Roman Holiday

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Long before Draco arrived at her door, Hermione reached this conclusion: something had to give. She couldn’t keep sneaking around like this anymore.

Some women might be cut out to play femme fatale, she thought, but she certainly wasn’t one of them. And this Lady Guinevere thing was getting old, fast - once you factored in the late nights, the missed sleep, the multiple lies and evasions she’d either perpetrated outright or been party to, and the lost study time, the Simple Joys of Maidenhood got pretty damn complicated. Exponentially so.

Besides, Hermione rather fancied herself more a Maid Marian. Or, if you wanted to get poetic, a Pallas Athene.

She shook her hair back from her face - it was getting long again; she’d have to stop in at the Wand and Razor for a trim tomorrow in Hogsmeade - and considered her options.

The Illuminata was three weeks away from finished, but the most labor-intensive steps - the distillation of the lemon balm and the painstaking addition of the phoenix ashes - were finished. For all its reputation as a difficult potion to brew, the actual process was rather straightforward. Hermione suspected that its supposed difficulty was mostly due to Palestrina’s tricky encoding, not to mention his relative obscurity within the wizarding world - now that she’d actually made some, everything she’d read about it sounded suspiciously like speculation.

Had the … um, side effects of its brewing been more widely known, she had no doubt that the translation would have been common knowledge for at least a century now. Of course, in that case the Ministry would probably have deemed it a controlled substance, like all other known aphrodisiacs, and she wouldn’t have been able to study it. So it was just as well.

You’d better believe that her lips were sealed, she thought, and smiled grimly.

Twenty more days of simmering, a wrap-up session to add the final ingredients, and she’d be finished. Once she’d copied over her notes and handed them in, her Tuesday and Thursday evenings with Snape would come to an end, as well.

Hermione thought that was probably for the best.

Lemon explosions were all very well, don’t get her wrong. And she didn’t regret the experience in the least - on the contrary, she figured that every young witch should have an Aphrodisiac Accident at least once in her life.

None of that changed the fact that sleeping with your professor was indescribably tacky, especially when the primary catalyst for doing so was based almost exclusively on physical heat, rather than emotional or mental affinity. She respected Snape, in some ways even admired him, but what had happened last night was clearly an aberration, not a love match. As far as she could tell, he didn’t even particularly like her.

Not that it was really an issue. She’d bet her grade point average that Snape was mortally embarrassed by what had happened last night, never mind that dreamy-cum-pleasant look on his face in Potions today. That wasn’t real - it was just chemicals. Take away the clouds of gently simmering lemon happiness, and she wouldn’t even get from him the desperate, aching tenderness that he’d given her, along with the accompanying roller-coaster ride to Heaven. If the Illuminata wasn’t a factor, they’d be back to the same wary, heated, half-resentful truce in which they’d existed since their encounter in Rome.

If nothing else, the situation raised the intriguing question of the Illuminata’s usefulness. It would be interesting, Hermione thought, to examine the effects of the Elixir itself, once it was finished. One suspected that a dose of the actual substance would prove more permanent, if not as purely euphoric, as the inhalation of the fumes. Even so, it was bound to wear off eventually, wasn’t it?

And then - if you were right back where you started before you swallowed it - why bother in the first place? Sure, ‘tis better to have loved and lost, and all that, but that was poetry, not real life. If all the Illuminata offered was a temporary lift of earthly cares, it was no better than a psychedelic, it would never do anyone the lasting kind of good she’d intended for it to do, and she ought to dump it now.

She called up her childhood memory of the Missa Papae Marcelli - snug in her pillows, her dad sitting next to her like a big warm boulder, and both of them nestled in midair as if cradled in the palm of a large, benevolent hand.

Not shocked to leave the ground, oddly enough. Not giddy with euphoria. Not in the throes of mad laughter.

Calmed. Comforted. Warmed.

If she thought hard enough, that feeling was still with her. Of course, it was aurally linked to the conduit of the music - maybe that was why.

Wait a minute.

Hermione frowned, grappling with a new thought. What if the Illuminata didn’t affect the drinker, as much as what the drinker did?

Now that was something worth pondering.

**

A soft knock on her door, followed by a slice of brighter light from the stairwell just wide enough to admit a relatively slender Lancelot. Hermione smiled in the door’s direction and felt a pleasant sense of anticipation curl through her.

She was feeling better about the Draco situation. His half-erased declaration was still an issue, but - in her post-Potions frame of mind - more intriguing than unsettling. She’d pondered it all through dinner, as a matter of fact.

He loved her. And was afraid to say so.

Draco Malfoy. Hard as nails. Cold as ice. Mean as sin.

The name-caller. The daddy’s boy. The bigot. The sneak.

Draco, who’d risked death-by-tourist to kiss her in the Sistine Chapel. Who’d fed her tiramisu with his fingers. Who’d inhaled freedom like oxygen and then sacrificed his security in trade for it. Who had, against all odds, chosen the Light over the Dark, even before he’d discovered his seemingly charmed life to be cursed.

Draco, whose pure wizard’s blood was running in her veins. Wasn’t that one for the storybooks?

She watched the Invisibility Cloak come off and narrowed her eyes in appreciation. No doubt about it, he was handsome; even when he was stalking around with a scowl on his face and his pretty mouth curled into a sneer, the Gryffindor girls shot him second glances under their eyelashes. In the soft light of her bedroom, with his hair slightly mussed from the cloak and his face alight with danger and expectation, his Prince Charming readings rocketed off the charts.

“Hi,” he said, and surprisingly enough, stood there looking a little shy. She raised her eyebrows.

“Hi.”

“I got your note.”

Hermione sighed inwardly. Look at him now, and you’d never believe that he’d conspired to kill a hippogriff.

This whole thing was so damn confusing.

“I liked the poem,” she said. “The Arnold was nice, too. But I’d take free verse over metered, any day of the week.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He dropped the cloak by the foot of the bed and took a step nearer. “What did Potter have to say about it?”

Harry? Hermione frowned. What did Harry have to do with this?

“He said it was sentimental, overrated, and would never have gotten published if her husband weren’t famous.” At his disbelieving snort, her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

Draco slid onto the bed beside her. “Because,” he said, “he watched me walk across your common room. I could have sworn that he saw me.”

Hermione bit her lip. “Did you open the Fat Lady’s portrait by yourself? That might have attracted his attention.”

“No - followed a bunch of second-years in.” He kicked off his shoes, wrapped his arm around her waist, and yawned. “It was the oddest thing. They all stayed in the common room, and I headed straight up here by myself. He was sitting in a chair by the fire with some papers in his lap, and his eyes trailed me, all the way to the stairs. I half-expected him to come over and start something.”

He shot her a deliberately casual sideways glance. “You didn’t … say anything to him, did you? At breakfast?”

“No, nothing.” Hermione’s jaw had begun to tick alarmingly, but fortunately Draco didn’t notice.

“Hm. I must be paranoid.”

**

No, thought Hermione, ‘paranoia’ isn’t the word I’d choose, exactly. ‘Invasion of privacy’, now - that’s a phrase with a ring to it. I wish Snape had burned that bloody parchment when he had the chance, three years ago.

She was going to have some serious words with The Boy Who Lived, come daybreak.

But that could wait. Being a bookworm had its advantages - chiefly among them at the moment, that no one in their right mind would believe that she was shagging Draco Malfoy in the sanctity of her Gryffindor Tower bedroom. Harry himself might not even believe it; perhaps she could convince him the map had malfunctioned?

Yeah, right.

File under ‘D’ for ‘Discoveries, Inevitable’, she thought, resigned, and forced herself back into the moment. It wasn’t as difficult as one might think -- whatever Draco was doing with his hand right now, it was proving to be a marvelous distraction. She twisted lazily in his arms so she could kiss him back.

“You’re getting good at this,” she murmured. “You must have been practicing.”

“Well, there’s this girl I know,” he muttered in between kisses. “Too smart for her own good. Kisses like a succubus. She’s got me daydreaming about her during Transfiguration.”

Hermione chuckled. “That’s dangerous.”

“Tell me about it.” Draco yanked the front of her robes open and made a low sound of satisfaction in his throat. “My wand slipped to the right this afternoon and Goyle ended up with flippers.” He nuzzled her bare neck. “Of course, opposable thumbs are wasted on him anyway. Can’t you get more naked than this?”

Hermione ran her hands down under his collar and stifled a moan. “Let me see what I can do.”

**

“Morning, Hermione,” Harry said innocently at breakfast. Hermione studied him as coolly as possible; if he knew anything, he wasn’t letting on.

The best defense is a good offense, she told herself, and narrowed her eyes at him.

“Prongs,” she said, by way of a return greeting, and watched with a very nasty sense of satisfaction as a flush spread over his cheeks.

Gotcha, she thought, and reached for the maple syrup. Toast was all well and good, under normal circumstances, but after last night’s athletic endeavors, she needed a bit more of a jump-start. Especially if Potentially Incendiary Revelations were on the schedule for the morning.

Harry was now looking at least as embarrassed as he was troubled, with possibly a soupçon of ‘angry’ somewhere in the mix. Ron glanced from one of them to the other, bemused.

“You two have a fight?”

“Oh, no,” Hermione said airily. “Because Harry would never jump to conclusions before he got his facts straight and say something he’d regret later. Would you, Harry?”

Harry shot her a dark look. “Right,” he said. “Of course, fact is stranger than fiction, they say. Just read the papers.”

“What are you talking about?” Ron asked impatiently. “The Daily Prophet? Harry, there’s nothing even remotely resembling a fact in that newspaper!”

“One might say,” Hermione said thoughtfully, studying her pumpkin juice, “that someone needed to check their facts. To get them straight. If you know what I mean.”

“One might say that,” Harry agreed. “I imagine the library would be useful for that purpose. Don’t you, Hermione?”

Ron’s eyebrows shot up. “Whew,” he said, cramming in the rest of his toast and standing up. “Whatever’s eating the two of you, I’ve got nothing to do with it. Harry, I’ll meet you on the Quidditch pitch later.”

Hermione watched him walk away, mildly surprised. Tact, from Ron? Was the earth moving?

“He might make a decent human being yet,” she murmured, and got a black look from Harry for her trouble. “What? You want to talk about this now?”

“Hole in one,” Harry said shortly, and gestured abruptly toward the staircase. Hermione sighed.

It didn’t look like she was going to get that haircut today, after all.