Through the mirrors of their Communication Compacts, Ron was trying to smile at his fiancee. But he looked sick. And he looked, Hermione thought for the first time, like he needed an eyebrow pencil. She shook her head, forcing her attention to the words he was saying. They were tepid and strange, like he had learned them by heart from a script someone else had written. But what would have been the right thing for him to say to her this evening? Perhaps the script was as good as anything.
His speech was winding down. "...so I will remain your absent partner on your journey. This is the first of my cheerful, loving daily messages to you, until we meet again." He stopped, his posture slackening. "How was that? Berlant came up with most of that. So it should have been alright, yeah?"
"You talked to Dr. Berlant about all this? Who else did you talk to?"
"Well, George, Mum, Ginny, Harry..."
It was just their inner circle.
"The porters at the hospital, those nurses..."
Their inner circle and discreet medical professionals at the hospital.
"Made a bit of a show of myself though, what with the shock, and then there was the old bloke marching around the hospital in Malfoy's clothes all day. The other patients figured out who 'Jean' really was pretty soon after seeing me getting hauled around. Don't be mad, we can't really blame them for being excited and talking about it. Nothing ever happens up there. The papers have been owling everyone here at home all night for reactions, but no one's talking to them, of course. Probably won't be able to open the store for a day or two."
She groaned into her hands. "Ronald, I am so sorry."
"Then just come home."
"No. No, let's not go over this again."
"No need, no need. Dr. Berlant explained it all to me. Absent partner, loving, cheerful, gutted. That's me."
Berlant knew her patient well. If Hermione allowed Ron to make contact with her like this every day, she'd be curled beneath a quilt at the Burrow with him within a week.
"Stop, Ronald," she said. "Don't do this. Don't dutifully sit there waiting, it holds back everything I'm trying to accomplish."
"Hermione--"
"We can start again when I've finished this project, one way or another. But I can't do this with you hanging on so tightly."
He sat back, where she could see his whole torso in the glass, showing her his hands, holding nothing. "Go," he said. "Go on and go. It doesn't change anything I feel, but go. I love you, Hermione. I'd do anything for you. I'd even do this."
Her eyes were clenched tight against her tears. He was quiet, waiting for her to echo back his 'I love you.' And heaven knew she loved him--loved his warm body on cold mornings, his permanence in her history, loved him as if her ties to every other human being she could claim to love depended on her maintaining her happy connection to him. It wasn't fair. Before her parents had left, love existed in the universe for Hermione Granger independently of Ron Weasley. And she had to make it true again, even if there was no script for it anywhere. Rewriting--this was all a rewriting.
She was cold, rubbing her palms against her arms, from elbow to wrist, stoking her own warmth and strength as she told him. "I'm sorry Ronald, you darling boy. Until we meet again, goodbye." She snapped the Compact closed.
There was a sound outside her door like someone had dropped a load of tools down the stairs while coughing out "alohomora" and Malfoy was in her room, disheveled and demanding, "What? What is it?"
"Nothing, why are you--"
"The bracelet. You touched it, you called."
She looked down at her hand, clamped around her opposite wrist, palm pushed against her St. Mungo's hospital bracelet. "Oh, I didn't--didn't mean to at any rate. I was just overwhelmed talking to Ron."
He rolled his eyes dramatically enough for his entire head to swivel. "Let me get some sleep, would you Granger?"
"Sorry. And you were right," she called to Malfoy as he was retreating behind her closing door. "You were right about the scandal. It's all a mess over at the hospital, and at the Burrow."
"Well, of course."
"And I've told Ron that, for now, he doesn't need to worry about me. He's not responsible for me."
Malfoy stepped back into the room, a flush of pink across his cheeks. "Yeah, well that makes two of us. When my house was hunting you, I felt compelled to intervene. It was Malfoy magic, even if it wasn't exactly mine. But don't get used to it. Now that we're clear of the manor, I'm claiming that equal partnership I was promised when I agreed to all of this."
She took a step toward him, brow furrowed. "Have it. I never intended anything less than independent collaboration."
"Then snap out of it, Granger. Pay attention to our surroundings. Shape up. Read a real book."
"I am an extremely accomplished reader!"
"Then be as bright as everyone tells us you are. Have a care."
"I'm trying, Malfoy." She swore at him. "I am trying, but I'm sick. Doesn't anyone believe me? I'm sick."
She sat down hard on the edge of her bed, easily resuming her crying.
He groaned, hating it. "Look, just--get some rest, yeah?"
Outside her door, Draco Malfoy went down the stairs instead of up, out into the streets and Swindon's weekday nightlife. The high street was all but empty, nothing open but a chemist, a liquor store, and greasy kebab shop where people ordered food at a window and disappeared to eat it alone. Perfect. Connecting with hunger again was a healthy sign. Maybe it was a benefit from eating his mother's cooking after so long, canned and preserved for years though it was. He leaned against a bus bench and ate away at the kebab, the sound of trains rumbling through the town, going to and from London masking the nearly unbearable sound of his teeth and jaws working. He needed his own advice. He had to stop thinking like a hospital patient and start thinking with coolness and calculation again. With Granger flagging the way she was, it might be the only chance they had to keep this up all the way to Canada.
Play nicely, Draco. Mother--what had she been playing at in the manor today? Why come out fully hostile toward Granger? Surely his parents weren't they still bent on that purity nonsense--that flimsy, sickening excuse for grasping at other people's wealth, status, and power. Those conjurings today, the flowers and perfumes--what were they meant to tell him, to force him toward? Entertaining the idea that they might not have been attacks would have been too risky so he'd cut off his mother's advances as soon as he sensed them. But maybe there was more to them, machinations he still couldn't see through, not in this state of mind.
He wiped his face and hands on a paper napkin, disgusted at the smell of food on his skin. His apparation legs were returning to their normal steadiness. His third trip should be perfectly normal, even solo. He could go back to the manor alone, while Granger slept, and let his parents reach him, find out their schemes if it was for no purpose other than to inoculate himself against them, making sure he didn't become their little white pawn again. He'd put off contacting them long enough. Wasn't that what Berlant had been trying to tell him? What it was all coming down to, what was forcing the crisis, was the question of whether his mother had been trying to separate him from Granger, or push them together, rehabilitating the damaged Malfoy name through an alliance with British wizarding society's favourite Muggle-born hero, Hermione Granger.
Throwing the rest of his food into the bin he stood up quickly, wand ready. And then his still-recovering mind switched, as it often did, to somewhere else entirely. He saw himself back in Granger's room at the inn, heard her swearing at him--not a mild one either, none of that Weasley "bloody hell" nonsense. She was beyond that. No one would believe him if he told them what she'd said, and the thought made him laugh--laugh until he was groaning again. This broken person crying in the inn was a version of Hermione Granger only he knew. She existed in a world with no one in it to care for her but him. He was responsible for her, bound by some kind of human ethic he didn't ask for and could not yet dismiss. Maybe this feeling was nothing more than the lasting effects of the innocentia spell showing themselves to be more powerful than he'd known. Whatever it was, Malfoy pulled at the hair at his temples, turned on the sidewalk, and walked back to the inn.
The sound of her sniffling was still audible from the landing as he climbed the stairs to his room. He paused, felt for a rectangular lump in his jacket pocket, and knocked at her door.
She opened it hardly at all, greeting him through the crack with, "You've been eating."
He wiped at his face again, frowning, then reaching into his jacket pocket. "Read this," he said, passing her a thin book.
"Hamlet?" she read from the spine. "You're reading Muggle literature?"
"Shakespeare is not a Muggle, obviously. Have you read this, Granger? Have you read anything but encyclopedia and dictionaries?"
She'd been waiting to tell him. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I've read some Austen, that one Bronte, Huxley..."
He rolled his eyes. "Read this. Read it all. It's a tragedy about parents. It won't make you feel better, but it'll help you remember how the world works, which will do us all good."
________________________________________
George forced his way through Ron's bedroom door, ready to break up what sounded like a fight. Instead, he found Ron furiously packing his clothing into a bag.
"Oh no," George drawled. "He's heading off to bring back the near-missus."
Ron huffed over a pile of clean underwear. "Well, I can't show my face in the shop until the reporters clear off--"
"It'll just be a few days."
"I can't go to Malfoy Manor to punch his face up--"
"Arguable."
"And I can't sit here, knitting with Mum."
"Sounds nice to me."
"So I'm heading them off."
George shook his head. "Off? Whaddya mean?"
From the pile of boxer shorts, Rob had found what he was looking for: a pair of baggy, barely used swimming trunks. "What do you think I mean? Where do you think a man in my position would be heading? I am going to Australia."
__________________________
All morning, inside a Muggle library, they bored each other, arguing back and forth over travel plans. Each of them already had a valid passport, complete with the "-W" noted at the end of their serial numbers to show their statuses as wizard or witch. What remained to be decided was whether they would travel through the magical international transport system or through a Muggle airline.
Malfoy, of course, argued for the magical system, finding passage on trans-Atlantic ships something like the Durmstrang Institute had used to convey their contingent from Bulgaria to Hogwarts, only without all the medieval flair and secrecy. "It's how my family did all our international travel. It's civilized and safe--not driven by exploding fuel a kilometer into the sky, like those Muggle machines."
"Airplanes, Malfoy. They're smelly and cramped but they're safe--enough."
"I don't understand your reluctance," he went on. "It's not like we're fugitives. We've broken no laws. We can come and go through the international transport systems as we please, like anyone can."
He continued to argue the point until they managed to summon a morning edition of the Daily Prophet. There it was, written up in the fine style of Rita Skeeter's protege, Almun Rentz, a story pieced together from their fellow patients at St. Mungo's. Rentz was calling it the "Gralfoy Affair." The story filled the entire lower half of the fourth page, accompanied by an outdated promotional photo of Ron smiling in front of his shop captioned "It's no joke! Weasley jilted for bad bloke."
Hermione folded the newspaper into her bag. "You're right, Malfoy, it's not like they could stop us. But what a nightmare it's going to be, stepping up to a transport counter to identify ourselves as the Gralfoy Affair, and then spending the entire voyage as scandal incarnate."
He blew his hair upward, out of his face. "We could still go separately. That could help dispel some of the gossip. Might be good, actually."
She said nothing, her shoulders rounding, her head bowing forward slightly, the weight of a lonely passage across the north Atlantic pressing on her with the very mention of it. The weight settled on her back, pressing down with that now familiar crush, each breath harder to take than the last one. Her hand clamped the arm of Malfoy's chair.
"What? Oh, honestly Granger, breathe. Breathe with me."
"S-sorry," she gasped.
"Leave it, Granger, just--look at me. Calm down. Breathe. We won't send you alone."
_____________________________________
On the outskirts of greater London, in Gatwick Airport, the crowds that had been merely close on the train from Swindon began to squeeze--throngs of Muggles in sandals, wheeling their cases, bumping them against each other's cold bare ankles. Malfoy looked sick as Hermione pulled him out of a queue for the lifts and into a stairwell they could climb easily carrying nothing but their extended bags. His extension was not undetectable--that would have taken more care and time--but it wouldn't matter here.
"You need to fix your face," she told him as they climbed. "If you can sustain a spell to magically cloak most of the belongings in your bag, how much harder can it be for you to smile so the security officers don't worry and stop you with a bunch of probing questions?"
He did nothing to prove to her he could smile. "I prefer to leave my mouth closed in here. It's rank and awful, like a cattle auction."
"That's not the Muggles's fault. They're doing their best."
"Doesn't mean I can't hate it."
They emerged at the top of the stairs in a vast but crowded area full of more queues and cases. He glanced at her. "You're not feeling panicky here?"
"No, it's rather nostalgic. Has me remembering good times with my parents, on holiday. Just don't leave me alone." She caught him by the sleeve, dragging him toward the longest, densest queue in the building.
"This has to get worse before it gets better, doesn't it?"
"Yes. Now where's your wand?" She patted the outsides of his jacket, feeling for it as he raised his hands to hold her off.
"Granger, stop. It's in the bag already. Why does this process have to involve everyone touching me?"
She stood on tiptoe, craning her neck to see the security checkpoint at the head of the queue. "They haven't even begun to touch you, Malfoy. And if you don't want those nice people in uniforms to feel you all over, you really must listen to me and fix your miserable face."
"I've never been able to do that. Made my father livid." He shuddered with the memory of--something.
Hermione hung her head, sighed at her shoes. It was true. Everything he felt was always broadcast on his face. It was another one of the things that made him a good enemy but a difficult ally. To get 'round it would require extreme measures. "Alright, Malfoy. I am about to share with you a Granger family secret, our method for keeping a pleasant exterior under unpleasant circumstances. Dentists need to be expert at that kind of thing. I will show you what my mother used to do to keep me from frowning when I needed to be sweet."
His eyes narrowed. "Sweet? What could--"
In that swift instant, she had hopped toward him and smacked a kiss against his cheek with all the ardor she had used to kiss her mobile phone the day before, with all the perfunctoriness she used to give Charlie and Percy their New Year's kisses every year.
"What the hell, woman?"
She fell back, laughing at him. "There! Now when you're stood in front of the security officers, just bring back to mind how silly and surprised you feel right now, and your gloomy face should clear right up. Maybe not exactly smiling but slightly confused is a rather benign look, better than scowling at any rate, and--no, Malfoy, not like that."
He looked beyond silly, well beyond confused, positively shocked, scrubbing his thumb against his cheek.
"Oh, stop. It was perfectly dry."
"It wasn't and--Granger, you don't just up and do that."
She had pulled a handkerchief out of her bag, coming at him again to dab his face. "Pardon me, Malfoy. I'm sorry. Pardon me."
But the fact was, at the security counter, Draco Malfoy succeeded in not scowling. Ahead of him in the queue, an officer scanned the bars and blocks on Hermione's passport. The machine beeped happily and she walked through the metal detector to the secured side of the airport. Malfoy nodded blandly as he handed his own passport to the official. The machine responded with a deeper beep, long and morose.
"What's all this?" a tall man in a white shirt-ed uniform instead of the typical blue one asked.
"He's on some list," a man in a blue shirt answered. "And it won't tell me which one. Just says to call upstairs."
"Odd. Right. Come this way, sir."
"Oh," Malfoy stammered. "Just a moment, please. I need to tell--" He pointed through the scanners, to where Hermione stood, head bent over her open bag.
"It that your girlfriend there?"
"Er--sure. Can I just--"
"Yes, don't worry about that, sir. We'll inform her. Come this way, without any trouble, if you please."
Malfoy was taken through a steel, windowless door in an adjacent wall, into a small room made of breeze-block painted the colour of curdled cream. Seated at an empty table, he waited, eyes on the door he'd come in--the one Hermione had not followed him through. By another door, another officer entered, checking over his shoulder before whisking a wand from his coat with a flourish to close them both inside. "Mr. Draco Malfoy," he said. "I am Sargent Harv, officer of the Ministry of Magic, Department of Magical Transport, Gatwick International."
Malfoy slumped forward onto the table with relief. "Yes, nice to meet you. There's some kind of mistake. I'm just off to Canada."
"Yes, yes," Harv began, "this may well be nothing but an oversight. However, we are required to investigate when the system flags a passport. It seems in the days following, well, all the unpleasantness, your entire family was placed on a no-fly list. No international airborne conveyances of any kind, magical or not."
"Yes, that's correct, but it was meant to lapse following our rehabilitation. And I've served a psychiatric sentence at St. Mungo's, not a criminal one. Even that's been expired for almost a month."
Sargent Harv nodded. "Right, right then. Just hand over your discharge papers from the hospital and we'll take you back to the head of the queue."
Malfoy's face blanched even whiter.
"No papers, Mr. Malfoy? Well, that does complicate things."
Knocking sounded at the door, regular at first but then layered over with another higher, faster knock that did not abate until Harv rose and opened the door by hand. Outside was the tall blue-shirted guard and at his elbow, Hermione. Before anyone else could speak, she was calling out to Malfoy. "There you are, darling, I was frantic when I couldn't find you and the nice officer brought me here. Is everything quite alright?"
Malfoy gaped at her from the table as Harv inspected her passport, humming gravely at the "-W" status, dismissing the blue-shirt, and shutting the door. She crossed the floor in a single, giant step, dropping an arm around Malfoy's shoulders.
"This is your traveling companion, Mr. Malfoy?"
He looked up at her, stunned as she chattered to the official. "Yes, of course," she said. "We're on our way to Canada to introduce Draco to my parents. Poor darling was so nervous he might have forgotten to bring some of our documentation. Can't say I blame him. But is everything alright, sir? Can I help you?"
"Sorry, Miss, how are you involved with Mr. Malfoy?"
"I'm his fiancee," she said, squeezing the stiff angle of Malfoy's shoulders against her hip. "Didn't you know? No, it's nice to meet someone with too much sense to read the gossip pages. Well done, sir."
"Well, I'm afraid your trip will have to be postponed until after Mr. Malfoy has brought a successful application to have his name expunged from our no-fly list. Very sorry, Miss--what was it again?"
"Granger," she over-articulated. "I'm Hermione Granger. It's nice to meet you. May I show you something?"
He nodded and she let go of Malfoy to reach into her bag for the morning newspaper, spreading it out on the table, open to page four.
"Oh, this is you," Harv sang. "The Gralfoy Affair, yes, my daughters have been following it. And here you are, in our airport, on my watch. Aren't you a handsome pair?"
She took a step back, encouraging him to admire them, closing her hand around Malfoy's. He spread his fingers, lacing them between hers, holding tightly.
Sargent Harv cleared his throat. "Quite the scandal though, yeah? But what is it they say? The heart wants what it wants, or something? Yes, it's all here in the newspaper. Look at that. Well, I suppose you can be on your way. Just between us, we'll consider this newspaper your hospital discharge papers. But could I trouble you for one small wish, from a doting father of a houseful of girls?"
He produced a quill and smiled on as Hermione and Malfoy signed their autographs to page four.
__________________________________________________
The inside of the Muggle airplane was huge but more crowded than anywhere they'd been yet. Malfoy sat in the dark, his forehead pressed against a cold, tiny window overlooking a vast blackness. The sea must be below them but it had disappeared beneath white clouds hours ago, before everything turned dark. Women with a huge rolling cabinet kept passing by, handing him food impossible to eat in a space so small. The noise, the slowness of their crawl through the air, the trapped breaths of hundreds of other people--how could Granger not be panicking here? Instead she was sleeping in the seat next to him, a small pillow between her head and his shoulder. If he pushed her away, she'd slump over to sleep on the person on the other side of them, a woman who'd been sitting beside them with a book bent around her nose, as if it was possible to read in the eerie low light of the passenger compartment.
While Hermione slept, Malfoy risked raising his hand to touch his cheek again, where she'd kissed him. Maybe she had spent years living in the small house of a large family, all of them clambering over each other like puppies, and thought nothing of casual physical contact. He, on the other hand, had spent most of his life in the large house of a small family, where he sensed his mother's presence from the smell of her perfume wafting in and out of rooms rather than from the press of any kisses against his face. For him, this had been rare and strange. His pulse quickened just remembering something Granger would likely never think of again.
And then there was that business about the Gralfoy Affair in the interrogation room. Hermione's part of it had all been an act--and not even a good one. But the show had settled into him as well, rooted inside his rib-cage, an aching lightness. He clenched his hand into a fist, closed it against the memory of her fingers between his. In that moment, he had been so grateful for his rescue he had wanted her close--not just as a gesture for the benefit of the watching Ministry official but for someone else, for himself.
He turned in his seat, closer to the window, inadvertently dislodging her pillow so her head bobbed forward. She rubbed her eyes and she re-situated herself. "Malfoy what do they mean, calling it the Gralfoy Affair rather than the Malger Affair?"
In the darkness, he smiled against the airplane window. "Go back to sleep."
------------------------------
The light was barely strong enough for Hermione to be able to read the words in the paperback edition of Hamlet that Malfoy had lent her. He slumped, asleep, his head propped in the well of the airplane window, a pile of vacuum sealed biscuits and pretzels in his lap. Pausing her reading to watch the cloud of his breath form and reform on the plexi-glass window pane, she smirked, imagining that the t-shirt underneath his jacket might have said "O, that this too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into dew." Poor little prince, crammed into economy class airplane seats.
He twitched awake when the flight attendants clicked on the announcement system, describing the weather and the time at the Halifax International Airport below. They were beginning again, the same speech but spoken in French, as he sat up, rubbing his head. Through the window, they could see nothing but white fog, a heavy cloud continuing all the way to the surface of the earth. They landed not in view of the sea, but in trees--dark spruce trees tipping west, away from the wind coming relentlessly off the Atlantic.
In an airport, tiny compared to anything they knew from Europe, Hermione used the muggle-wand to make arrangements for them to stay in a large orange motel on the outskirts of the city. Their room was conventional, American-style though not American, two large beds in a small, undivided space--more room than they needed, but also not nearly enough.
"Well, I'm in a bad mood," Hermione began, "because I didn't expect this place to be so populated. I don't know what I was imagining but it wasn't a proper city of nothing but petrol stations and doughnut shops, far as the eye can see."
"Trees," he added. "Don't forget the trees."
Yes, between the fog and the trees and the sea which she could smell but not see, Hermione felt like she couldn't find anything in this place. And since the trip was primarily a finding mission, it was raising panic.
As for Malfoy, he was in a bad mood because he was famished. "You've eaten nothing since Swindon this morning, haven't you," she accused him.
"I'll get something later."
She folded her arms, watching him slide his jacket from his too-lean arms. "Malfoy, this has to end. You need to go back to eating with other people. It's healthy for all sorts of reasons besides nutritional ones."
"My nutrition is fine--better, at any rate." He was kicking his shoes off, pulling back the bedspread. "I'll sleep while you go eat. Then we'll trade off."
She tugged at the covers he'd just pulled over himself. "Come on, let's eat together. We'll never accomplish anything if we stagger our daily routines like that. We have to stay in sync, like they had us at the hospital."
"I don't see why." He had rolled into bed, turning his back to her.
She took a deep breath. "I know what this is, Malfoy. This isn't just jet-lag, this is trauma."
He said nothing, motionless in his bed.
She sat down on her own bed, facing his back. "What happened to you? Why won't you let anyone see you eat?"
"Leave it, Granger."
"Like I left the innocentia spell? Look Malfoy, I can help you, perhaps better than anyone. I've done it before."
"That was spell management. This food issue is you going power mad, my own personal Berlant, and I won't have it."
Something flew across the room, summoned out of Hermione's bag to hit Malfoy him in the back, bouncing onto the floor beside his bed. He turned over to glare at it: his battered, paperback copy of Hamlet.
"Right," she was saying. "I am not your Ophelia. My story is not one about following you around while you hurt, getting prettily flustered by it all, never saying more than a line or two, waiting for you to insult me and make me insane. That story is bollocks."
"What're you on about, Granger?"
"I am not awed by your pain, Malfoy. We're all hurt. But the war is over and each of us has to confront our trauma and move on. That's why we're--"
"Not awed by my pain?" He was sitting up in bed now, snarling. "It's all the same for everyone involved in the war, is it?"
She started to speak again but he was talking over her, deep and loud. "True enough, you are not Ophelia. No, but I'll talk to you like I'm a madman anyway. I don't need your awe but I will tell you about the last meal I had in the company of other people. And once I start, I warn you, I won't stop."
Sitting on the edge of his bed, he told her everything about the night shortly before the Ministry fell, when the Dark Lord assembled his highest-ranking Death Eaters in the dining hall of Malfoy Manor. He told her how their teacher, Professor Burbage, had been suspended over the long, black table until, with his own father's wand, she was put to death and then eaten by Nagini the snake as they were all seated at the table, watching.
When it was announced that Professor Burbage had resigned, Hermione had believed with the rest of the Order of the Phoenix that she had been killed, but she hadn't known it had been like this. She gasped, sinking to her knees on the carpet between their beds. Malfoy fought onward, telling the story through gritted teeth, shaking where he sat on the edge of the bed. She gathered his quaking hands between hers. They were slick with cold sweat, clamping around hers as he spoke.
"When it was over, the great hideous thing was stretched and bloated, all uncoiled along the table. And the Dark Lord laughed about how it couldn't slither an inch so soon after a big meal. We all had to laugh too. Mother looked at me, with just a look begging me to laugh along. He ordered the serving elves not to lay hand or spell on the snake. Forced them to just serve everyone supper over and around its body while it slept."
At this, he choked out a sob, falling forward. She rose up on her knees to catch his head against her shoulder, shushing him as his tears wet the skin of her neck.
"No, I said I wouldn't stop," he said through his sobs. "I was too sick to eat with them, but my mother wouldn't excuse me. She squeezed my knee underneath the table and gave me that look of begging again -- pleading with me for all of our lives, as if it was up to me, as if it was ME who was responsible for doing this to HER."
He was almost shouting against Hermione's neck, and since at that moment she couldn't muffle him with a spell, she reached her arms around him, pulling him closer, turning her head to sigh into his ear. He quieted enough to go on. "'Death Eater' is not a metaphor. We had to eat, and I did."
*********************************************
There had been nothing to say. Hermione listened to Draco Malfoy's story, propped him up while he cried, and eased him back into his bed when he finished. He was awake again now, clean and dressed after a shower, when she returned to the room with food for both of them, bready sandwiches and paper cups of thick soup. His jaw clenched as she laid the tiny motel table for two.
With no fanfare, no browbeating, she simply touched the back of an empty chair. "Eat with me, Malfoy."
He sighed, dropped the towel from his damp hair, and took his seat at the table.