Roman Holiday

Chapter Eleven

They emerged into the afternoon light, blinking. The crowd had begun to disperse; Draco took a quick look around to make sure no one was looking their way and yanked the Invisibility Cloak from around their shoulders. Hermione stared at him as if transfixed.

“Oh, God,” she said, and sat down hard on the stone steps. After an awkward moment or two of towering over her, he sat down too.

“What?” he demanded. She laughed, a little shakily.

“It’s just bizarre,” she said. “Up until this vacation, I’d have figured you and Snape for the last two people on earth who’d want to touch me. Then last night, he cops a feel - and you and I do more kissing in 48 hours than I’ve done with anybody else in the last year and a half. It’s like I’m not even me anymore, like I’m my own evil twin. Doppelganger Hermione, the Slytherin Magnet.” She shot him an apologetic look. “No offense meant.”

“None taken.” He arched an eyebrow at her. “You don’t kiss like you’re new to it.”

She blushed. “Krum,” she said, and he nodded. It made sense.

He broke the short silence that followed with a heavy sigh. She looked at him enquiringly, and he made a what-can-you-do gesture with his hands. “Not like this is my most shining moment, either,” he said. “I mean, what does it matter if I don’t hate you, if you don’t hate me? What if we do hit it off? What good does it do?”

“Your father,” she said quietly. He tilted his head in assent.

“Him, yes. And the Slytherins, yes, though to be perfectly frank I could care less about what they think. Inbred, simpering idiots, the lot.” He glared at her. “You’re the one who should worry, Granger. You’re the one with the pack of friends, real friends, the twin bodyguards who’d see me burn in the street before they’d spit on me. You’re the brains of their outfit, the voice of restraint. You keep them from sending themselves up in flames. You think they’re going to like the thought of their chaste goddess swapping spit with the son of a Death Eater?”

She laughed. It was the last thing he’d expected.

“What’s so funny?” he snarled, and she slid her palm down his jawline in a sudden, playful caress.

“You are,” she said. “Playing at being a bad boy, when your heart’s beating time with the Age of Chivalry.” The laughter faded from her gaze, and he found himself caught in those perceptive caramel eyes. “Don’t worry about Harry and Ron,” she said. “Or about my precious Gryffindor reputation. We’re not back at Hogwarts yet, and I’m not as fragile as I look.”

“I’ve hurt you,” he said somberly. “Before. I’ve made you cry.”

“You’ve done what you had to do. I understand that.” Because she couldn’t take that sudden look of vulnerability that had come over him, Hermione pulled him to his feet and made a great show of dusting him off. “Let’s not dwell on it,” she said again. “We’ll have to sooner or later, but right now let’s just be happy we’re here together. Okay?”

“You’re the strangest girl,” he said. “Three kisses and Pansy was picking out her bridesmaids’ colors. And you’re standing here telling me you want to have a fling.”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “If you want to call it that. I was thinking of it as a bit of a test run. Under controlled circumstances.”

He laughed. “You think like Snape. That’s probably why he’s hot for you.” His gaze went to the bustling, sunlit piazza. “And you call these controlled circumstances?”

She rolled her eyes. “Malfoy. Stop talking, for God’s sake, and come ON. I want to show you something else.”

“More art?”

“Sort of. You’ll see.”

**

They backtracked toward the pensione, back to the Piazza Barberini, and turned onto the Via Veneto. Hermione deftly squeezed the motorino in between a couple of taxicabs, parked it, and gestured across the street. “There.” Draco stared blankly at it.

“It’s another church.”

She looked secretive and highly amused. “Yeah. But wait until you see inside.”

“Do we need the Invisibility Cloak for this, too?”

“Unless you want to pay to get in.” She frowned. “And it’s possible we might run into a wizard in this place. Might not be a bad idea.”

Duly concealed, they slipped into the little church - the Santa Maria della Concezione, Draco saw - and past the monk taking donations. “Where are we going?”

“The crypt,” she said. “Come on.”

The crypt wasn’t Pantheonic in size - it consisted of only a few small chapels. Nevertheless, Hermione had to clap her hand over Draco’s mouth to keep him from gasping aloud.

The whole place was decorated in bones. Human bones.

Stacks of grinning skulls. Pyramids of femurs and tibia. Giant murals and frescoes made entirely of finger joints and wrist bones and vertebrae. Entire, perfectly preserved human skeletons.

“Bloody hell,” he breathed into her hand. “What IS this place? Who did it?”

“Capuchin monks,” she murmured. “About four thousand of them. Willingly donated to the cause. These guys used to give entire sermons with a human skull in one hand and a candle in the other.”

“Unbelievable,” he muttered, and dragged her over to one of the propped-up skeletons. A neatly-lettered sign was wedged into its dead hands:

“Quello che voi siete noi eravamo; quello che noi siamo voi sarete.”

“Translation?” he queried into her ear. Hermione fought the urge to lean into that warm, intimate tickle.

“That which you are, we were; that which we are, you will be.”

They stood looking at each other for a moment or two, and Draco realized with a start that she’d meant for him to read this - this morbid little psychodrama of a burial ground had a blunt, but very valid point.

Sooner or later, he’d die. But he wasn’t dead yet.

Point taken, Hermione, he thought, and leaned forward to kiss her nose. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but this is putting me in the mood for spareribs. Is it time for dinner yet?”

“You’re sick, Malfoy,” she said, but laughed anyway. “We’re only a couple of blocks from the pensione. Let’s get dressed up before we go out.”

**

They went to another café Giulia had shown her that first week in the city, down near the Trevi Fountain, and dined on prosciutto-wrapped melon cubes, grilled lamb shanks, and ravioli stuffed with spiced pumpkin and smothered with cream. No minimum drinking age in this city - the proprietor, sensing a pair of heavy-tipping young lovers, poured red wine into their goblets and kept up the refills with a vengeance. By the time they pushed back their chairs, they were more than a little light-headed.

“Where to now?” Draco asked, and Hermione shook her head to clear it.

“Outdoor concerts down by the shore,” she said, running a tentative tongue along her teeth. “You like jazz?”

**

He did, Draco discovered, at least this kind of jazz: cool and tight and topped off with a smooth dollop of crooning soprano saxophone, it seemed to insinuate itself into his wine-heavy head and spread out on the inside. They’d swiped a blanket from their pensione and carried it out underneath the Invisibility Cloak (possibly, he reflected, the most practical birthday present he’d ever gotten, and yes, that included the broomstick). He leaned back into the softness that was Hermione, closed his eyes, and smiled.

He could still see stars.

It was early morning before they trailed back to the pensione. They were sober now, but still groggy and lethargic. If Hermione hadn’t needed to stop to remove a stone from her shoe, they would have run right into him.

“Look,” Draco whispered, and pointed across the street. Hermione gasped and shrank farther back into the shadows.

Lucius Malfoy was standing on the pensione’s front steps. And he didn’t look happy.

TBC