By the morning, Draco and Hermione were still guests at Malfoy Manor, having been prevailed upon to stay the night by Lucius and Narcissa, who simply could not let them leave on the sour note of having carelessly drugged Hermione. No one contacted them to raise an alarm when Pollux was absent from his classes that same morning. But Rose Weasley noticed his empty seat in advanced potions immediately. Her keen sense for trouble had been inflamed, and she'd been watching for him ever since Professor Stuve had excused him early from charms class the previous afternoon.
By lunchtime, no one she asked had seen him, not even strange little Castora, whom James had brought to sit with them at their usual table.
"If anyone would know where to find him," Cassie told Rose, "it would be Griselda Goyle."
"Yes, but where is she?" Rose asked, standing up to survey the Great Hall again.
"She sits by the teachers when she wants to be left alone," Cassie explained.
"Oh! You're right," Rose cheered. "There she is. It's good to have a legilimens at the lunch table."
James looked sideways at Cassie. "Something like that," he said. He tapped his wand against the outside of Cassie's dish. "You're not eating, Malfoy. Do you need your soup warmed a bit?"
"No, thank you. It's fine."
At this, Albus raised his eyebrows, looking across the table, trying to catch Rose's eye. But she was already scrambling over the bench, moving toward Griselda's seat just under the dais where the teachers were sopping up their soup with thick slices of buttered bread. On the table in front of Gris was her Remote Note, open to a blank page. She slammed it closed as Rose took a seat beside her.
"No updates," Gris said, a flurry of hands and parchments as she gathered her things.
"No worries," Rose said, laying a hand on Gris's arm. "I'm actually here to ask you about Paul."
"Haven't seen him."
"No, nobody has," Rose said. "I'm beginning to wonder if he's alright. He wasn't in potions this morning. I'm sure you noticed."
The suggestion felt too knowing -- implying an enraging intimacy, something the girls shared that they had no business sharing. Gris felt her face growing hot. "If he's feeling poorly, he'd do well to stay out of class and in bed. That's probably where you'll find him."
She stood up to jam her books, parchments, quills, her wand itself into her bag.
"Look," Rose said, standing beside her, "it's not my place to intrude into Paul's private quarters. But -- "
Gris slung her bag over one shoulder, turned sharply enough that she might have apparated if she wasn't inside the castle, and marched toward the hall's exit. Rose trotted alongside her. "Griselda, wait," she said. "I'm a bit dense sometimes but even I can tell Paul is the inspiration for your Torrence. Once I saw it, it's all I can see when I look at him now -- "
"Will you please leave me alone?" Gris said. She had meant it to sound like a snarl but it sounded more like desperation, begging.
"I'm sorry, I can't do that. It's against my nature. I'll make myself mad," Rose said. "Paul is Torrence the Veela -- not literally, I know, of course, but still, Griselda. And you, of all people, you must know that what he needs if he's suffering right now is his mate."
Gris stopped and threw her bag on the ground between them. "Then go. Leave me out of it. Just go."
Rose frowned. "Why would I go?"
Gris picked up her bag and turned away again.
"Griselda, you're his person. If you think there's anyone else, I can tell you you're wrong." She caught Gris's arm and held it, traces of her werewolf nature alive in her grip, forcing Griselda to wait. "Paul told me what happened between the two of you the other night, and that he hates himself for being so stupid about it. Please," Rose said, "go and free Torrence from that seaside rock before the tide comes in."
Paul had told Gris the answer to the riddle posed by the eagle knocker on the door to the Ravenclaw tower at the beginning of the school year. She'd never used it herself, but she'd never forgotten it either. Lunchtime was over and afternoon classes had started, leaving the common room empty as she entered and crossed the room to the tower's staircase. She climbed to the upper floors where the sixth and seventh year students slept, and cracking a door open with careful slowness, she peered into what she hoped was Paul's room. Inside were four beds, one of them enclosed by its curtains.
In a tremulous voice, she called his name. "Pollux?"
There was no answer, but in the quiet the curtain's rings moved sideways, scraping along the wooden rod.
"Gris?"
At the sound of her own name, she took two stomping steps into the room. "What are you doing up here in the middle of the day? Are you ill?"
"Gris, you came."
Paul's voice was weak, and when he drew the curtain far enough to reveal his face, his complexion was paler than Griselda had ever seen it, the veins blue and visible in his forehead, his skin slick with sweat. She was at his bedside, dropping her bag on her feet, pressing her hand to his forehead, smoothing his cheeks with the backs of her fingers.
His eyes fluttered closed and he let out his breath. "You did. You came."
"How long have you been like this? You're up here alone, burning with a fever."
"Like an abandoned hinkypunk, lovesick in a Note-fic," he said.
She wasn't moved by his pathetic appearance enough to hold back a scoff. "Hinkypunk - that's what you're not, Pollux Malfoy. Now sit up and take some water."
His fingers found her hand and he pulled himself to a sitting position, hand over hot hand along her arm, clinging to her in a claw-like hug to keep from falling back onto the pillow.
"Right. Stay there while I get some water," she said.
All at once, there was strength in his arms, and he crossed them on her back. "No, don't go."
She braced her hands in the dips below his biceps, as if to push herself away. She hadn't applied any pressure yet but he was already settling his face into the curve of her neck, his breath hot as a supernatural creature's. Her own breath caught at the feel of it against her throat, and the brush of his dry lips. Her heart was racing as she said, "Pux, I can't help you if I you won't even let me get my wand from my bag."
He nestled closer. "Don't let me go. Just stay." He paused to take in a deep breath. The air dragged across Griselda's skin as he breathed it in, and she felt herself pulled into him along with it, confirming what she already knew. She was his. "I'm only better," he said, "when you're right here."
An unhealthy heat was radiating through Paul's clothes. He needed water and a cooling, healing potion from the hospital wing, but a delay of a few more moments wouldn't damage him any further. Gris unlocked her elbows and bent her arms around Paul's torso, returning his embrace, her hands flat against his back, moving over the lean angles, as if marking him as her own. "You're not delirious, are you?" she whispered.
He hummed. "If I am, I hope I never get better."
He barely heard her laugh. Listen to him, she thought. He really was the model for Torrence.
Paul gave another great sigh of relief, enough hot breath against her neck that she would have done anything he asked of her. But all he said was, "Please, Gris. Stay stupid. Stay in love with me."
She pressed her lips to his damp, matted hair. "Of course..."
______________________
At dinner, Nana Narcissa overheard Draco's conversation with Cassie where she contacted him by Communication Compact to say that Paul was in the hospital wing being treated for an unpleasant but not a dangerous fever. On hearing it, Narcissa would not tolerate the boy being left to recover at school "like some urchin" and insisted he be brought to the manor instead. Paul may have been her favourite grandson even if she had more than one -- the tiny baby she had wept over in St. Mungo's hospital, the hope for a future after years of war, trial, and incarceration. For himself, he had always loved the manor, always complained to his parents about their expensive but deceptively modest London flat having none of the manor's flair and flash. And in truth, he might just recover faster and more completely at the manor. The Malfoy family's invigorating tonics and potions were generally better than what was mass-produced and sold to hospitals anyway.
Draco allowed himself to be persuaded to let his Mother nurse Paul through his illness even though he was quite impatient to leave the well-meant but stifling surveillance of the manor and take Hermione back to London on kissing terms with him.
"He's not a prince, Mother. He'll be fine in a few days no matter where he is," he argued.
But then Hermione had insisted, arguing that the time had come to tell the children about the risks of Dr. Huang's procedure to see how they felt about the situation. Making Paul's convalescent visit into a family conference meant Cassie would be brought to the manor too.
Paul forbade his parents to come fetch them at school, arguing instead that Griselda could side-along apparate both he and Cassie to the manor without inconveniencing anyone. Everyone accepted this but Cassie, who stunned her parents by proposing to make the trip by train.
"But the Hogwarts Express doesn't run on normal school days, darling," Hermione argued.
"The Muggle trains never stop though," Cassie countered. "Did you forget that, Mum? You've ridden them yourself, with Gran and Grandad." Gran and Grandad Granger -- if Paul was the Malfoy grandparents' pet, Cassie was the Grangers'.
"Well, yes. And I remember it's a long trip. It takes the better part of a day to get to London from Hogwarts and then an hour more to Swindon and you still wouldn't be at the manor. And you'd have to change trains at Paddington or somewhere else just as mad. No, it's too much for a young witch all alone on the train for the first time."
"I wouldn't go alone, Mum."
"Now Cassie, Paul is still too sick for a trip like that."
"Not Paul, Mum. I'd bring a friend, someone who's interested in exploring Muggle things with me. You know him. He's James, your Harry Potter's son."
Hermione would not let Cassie to ride the train anyway, insisting that she come with Paul and Gris instead. But Cassie and her friend, James Potter, stayed on Hermione's mind. James Potter -- Harry's son, Ron's nephew, some kind of mix of the both of them. When she was a teenager, such a creature would have been the perfect boy to her, even if he didn't read or look or kiss like Draco. And now Cassie was talking about crossing the country by train with him. At least she was asking permission. How old was she again? Just finishing fourth year, about to turn fifteen? That was already older than Hermione had been when Viktor Krum had come along.
The thought of Cassie alone and at large with a person who might be the perfect teenaged boy tumbled through Hermione's brain throughout the rest of the evening. Paul intensified it when he arrived outside the manor between the high dark hedges, leaning quite theatrically across poor little Griselda's shoulders, complaining that they would have come sooner if Castora hadn't taken so long with Potter before meeting at the apparation point just outside the Hogwarts grounds.
Hermione was fussing over it more than ever after Gris had returned to school and the children had gone to bed, safe and sound inside the manor. It was still with her even as she was saying goodnight to Draco on the threshold of the guest bedroom her in-laws had given her to sleep in. Draco had successfully set aside his concerns for the children, not discounting them, but delaying them until the time they'd appointed for the family meeting arrived in the morning. It meant that for him, the rest of the night could be devoted to rehabilitating his marriage in the best way he could imagine.
To that end, he stood in a bedroom doorway, his arms around Hermione's waist, stooped to press his forehead against hers, just about to declare that his parents must have learned their lesson about responsible potion and tonic handling by now. Enough time had passed between the tonic incident and this moment for his parents to no longer feel responsible for it, and he was prepared to invite his wife to stay with him in his room for the rest of the night.
But before he could speak of any of it, she sighed and said, "Is James Potter the one who's older or younger than Cassie?"
Draco straightened his posture. "Who?"
"One of Harry and Ginny's sons, the one called James. I can't remember which one he is. Cassie mentioned him today as a particular friend."
Draco kissed her forehead. "Your suspicion of teenaged boys is returning. That's a good sign."
"Be serious, Malfoy."
"I thought you were the cool Mum who didn't mind the children having close friends of their preferred dating gender."
"When did I say that?" She turned her back to him, letting him pull her back into his chest, speaking into her ear over her shoulder.
"Well, if you're going to worry about the children dating, maybe start with Pollux. Did you hear him call Griselda his 'mate' back in the professor's office? I'm not sure what he meant by it but it sounded far more than friendly. And if she's anything like her father, she might be a bit too easily led."
Hermione scoffed. "This is the girl who's already punched our boy in the face this week."
Draco nestled his face into her hair. "Right, the very best kind of girl."
"Malfoy, go to bed..."
The door across the hall opened. It was Paul, still pale but looking less haggard than he had hours ago, standing in his doorway with an empty water glass. Away from school and still sixteen for a few more weeks, he was unable to fill it up magically.
"Pollux," Draco said, letting go of Hermione's waist. "You need water? What's wrong? You're in the manor. Just think of what you want and the house will do its best to provide it."
"I did," he said. "And it wouldn't help, forced me to come out here, at this moment."
Hermione took the glass from him. "Let me get it, darling."
"So the pair of you are back at it?"
"Paul -- "
"When were you going to tell us? Is that why you brought us here?"
"There's a lot to discuss," Draco said, "Tomorrow -- "
"Tomorrow?" Paul took the empty glass back from his mother. "You didn't think it might be urgent to tell kids gutted by our Mum suddenly forgetting everything and hating you like an enemy that you were all handsy and snoggy again and we didn't have to worry about that anymore? You didn't think that information might do something to help us sleep at night, to stop making ourselves sick?"
A little further down the hallway, Cassie's door clicked open.
Hermione nodded. "Right. Come into my room, all of you. Let's talk."