Roman Holiday

Chapter Sixty

She was dreaming.

The dream was a maze of snow, blinding white-on-white, and the sky above so pale a grey as to make no difference. All white, all still, and only Hermione running, her breath loud and laboured, slipping and panting and clawing at the icy slick walls with her bare hands, her gloves long dropped behind her - the Shadow advancing, and she a small stalked animal with nowhere to hide in her black robes against all that merciless, blank white.

Running and running, until her breath screamed in her lungs - and then, flat up against the unforgiving wall of snow, nowhere-to-go-no-one-to-help, scrabbling in her pockets for a wand that wasn’t there. And him, the Shadow whose face she couldn’t see, black against the corridor of snow, blocking her way out again.

She screamed at him, hit out at him, but he just kept coming. And then she ripped at his mask with her frozen hands and before she could get a good look he turned into Three, not One: one shadowy and dark, with a voice like ice; one fair, with an archangel’s face, who came closer and closer and reached out for her - the beautiful golden one, who was sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.

Which was he now? She couldn’t tell. Panicked, she cried out and twisted away from his touch, pleading with the Third, the Watching One - help me, help me, don’t let him touch me!

They argued, the Watcher and the Archangel, argued in soft voices using words she couldn’t quite hear. And then the Archangel was gone, and it was all white again - but warmer now and soft, with bits of gold light leaking through her closed eyelids.

She was safe.

The Shadow was trapped. She could feel the hammering of his fists against the walls, but he couldn’t get inside, couldn’t find her now. The Archangel had fled weeping away. Only the Watcher remained, and he didn’t touch her at all, just sat solid and dark and didn’t speak, except at the very end, just once.

This doesn’t change anything, you know, he said.

And she wanted to agree, since his voice was so reasonable, so calm: all right, she wanted to say; yes, that’s perfectly sensible.

But she had dropped her voice in the snow, and she couldn’t find it again. Instead, she searched for his hand, strong and warm against the enveloping white, and held on tight until the bright lights came back for her and she didn’t remember any more.

**

Draco ran until he couldn’t run anymore; down the stairs, through the Entrance Hall into the Trophy Room, past a sleepy Morgan and then down down down to the most dark secret place he knew, until he reached Sal’s deserted dungeon apartments and threw himself into a chair. Blood was beating bright and hot behind his eyes, and he was fairly certain that he no longer wanted to kill himself.

He wanted to kill Snape instead.

Snape - sympathetic, oh-so-reasonable Snape - patting his shoulder and talking soft silky sense and all the while laughing in the middle of his head, knowing things Draco didn’t.

Bastard.

And after he was done, after his rival was broken and bleeding in a sticky black heap under his feet, then maybe he’d go after Hermione.

Hermione. His raison d’être, his false angel.

Hermione, who’d warmed his bed and stolen his heart and scared him half to fucking death, thinking she was dead and never coming back. Hermione, for whom he’d forswear King and Country and follow, mindlessly follow, to the ends of the earth.

Hermione, who just five minutes ago had cried in her sleep and cringed away from his hands: help me, help me, don’t let him touch me!, when all he’d really wanted was to make sure she was real, that she wouldn’t be stolen away from him again.

No extra points for guessing the object of her supplications.

If there was an Irony Sweepstakes, Draco thought, he was a shoo-in for the boat and the vacation. “It’s so fucking unfair,” he said aloud bitterly, and jumped when Sal materialised suddenly in the adjoining armchair.

“Why’s that?”

Draco scowled into the fire. “If it were any other girl,” he said, mostly to himself, “there’d be no contest. It’s not like he’s handsome, after all.”

Sal should have looked confused at that, but he seemed to understand perfectly. “Ah,” he said thoughtfully. “And you’d want just ‘any other girl’, would you?”

Another scowl. “Well, no …”

One ghostly eyebrow tilted upward. “And if she were like all the others, you’d still want her? You’d want to be loved for your blond hair and your trust fund, and not for yourself?”

Of course not, but to say so under this kind-but-pointed questioning would be too much of an admission. Draco set his jaw stubbornly. “I’d settle for her loving me at all,” he said, knowing he sounded sulky and hating it. “Just now she cried when I got near her - pulled her hand away from mine. It’s him she wants, not me.”

The other eyebrow shot up. “There’s been more than one man running around in your body today,” Sal pointed out mildly. “Once she wakes up and tells her tale, you might find that she had reason to keep her distance.”

Draco hadn’t thought of that - and now that he had, he wished he hadn’t. After sixteen years with Lucius Malfoy, he knew his father fairly well … and the thought of Hermione helpless under those hands was like ice water over his whole body. He drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, trying not to shiver. Sal shot him a sideways look.

“Sleep is a strange land, anyway,” he said musingly; “I ought to know. I lie back and doze a bit sometimes, but I can never quite fall, not the way I used to. I’ve been craving a good night’s sleep for eight hundred years.” He caught Draco’s eye and smiled reassuringly. “Don’t take dreams - your own or anyone else’s - too literally. That way lies madness.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

They sat in silence for what could have been five minutes or fifteen, watching the crackling flames - golden fingers, blue hearts, in a courtly all-consuming dance. Finally, Sal cleared his throat.

“Tell me something,” he said, and Draco looked at him curiously.

“Sure.”

“What are you going to do with yourself when you finish school? What are your plans?”

Huh. Not what he’d been expecting, but a good question regardless. Draco shook his head after a moment of thinking.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really have any.” He shrugged. “Up until this year I was going to do whatever my father wanted me to do - I assumed that meant university, or joining the Death Eaters, or both. And then, when I found out about the …“ - here , his hand went unconsciously to the back of his neck - “I stopped thinking about after-Hogwarts at all, because I figured - what was the point?”

“Time you started thinking again, isn’t it?” Sal suggested, and Draco nodded slowly.

“Yeah.” He hugged his knees a little tighter.

“I really did send in that application to Beauxbatons, for the summer program,” he confessed suddenly. “It was part of my alibi, remember? But Snape wrote me a really good recommendation, and after I read it, I thought - why not? I’m still waiting to hear back from them, though.”

Sal nodded approvingly. “There’s a start,” he said. Draco frowned.

“A start to what?”

“Ah, there’s the question,” Sal said, then turned to look him straight in the eye. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d start thinking about what it is that I want, not who. You and Miss Granger will sort yourselves out eventually, for better or for worse. But your chances with her will get a whole lot better, the more you bring to the table.”

He rearranged himself in his chair and leaned back with a little sigh. “Ahhh - that’s much better. I couldn’t trouble you for a game of chess, could I?”

There was no point playing chess with Sal, Draco reflected as he rummaged in the sideboard for the game pieces. After you’d owned a set for a couple hundred years, even the opposing side started to do what you told them to - and Sal, cagey old conniver that he was, knew it. Then again, Draco guessed that a thousand years of existence would tend to make you smart about a lot of things … careers and women no exception.

Things to ponder, he thought, and began resignedly to set up his already-mutinous players.

**

“Ah, you’re awake,” said a cheerful voice, and Hermione rubbed her eyes blearily, feeling rather as if she’d slept underwater and was just now breaking the surface. “There’s quite a crowd outside the door, you know. Poppy’s having a time of it, keeping them at bay.”

Hermione yawned, pushed herself up on her pillows, and turned toward the voice. Albus Dumbledore beamed back at her.

“Feeling better, I hope?”

Hermione cautiously took stock of herself. All seemed to be in working order. “I’m not sure I was ill,” she said, her voice sleep-clogged. “I didn’t feel ill. Just tired.”

“And small wonder.” Dumbledore was impossibly cheery; Hermione saw a flash of blue in one of his hands, and thought she knew the reason why.

“I can’t believe you want to touch that,” she said, a bit sharply. “Just looking at it makes me queasy.”

“Precautions have been taken,” Dumbledore said, and held it up so she could see. The sapphire had been removed from her bracelet and suspended in a glass chamber slightly smaller than a walnut. Hermione frowned.

“Is it charmed?”

“Charmed for Unbreakability, yes,” Dumbledore agreed amiably. “Beyond that, it’s made of two-way mirror glass. Should he manage to escape, he’ll find whatever nastiness he was embroiled in at the moment reflected right back at him, from all sides.”

Hermione’s eyebrows went up. That was clever.

“What are you going to do with him?” she asked, and the Headmaster beamed.

“Well,” he said, his voice young with mischief, “I’ve rather been needing a paperweight.”

Startled, Hermione started to laugh - and then, as if the laugh had torn that coiled-up something in her chest loose inside her, to cry. “Oh, God,” she hiccuped, and mopped at her face with a corner of the sheet. “All day yesterday, and not a tear. Now, I’m hysterical. What sense does that make?“

Dumbledore’s arm was around her. “You needn’t apologize,” he said kindly. “Any wizard with a phoenix familiar understands the healing properties of tears. And you’ve more than proven your bravery, Hermione.”

“Brave,” she said with shaky self-mockery. “Scared to death, more like.”

“Brave,” he repeated firmly, and tucked her head comfortingly underneath his chin - an astonishing feat for someone so slight of stature. Breathing in the scent of lemon drops and Old Spice aftershave, Hermione felt the last of her tension slipping away.

“Do you want to hear what happened?” she queried. He shook his head.

“Not unless you want to tell it.”

Hermione weighed her options, then pulled back a bit. “Not yet, then,” she decided, and on impulse leaned up and kissed Dumbledore’s papery cheek.

“Thank you,” she said. “Do you think I could see the others now?”

That twinkle was back in his eyes. “I’ll refer that question to Madam Pomfrey.”

He was halfway to the door before she decided to ask the question. “Professor?”

He turned back around and cocked his head to the side, looking - at the moment - very much like Fawkes indeed. “Yes?”

“Someone was here with me last night,” Hermione said, “sitting with me. Was it you?”

To her annoyance, Dumbledore looked amused. “No, Miss Granger,” he said. “It was not.”

He was gone before she could ask him anything more.

**