured the place he came to instead of the grave. On the last Sunday of February, he did not come to the cemetery. She waited an hour. She sat in the grass at Fred's feet in a thin cold rain, and the hinge sigh of the gate did not come, and the boots on the gravel did not come. And at a quarter 2, she got up stiffly from the wet earth, and walked back to the village, and stood under the awning of the post office, and tried to work out, without letting the thing in her chest get entirely out of hand, what the non-arrival meant. He had told her two Wednesdays earlier the muggle address. He had told her at the end of an evening, standing at the door of the cafe, as though handing over a key. If you ever, in case of anything, it is a flat in a building off Marchman Street, number 42, the top floor, the top flat. No name on the bell. Press and I will come down. He had not said come. He had said if you ever. She had not used the address. She had kept it folded in the back of her diary the way one keeps an emergency bank note. She apparated to an alley two streets away and walked. The building was a narrow Victorian terrace of syi brick with a row of bells beside the black painted door. And as he had said, no name on the top one. She pressed it. She waited. She pressed it again. Nothing. She stood with her hand on the cold brass and a cold traveling up her spine that had nothing to do with the weather. And she was on the point of turning back when the door opened from inside. and a young woman with a baby on her hip looked out at her inquiringly. "I I'm here for the top flat," Hermione said. "I don't. There's no answer on the bell." "Oh, he'll be in," the woman said, kind and curious. "I've not seen him go out all week, poor soul. Go on up, love. The bell's been off since December." Hermione went up. The stairs were narrow and creaked. four flights. At the top, there was a single door painted the same black as the front door with a small brass number 42. She knocked. She waited. She knocked again. From the other side, she heard faintly a movement, a chair scraped back, perhaps a footstep, and then silence, and then finally the click of a lock. He opened the door. He was in shirt sleeves, the shirt rumpled as though he had slept in it, the top button undone, and the cuffs loose. His hair was unbrushed. His eyes, when they found her, were bright in the bad way, the fever bright way, and the skin of his face had gone white, where it was usually only pale. He looked at her without seeming for a heartbeat to understand what he was looking at. "You weren't there," she said. No, I waited. I Yes, I'm sorry. May I come in? He stepped aside. He did not quite step aside enough. She had to brush past him to enter, and for an instant her shoulder was against his chest, and she felt through the cotton of his shirt the wrong heat of him, the heat of a body running several degrees above where it ought to be. Draco, you're ill. I am all right. You are burning. I am all right, Granger. He shut the door behind her and leaned his back against it, and she turned and looked at the flat he had never shown her. A single long room under a sloping roof, an armchair, a desk, a wall of books in no particular order, a narrow bed at the far end, unmade. A small kitchen behind a half partition. No photographs, no flowers, a kettle on the hob gone cold by the look of it hours ago. She took off her coat. She laid it over the back of the armchair. She walked to the kitchen and filled the kettle and put it on. And she did all of this without asking him. And he watched her do it from the door with an expression she did not turn her head to read. Sit down, she said over her shoulder. Draco, sit. He sat. She made tea. She brought it to him in the armchair and she knelt. She knelt because the armchair was low and the foottool was out of reach. And because kneeling, she was beginning to understand was what her body did around him when it did not know what else to do. She knelt in front of him and put the cup in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it and held them there until she was satisfied he would not drop it. His fingers were hot. How long have you been like this since Wednesday? Perhaps Thursday. 4 days. I lost the thread of the days. Has anyone been up here? No. Has anyone known? No. She sat back on her heels. She looked at him. He was looking at the cup in his hands with the deliberate, wavering concentration of a man for whom the cup had become a difficult object. Why didn't you send for me? She said. I I am not in the habit of Draco. He looked up. His gray eyes were wet bright with fever and with something else, and his mouth opened and closed, and she watched a dozen careful sentences rise in him and die on the way to his tongue, and at last he said, very low. I did not know that I was allowed to. She did not move for a long moment. Then she reached up and took the cup out of his hand and set it on the floor beside her knee. And she took his two hands in her two hands and she held them and she looked up at him and she said, "You are allowed to. You are allowed to, Draco. Do you hear me? You are allowed to send for me. You are allowed to knock on my door at 3:00 in the morning. You are allowed to write me a letter that says only come and no other word. That is what this is. That is what we have been doing for 2 months. Do you understand? He closed his eyes. A tear broke loose and tracked slowly down his cheek. He did not move to wipe it. He did not seem, she thought, to know it had happened. The fever had stripped away the parts of him that ordinarily caught such things before they fell. "I do not know how to live as the person he died for," he said. It came out of him the way old water comes out of a well that has been covered too long, slow at first, and then a rush, and then a silence after, as though he had surprised himself by the quantity of it. He did not open his eyes. I have tried, Granger. I have tried. I have kept my head down, and I have not drunk to excess. And I have done my work, and I have paid my mother's bills. And I have walked to that grave every Sunday for seven years. And I still do not know. I do not know what he saw that made him push me clear. I do not know what he expected me to do with the years. I do not know what a life looks like that would be worth the life he spent on it. I have spent seven years thinking that any day now I would find out and I have not found out and I am so tired. His voice broke properly this time. Broke open. I am so tired. Hermayan. She was up off her heels before she had decided to be. She was kneeling higher on both knees between his knees in the chair, and she was taking his face in her two hands. The first time she had touched his bare skin, and the fever of it was startling, the dry burning heat of it beneath her palms, and she was turning his face up to her own. "Look at me." He opened his eyes. "Listen to me, Draco. Listen." He did not push you clear so that you could earn it. He pushed you clear because that was what he was. He was a person who, with half a wall coming down on him, saw a boy he did not like and chose to live his last second as someone who saved that boy anyway. You do not owe him an earned life. You owe him a lived one. Do you understand the difference, do you? His hands came up and closed around her wrists, not to push her away, to hold on. He held on the way a drowning man holds on, which is to say with all of his grip and none of his strength. And she felt the fever in his palms and the tremor in his fingers and the pulse in the heel of his thumb against her skin. And she kept his face turned to hers. And she did not let him look away. A lived one, she said. Draco, a lived one, not an earned one. I don't know how you do. I don't. You do, she said, and her own voice cracked and she did not care. You are living one now. You have been living one for seven years, whether you knew it or not. You have paid your mother's bills and you have done your work and you have walked to that grave in the rain every Sunday of your life. And you have, you absolute impossible man. You have let me in. And that is a lived life, Draco. That is a lived one. She stopped because her throat had closed, and because his hands had tightened on her wrists, and because his face in her hands had lowered a fraction, and her own face had lowered to meet it, and the space between their mouths had narrowed to a breath, and narrowed further to nothing, and then a log shifted in the great behind her with a small, distinct sound, and she started and he started and the breath they had almost closed opened back up to half an inch. And they stayed there with her palms on his face and his hands on her wrists and his forehead tilting slowly down to rest against her forehead. She closed her eyes. She felt his breath on her mouth. She felt the fever of his skin and the wet track on his cheek against her thumb. And she felt very clearly, as clearly as she had ever felt anything in her life, that she was not going to close the last half inch tonight. Not because she did not want to, not because he did not want her to, but because he was ill and frightened, and seven years passed weeping, and this was not, however much her body protested otherwise, the kiss either of them would be able to carry afterwards if it happened now. She tilted her head and pressed her mouth instead to his forehead. She held it there. She held it there for a long, long moment, her lips against the hot, dry skin above his brow, and she felt him shudder once under her hands, a single deep full body exhale, the kind a body gives when it has been bracing against something for a very long time, and has at last, for one instant stopped. "Sleep," she said into his hair. "I am here. I am not going. Sleep, Draco. His hands on her wrists loosened. She eased his head back against the chair. She pulled the blanket from the foot of the unmade bed and drew it over him. She knelt by the chair with one hand over his on the armrest, and the fire ticked, and the rain began again on the skylight above the bed. And sometime in the hour after midnight, his breathing evened and lengthened. And she stayed kneeling and did not move and did not sleep and did not for the whole long night once let go of his hand. The fever broke before dawn. She felt it break beneath her palm. The skin of his hand, which had been burning all night, cooled slowly over the course of an hour. and a fine damp came up on it, and his breathing changed from the shallow catch of illness to the deeper rhythm of ordinary sleep. She did not move. She knelt by the armchair with the blanket pulled up to his chin and her hand over his on the armrest, and she watched the gray come into the skylight above the bed. and she thought about nothing at all or about everything which at that hour amounted to the same thing. He woke at 7. He woke by degrees the way a man wakes who has been properly ill. A small frown, a swallow, the lashes lifting, a brief confused look at the ceiling while he worked out where he was. And then a slower, more careful look down at his own hand on the armrest, and at the hand over his, and at the woman kneeling beside the chair, with her cheek resting on the blanket, and her eyes open, and her face very tired and very quiet in the pale morning. He did not say anything at first. He looked at her for a long time. Then he turned his hand under hers and laced his fingers through her fingers and closed them, and she felt the difference at once. The fever gone, the grip steady, the small tremor that had been in him for weeks quieted. "You stayed," he said. "Yes, all night." "Yes." He closed his eyes again briefly, and she watched his throat move as he swallowed. Thank you. Don't. I must. You mustn't. Not for this. Not ever for this. He opened his eyes and looked at her, and a small crooked thing that was almost a smile moved at the corner of his mouth. The first real one she had ever seen on his face, she thought, though it was so faint she could almost have imagined it. It was there and it was gone. And what was left behind it was a look so undefended that she had to drop her eyes to the blanket for a moment to bear it. I will make you tea, she said, which was not what she meant. What she meant was something she did not yet have the words for. He understood she thought what she meant. He let her hand go. She made tea. She made toast. She found in the small, tidy cupboards of his kitchen the things one found in the kitchens of solitary men. Tinned soup, a half empty jar of marmalade, a loaf of bread only a day past its prime. And she put together a breakfast of sorts and carried it on a tray to the armchair. He ate slowly. He ate all of it. Color came back into his face by small increments, and by 9:00 he was sitting up properly, and had washed his face at the sink, and had combed his hair with his fingers. And he looked to her enormous relief, like a man again, and not like a candle that had been guttering in a draft. At 10, he said without preamble. We should go today, she set down her cup to George. Yes, Draco. You have been ill 4 days. You are not. I am ready. I am. Hermione. I have been afraid for seven years. And I was afraid last week. And I was afraid yesterday. And last night I stopped being afraid. And I do not know how long that will last. And I would like to do it while it lasts. Please. She looked at him. His eyes were clear. The fever bright had gone out of them, and what was left was a steadiness she had not seen in him before. Not the brittle composure of the cemetery, not the careful restraint of the cafe, but a thing that looked almost like peace, or at least like the ground on which peace might eventually be built. "All right," she said. "Today I will send an owl ahead. George should not be ambushed. No. She wrote the note at his desk. She kept it short. George, may I come by at 3? I need to speak with you. I am bringing someone. Please trust me. H. She sealed it and called his owl, a sleek gray creature on a perch by the window, and sent it into the London morning. They did not speak much that afternoon while they waited for the hour. He dressed properly, the charcoal sweater, the dark coat, the silver ring back on his right hand. And she sat by the window and watched the pigeons on the roof across the street and ran through over and over the shape of the words they would say. At 3, they apparated to the lane behind the shop. Weasley's Wizard Whezes stood at the bottom of Diagon Alley with its preposterous orange frontage and its revolving window display. And on a Monday afternoon in late February, the shop was quiet. A few school children on halfterm browsing the sking snack boxes, a tired looking mother at the till with a catalog. George was behind the counter. He looked up as the bell rang, and his face did a small, not quite managed thing when he saw who was behind Hermione, and he set down the quill he was holding and came around the counter. "Upstairs," he said. He did not say hello. He did not look at Draco. He led them through the back of the shop and up the narrow staircase to the flat above. the flat he had shared with Fred and after Fred had shared with no one. And he shut the door and turned around and stood with his back to it and looked at Draco Malfoy in his sitting room for the first time in seven years. Well, George said, "Granger, you would better tell me why he is here." "He's going to tell you," Hermione said. I am here because he asked me to be here. George, sit down, please. George did not sit down. He folded his arms. He waited. Draco stood in the middle of the small sitting room in his dark coat, and Hermione saw his hand move once to the silver ring on his finger and then fall still. He did not turn the ring. He did not turn it. And she understood that he was making himself not turn it. And she thought, "Oh my love." And the word arrived in her mind unbidden and did not leave. On the 2nd of May, Draco said, "In the seventh floor corridor near the tapestry of the witches, a section of the upper gallery came down. I was beneath it. Your brother pushed me clear." George did not move. He did not clear himself. Draco said his legs were under the stones. Percy came and Percy sent me away and I ran. Before I ran, your brother said a thing to me. And I have never known which of his brothers he meant it for. And because I did not know which of you he meant it for, I have said it to none of you. I am sorry. I have carried the sentence for seven years. I have come every Sunday to the grave. I could not. His voice thinned. He steadied it. I could not work out how to give it to one of you without stealing it from the others. I was wrong. I am giving it now to you because you asked last autumn who the other person had been. He said, he said, "Tell my brother the punchline was worth it." George's face did not change. George's face did not change for so long that Hermione thought with a lurch of fear that they had miscalculated, that the seven-year silence was about to be answered with a silence of its own. And then George's mouth twisted, and his shoulders came up, and he put one hand flat against the door behind him to hold himself up, and a sound came out of him that she had not heard come out of a Weasley in seven years. A rough, torn sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob, and entirely without shame. "Oh, Fred," George said. "Oh, you absolute." He did not finish. He put both hands over his face. He stood like that with his back against the door and his face in his hands for a long minute. Hermayan did not go to him. She had learned in seven years of loving the Weasley's that there were griefs one did not interrupt. Draco stood very still in the middle of the room. He was white around the mouth. When at last George dropped his hands, he was not weeping, not quite. His eyes were wet, but his face was George's face again, long and freckled and tired. And he looked at Draco and he said the punchline. He meant me. Of course he meant me. He always meant me. I did not know. No, you couldn't have. The joke. Merlin Malfoy. The joke was It was a stupid running thing between us since we were 11 about Never mind. What about? You couldn't have known. I am. He drew in a long breath. He let it out. I am glad you did not choose. I am glad you waited. I am glad you. I am glad you came today. He pushed off the door. He crossed the room. He did not hug Draco. Hermione would not have expected that. Not today. Perhaps not ever. But he put his hand on Draco's shoulder, heavy and brief, and he squeezed once, and he said, "Thank you for running, you get. He would have wanted you to." Draco's composure broke then, not visibly, only a small unsteady movement of the shoulder under George's hand. A single deep breath drawn and held. George felt it, Hermione thought. George let him have it. George looked past him to her and gave her the briefest nod. A nod that said, "I have him. It is all right. Thank you." And she felt her own composure give way in turn and had to press her fingers hard against her mouth for a moment before she could speak. They stayed an hour. They drank tea. George asked questions, simple, specific ones about the corridor and the wall and Percy. And Draco answered them in a voice that grew steadier as it went. At the end, George walked them down to the shop. He stopped Draco at the door. He said, "You will come to Sunday dinner this week at the burrow. I will tell mom before you come. I will tell her in my way. She will not hex you at the table. I promise." "Probably." His mouth twitched. "Probably not." "Yes," Draco said. "I will come." They walked out of the shop into the blue February dusk and they did not speak until they had turned the corner. And then Hermione stopped in the middle of the cobbled street and turned to him and put her hands to her face and laughed. Laughed properly. Laughed for the first time in a great while. A shaky bright laugh that came out of her like water that had been held behind a dam. and he stood and watched her. And the look on his face was a thing she would carry in her private mind for the rest of her life. "Come here," she said. "He came." She stood on her toes and she put her hands on either side of his face as she had done the night before in the flat under the fever. And he put his hands on her waist as easily as though he had been putting them there for years. And she kissed him. She kissed him slowly. She kissed him the way one kisses a person one has been without quite admitting it. in love with for a great while, with her whole attention, with her whole mouth, with her eyes closed and her fingers in the fine hair at the back of his neck. She felt him make a small sound against her lips, a surprised, grateful sound, and she felt his hands tighten at her waist and then gentle. And she felt him kiss her back the way she had kissed him. Slowly, slowly, the kiss of a man who was not going to be rushed. Not for anything, not after he had waited this long. When they broke apart, she kept her forehead against his. "Hello," she said. "Hello, I love you." He closed his eyes, a small private smile, the second she had ever seen on his face, and this one more sure than the first. I love you, Hermione. They went home that evening together to his flat above Marchman Street because it was closer because the fire was laid because neither of them had just then any desire to be apart. And they sat on the rug in front of the small coal fire and ate toast with butter and talked about nothing at all. and his hand did not leave hers for the whole evening. A year later, on the 2nd of May, they were married in the garden at the burrow. Molly made the cake. George was Draco's witness, which no one who had known them at Hogwarts would have predicted, and which no one who had been in the sitting room above the shop that February afternoon would have doubted. The vows was spoken under an arch of white peies. Hermayan had insisted and had explained why, and Molly had not cried when she heard the story, but only nodded and said, "Yes, the white ones. Of course, the white ones." They kept the Sunday ritual. Every Sunday afternoon for the rest of their lives, they walked up the path of the Ottery St. catchpole cemetery together and they knelt in the grass at Fred's grave, both of them now side by side, hands laced between them. And Draco laid a single sprig of rosemary on the stone for remembrance. and Hermione laid whatever the garden was doing that week, and they stayed a quarter of an hour, and they left together through the gate with its familiar metallic sigh. The kneeling was not grief anymore by then. It was something else. It was the posture their love had chosen for itself in the beginning and had never seen any reason to change. And the grass beneath their knees each Sunday was the same grass. And the you stood over them. And the rooks called from the hedro. and Fred. Fred, who had laughed, who had pushed a boy he did not like out of the path of a falling wall, who had said, "Tell my brother the punchline was worth it." Fred was remembered every week by the two people in the world who had most reasoned to remember him and who had found in the remembering each other. So that was the story. I wanted to say something before you go. When I was writing this, I kept thinking about one small scene. Not the kiss, not the wedding, not even the big moment in the shop above Diagon Alley. I kept thinking about the cross, about two people kneeling in wet grass, not touching, not speaking, just being there week after week. Because I think that is what law really looks like sometimes. Not fireworks, not grand speeches, just a person who shows up, a person who sits with you in your worst silence, a person who does not run from the sin you are carrying. Draco carried a secret for seven years alone. He thought he had to. He thought no one could hold it with him. And then someone did that is a whole story really. If you are carrying something heavy right now, I hope someone kneels beside you. I hope you let them. I hope you do not wait seven years. And if someone you love is acquired for too long, maybe go and sit with them. You do not need the right words. You just need to stay. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here with me today. If this story touched you, please like it, leave a comment, tell me what you felt. I read every single one. And I will see you in the next story. Take care of yourself and take care of each other.