The Long Aftertaste of Stolen Firewhiskey and Other Impossible Conversations by Agarttha [PG13]
Valentine For: DeeMichelle
Title: The Long Aftertaste of Stolen Firewhiskey and Other Impossible Conversations
Author: agarttha
Type of Valentine: Fic
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J K Rowling. No profit is being made.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Character/s death.
Notes: Thanks to Kyra, my beta. Thou rocketh muchly.
Summary: One can live a million miles away and still stay in the very same spot. A Valentine’s Day chance meeting in a snowbound grand residence in the Himalayas. What could go wrong? Really.
"The Long Aftertaste of Stolen Firewhiskey and Other Impossible Conversations"
The deodars, proud timber of the gods, stood black in the quick-falling twilight. It was a night of magic, for if one could have looked beyond the solid cloud, metallic and clamping down on the tree tops, one would have see that the majestic moon of the Whole Month was out, a-hunting the senses of mortal men.
The sky threatened further snow, which lay in thick swathes on the Himalayan panorama, blanketing craggy mountain and sweeping valley, making everything preternaturally bright even in the growing darkness. A majestic Victorian building stood incongruously in this landscape, its steep gables and ornate eaves decorated with icicles and dustings of the snow; paned windows bright with the warm yellow light of welcoming bonhomie. Some of the light spilled out of a few of the un-curtained windows and fell in cold golden blocks onto the even snow of the lawns unblemished by anything except the stick footprints of myriad birds and the quick scampering paw-prints of the occasional squirrel.
From a French window of the East wing, a long trench of footprints led across the extensive grounds that sloped gradually under giant flat-topped cedars until it tumbled down a steep hill-side, down and down, fully two thousand feet into the mist-filled valley floor.
At the very edge of the snow-filled soft-edged lawn, precariously perched between the mists of the valley and the lead of the horizon, stood a fairy summerhouse, completely bare except for the wooden seat that ran around its circumference, and in it, stood a lone man. A stray pine cone rattled in a sudden gust and one of a livelier imagination than the current occupant of the building would have imagined unseen terrors and started.
Not Draco Malfoy, however.
He stood tall, like Cassius defying the lightning, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of his pale grey trousers, thin shirt clinging to slender body as the wind rippled and sussurated across him, lifting his pale silver hair off his brow in wisps of thistledown. It was bitterly cold, and the wind made the snow from the tall slender conifers drop soundlessly onto the blanket of snow below it, and yet he seemed unperturbed by it.
The wind carried with it the smells of pine fires burning in some distant valley, fresh and tingling, of the glaciers on the Mountains of the Thieves, and of something else… It brought with it the tang of a snow-covered land far, far away, where too snow-laden winds had whistled at him on a crenulated tower. An owl called, as if on cue, but when he opened his eyes, it was not on the dropping strewn floor of the Owlery at Hogwarts, but the bleached boards of the summer house of Wildflower Hall in the Shimla hills in India that he stood.
And it was not a boy who gazed at the panorama below him with eyes filled again with the façade of ennui, but a man, grown taller, broader, more bitter and hardened, and a fugitive.
Though not here. Not yet.
A deferential cough behind him made him turn.
‘Would sir like to come in? There is a nice fire in the Cavalry Bar…’
Mr. Chatterjee, the assistant manager of the hotel had no doubt come to make sure that Draco would not die of pneumonia while on their property. Or maybe he just was concerned about an underdressed man standing all alone on Valentine’s Day, when the rest of the hotel was full of smirking, cloying, romancing couples. Perhaps he needed to be less cynical... Was that consideration left in him? Could he be that boy who still believed in all’s right with the world and care packages and the certainty of family and the constancy of friends?
And here he was, starting to shiver in the violent wind, and the man behind him was held so taut in the numbing cold, Draco thought he would hear him snap if he waited but a moment longer. He did not need to; Draco’s thinking was done for the day.
‘Perhaps you are right, Mr. Chatterjee! This is not a night for standing about in the wind. But promise me you shall keep the honeymooning couples away from me,’ said Draco as he turned around and walked back across the virgin lawn to the main building.
The manager followed with a painful eagerness, almost shooing him up the lawn.
‘Of course, Mr Malfoy! The bar is closed on Tuesdays as you know. But Malkit Singh has lit the fire just for you. He likes listening to your stories,’ Chatterjee said, in words clipped together in freezing bursts as his uniform trousers and thin shoes became soaked in the snow.
Draco laughed softly, flattening his wind-ruffled silver hair into place, and if the manager noticed that his trousers and shoes were as dry as when he had left the shelter of the summerhouse, while his own clung to his legs in folds of frozen weight, he did not comment on it, but led his guest deferentially through the teak-panelled parlour into the dark-stained wood and leather interior of the Cavalry Bar, where behind a spectacular edifice of centuries old hardwood, stood a splendid Sikh gentleman, who should by rights have been long past the age of retirement, had such things any meaning in India. The manager then shut the heavy panelled door behind Draco with expensive smoothness.
Draco slipped onto a leather-padded bar stool with familiar ease, enjoying the warmth of the fire which burnt and spat fresh pine resin onto the stone hearth, while Malkit Singh poured him a practised measure of Glenfiddich.
‘Open on a Tuesday just for me Malkit?’ he said, sipping his golden dram, pretending it was something entirely different he was drinking, yet trying to not insult the excellent single malt. His brain said it should have been excellent; his heart could taste it turning to acrid water in his mouth.
Something of his conflict seemed caught in the Sikh’s old eyes, as they reflected the firelight and their age, and had they been the twinkling blue of a June sky on a clear day and not the hazel of the dried Deodar twigs of a winter-barren October, he could almost imagine that the magnificent beard and eyebrows belonged to another old man from a time very long ago.
His brain lurched as automatically he occluded Malkit Singh’s all too wise eyes, going back to the years of practise his hermit life had not extracted from him.
‘It looks like you will be with us for one more week, I think, Mr Malfoy,’ said the old Sikh, polishing his heavy crystal tumblers with a crisp white dishcloth. They had switched to familiar Hindustani rather than the formal English employed by the rest of the hotel staff to all guests. A clever translation charm had worked well for Draco the first year he had moved to India, but since then he had picked up the language and its various dialects and accents with surprising ease. And if ever Malkit had wondered why the same pale youth who had spoken at him in stilted but perfect Punjabi three years ago, but making no sense, had never again employed the language-- he never mentioned it.
‘Really? Surely not, Malkit! We’ve only had a foot of snow and we’re pretty high up here aren’t we? I think I’ll be crossing the Sutlej tomorrow, as planned-- I have all the provisions and company I need for the next two months,’ said Draco, knowing full well that he was wrong; he just liked Malkit Singh to talk at him, the old dry voice soothing him in a way that very little else did these days.
‘But there would have been landslides-there always are when we have snow in February. Oh yess, the road up from Rampur will be closed, and they’ll take a week, at least, kickback-taking slackers that they are, the PWD people, to remove the debris.’ Malkit spoke with relish, as if the elements, by ruining everybody else’s plans, had done him a personal favour.
‘Oh, don’t worry abut me Malkit-- I’ll hitch a mule up to Kinnaur if I have to. You can drive the Landrover up in the spring when the road opens,’ provoked Draco.
The old man chuckled. ‘Well you know that the shepherds will be coming south in this weather, not going the other way, Mr Malfoy, and you a hill man!’ he admonished.
‘Honorary, Malkit, still honorary. Negi up in Wangto still call me ‘white plainsman’, though I’ve lived up in Pangi for almost five years now. He thinks I am a plainsman, and most times I think I am very much a plainsman. My home was in a flat bit of country, you know.’
Malkit beamed, eager to show off his knowledge of the wider world, much of which he had gleaned from talking with select patrons at this very bar: ‘In Blighty? Wiletshire, yes?’ he said, pronouncing the place names with a strange musical cadence, making them sound alien rather than familiar. But they were alien to Draco now, weren’t they?
Malkit was now gingerly picking up the bits of red ribbon (that some unfortunate manager had forced him to festoon his bar with in deference to the Valentine’s Day celebrations) as if it were a live snake, a filthy live snake, and depositing it in the bin. ‘And Umballa, where my village is, is the flattest bit of land you’ll ever see. Nary even a hillock or a mud mound to break the flatness, except the ugly houses, but out in the fields? You can look on and on from mustard to wheat to barley and see nothing but the sky meeting earth. I thought that would be home, you know? But life-it has its own ways. But that doesn’t matter, you know-- where you grew up. Life is very long, if you are lucky, and I may not live by this wisdom, as I am an old stubborn man, but you shouldn’t let the past bind you. Aye, you laugh at me now, but heed an old man’s words. Let it free you, but not bind you.’ With that he had removed all bits of romantic trash from his sovereign domain and so brushed his hands with satisfaction.
Settling back behind the bar, he filled Draco’s glass once again.
‘Of course, once the mountains have you, how can you go back? Mr Oberoi offered me a nice pension and the chance to keep his house in Goa aired, but I said no, you know… When the mountains have you…’ He stoppered his best whiskey and put it back on the shelf.
Draco had heard this tale every day he had sat at the bar in the past three years he had been coming here.
‘Goa is nice-balmy and all that. Good for arthritic bones of old men; you’d like it.’
With the warm comfort of arguments often made and frequently reprised, Malkit bristled: ‘There’s nothing wrong with my bones! I could still take all the little muscle-bound striplings who come up here, ordering me about, flashing their new wealth. No stomach for a fight these young people, just puffy muscle, all full of air. Now I’ve fought in two wars as did my father and his father before him. I say it’s not in the arms that your strength lies, it lies in your heart and your liver and your convictions. Some people just don’t have that. Wimps, all of them!’
This was new.
‘Has Mr Chatterjee been rubbing you the wrong way? You can’t challenge him to a fight, you know,’ said Draco. Malkit never seemed to get along with any of the ‘new-fangled’ managers who tried to make him change his age-old ways.
‘Silly young Bengali! Thinks he knows so much about bar-keeping because he attended bar-keeping college. “Ho-tull-management”. Pah! He was telling me the other day what a Patiala peg was-me, who actually served the maharajah when he used to come up to Chail for the season. I was a mere boy then, of course, but I know more about a Patiala peg than that young whippersnapper could ever learn from his stupid degrees. Really, these people from down south, they know nothing about anything. And what kind of degree is hotel management anyway? In my time people studied Science or Mathematics, or even, god forbid, Law, not this nancy-boying around in gloves!’
‘Don’t worry, he’ll settle down once he realises things run better just as they are,’ soothed Draco.
‘Yes, but I bet he’s never fought in any wars has he? Never won a medal for bravery, hell,never even been on a losing side- too busy learning how to meddle in other people’s business in college, I bet!’
They were both content in the warm afterglow of good spirits, when an altercation could be heard, muffled, through the thick teak doors.
Then the door was pulled open a fraction and a woman’s voice said in a distinct London accent: ‘No, I know the bar is closed on Tuesdays, but everywhere else is full, my room isn’t ready yet, and I refuse to spend an hour in your stupid lounge with all those wittering soppy idiots! I demand that you let me have a drink in peace!’
This shrill announcement was followed by the placating tones of the floor-manager but they obviously failed to convince the harridan as the door was pulled open, and in strode a woman of indeterminate age, wrapped in a giant coat and woolly scarf. She stomped to the bar, while the hapless manager closed the door behind her.
‘Now this is very nice! An Arts and Crafts influence, I see. Obviously restored. Could I have a large brandy please?’ she said, removing her coat and scarf.
Malkit complied, muttering, no doubt castigating the rudeness of females who unceremoniously interrupted the quiet time of quiet men.
Draco would have slipped away to the comfort of his own room, but something about the untidy hair of this new arrival arrested him.
And it was his very stillness and wariness that attracted the woman’s attention and she turned to face him.
‘Draco Malfoy. Imagine!’ she said.
‘Hermione Granger,’ he replied, his voice still bitter with the effluvium of an age past.
‘How strange to see you here!’ She seemed determined to retain a façade of normality and vapid hypocrisy masquerading as politeness; he was having none of it.
‘It is strange for me to see you here, Granger, yes; but I do not think it a coincidence. I imagine you are here because you are looking for me.’
She acknowledged his statement with a slight nod. ‘The government is interested in you, but we didn’t expect to find you here,’ and she waved an imperious hand at the restored luxury of Lord Kitchener’s residence.
‘The Malfoy head is hard to disguise…. Did you hear tell of an old-young man in the Himalayas all the way up in stuffy London?’
‘Something like that,’ said Hermione, gratefully sipping her cognac, which Malkit had placed before her.
‘Are you here for long?’ asked Draco, hiding his initial irritation, and now for all the world catching up with a long-lost acquaintance.
‘Umm, yes, the road up from Shimla is closed- we had to trek up the last mile to the hotel. I was offered a yak, which I declined.’ Granger rolled her eyes in the same supercilious manner as she always had at school.
‘Looks as if we’ll be cut off for at least a couple of days then,’ shrugged Draco, displaying the exaggerated fatalism that Indians so often assume in the face of foreign exasperation. ‘Good skiing, though.’
‘They didn’t have a room ready for me, because they thought I wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, what with the snowfall and the roads closing, and somebody who had to check out today couldn’t because, you know. Why they would like to keep me out of here and with those stupid couples making mooneyes at each other, when you are sitting here, is beyond me!’
‘Probably because they like me,’ said Draco, smugly.
‘They are stranger even than I thought, then,’ she retorted, still secure in her Gryffindor world-view, despite War and Insurrection and Time.
‘Or perhaps they know a good thing when they see it,’ he winked at her, and it was especially enjoyable because it was infuriating to her.
Predictably, Hermione sniffed, her nose still red from the cold. ‘Same old Malfoy-so full of himself.’
‘Yes, I’m the same, essentially. Not you though. You’re…’
‘Grown up? Not a girl any more?’
‘Fatter, I would have said had I been just the same, Granger, which I won’t because you’re not. Fatter, that is. Just not a girl any more.’
She looked abashed, and pulled down her unflattering jumper sleeves over her un-manicured hands.
‘No, definitely not a girl.’
‘Working for the Ministry, I presume.’
She looked up quickly at him as he leaned negligently on the bar, looking at her and yet body twisted as far away as possible from her.
The barman had disappeared into some strange domain of barmen, and they were alone with only the flickering fire light for company.
‘You know I work for the Ministry-- the government. You may be living here in the middle of nowhere but you still follow what’s happening in the world.’
‘The world?’ he scoffed. ‘Eurocentric neo-imperialism at its utter, ignorant best! Why should the world be in London, Granger? My world is here. My life is here. A billion people live here. This is the world, you know! I like it here and don’t care two bits about your world!’
She was taken aback, but only for a moment. ‘Then perhaps you will be interested to know that “My world” still has interest in you, Malfoy. There are still a couple of case-files open that feature your name far too many times.’
‘I’ve never been officially charged with anything and I‘ve surrendered my residency rights to the Malfoy properties in Britain.’
‘You can’t leave everything behind just like that! Like it or not, you had some role to lay in the formation of our nation and we would-’
‘We would? Well, I don’t bloody care what you would. I left; I will not go back!’
‘These people do no know who you are, what you are!’ She spoke with a suppressed passion, as if wary of eavesdroppers.
Draco stared at her beetle-brown eyes, his own turned red by the firelight.
‘They have a much broader understanding of how life should be. They have lived with some form of magic all their lives; they accept it. They are neither horrified by it nor do they treat it like a Blackpool freak show. And in these mountains? There are more magical people here than there ever were in Diagon Alley and yet they never divided themselves from the rest of the populace; they never had ‘Muggles’. And that is why they never had the War.’
‘Division of the populace by magical ability was wrong. The government is working to rectify the divide-’
‘Rectify the divide? You don’t-- can’t treat difference by eradicating it! Are you one of them, then?’ He started and moved back, making his hand squeak against the polished wood. ‘You are! How could you not be, being the face of the new Ministry?’
‘I wear my Badge of Nullity and Equality with joy.’ And she pulled up the jumper sleeve on her left arm to show the silver band blinking green and red in an unfailing digital sequence.
‘The bone!’ muttered Malfoy, one hand going instinctively to feel the comforting presence of his own wand in his trouser pocket.
‘It is the rational thing to do. The world cannot survive with some members of the population having powers and abilities that affect the lives of so many others. We must therefore voluntarily decide to resist using our so-called powers-they cannot solve the problems of mankind…’
‘The problems of mankind? The problem of mankind is that a few mediocre politicians love power more than anything else and to seize it they will give up what little magical talent they ever had, convincing nitwits like you that it is a noble thing to do. And who would challenge them? Voldemort, Potter, Professor Snape, Dumbledore, all the senior figures of the Wizengamot are dead, and so your lot of snivelling political rats come along with this initiative. It’s utter bollocks!’
‘It is the way forward, it erases conflict!’
‘It is nothing except the triumph of mediocrity over substance!’
‘The process is entirely voluntary - if it didn’t make sense why would the majority of the Wizarding population in Europe submit to the Bone?'
‘Because you offered them immediate relief from conflict. Because their livelihoods and relatives had been killed in a war between purebloods and half-bloods and Muggle-borns, because they thought nothing could be worse? They were vulnerable and people like you jumped at the opportunity for power this gave you. Nulay Burr is the worse thing that has happened to the Wizarding world-worse even than Voldemort and Grindlewald. And if you didn’t have your eyes blinkered by your stupid middleclass left-wing righteousness, you would know it too.’
‘Shut up, Malfoy! What would you, a child of privilege and power, know about reparation and reform?’
‘I knew enough to fight for the cause I believed in, and to support the interests of Wizard-kind.’
‘We support the interests of mankind,’ she said, smug in her own often-ruminated rhetoric.
‘Sanctimonious twaddle. You support only Nulay Burr and his sycophants and people like you and Percy Weasley who would never have a significant role in a traditional government.’
She decided to be the force of reason; calm, rational argument in the face of his passion. ‘You could come back, you know. Wear the bone and the Ministry will give you back your land and titles. A place on the House of Seers and a say in future policies.’
He was having none of it, his colour heightened both by the spirit and the argument. ‘Rubbish! You want me as the face of the Purebloods. The Malfoy name, infamous, notorious, what have you, it is still a name to conjure with, now that you have no Potter to play with. To convince the populace that I agree with you. Well, I don’t and I will never willingly go back to Britain!’
She looked startled, maybe even a little guilty. She did have a brain somewhere still underneath all that tired political correctness.
‘This hurts you, doesn’t it?’ he goaded, now turned fully towards her, confidently slipping back into the role of the taunting bully.
‘What?’ she said defiantly draining her drink, which Malfoy re-filled automatically with a flick of his wand. Her eyes widened with shock, perhaps a little longing.
‘That you convert to their cause, be their poster girl, and yet you are never, ever the ultimate prize. They still need me. And you the brightest witch of the day, Muggle-born, discriminated against, the whole spiel, and yet they send you as a head-hunter after me.’
She was flushed with the cognac and the heat of the fire.
‘You are so cynical and bitter, Malfoy. Just because your plans for your racist, supremacist domination came to naught, you think everybody else is a power-hungry megalomaniac like you!’ She stopped and looked up from her drink and straight into his eyes, ‘and your father.’
That taunt had stopped hurting a long time ago, and he let it pass with a pleasantly surprised insouciance. ‘Granger, Granger, Granger, don’t go pinning your dirty left-wing post-imperial guilt on me. These concepts, these ideas that you hold so dear and wish to uphold-- no, to deny, to negate, oh so desperately, aren’t mine. They weren’t ours, our Pureblood society’s.'
He settled down on a stool next to her, sprawled out in lazy disrespect. 'We never went plundering out into the world and subjugating Wizard-kind from other countries, wily-nilly imposing our will and Imperial majesty over them, declaring their land Terra Nulla. And my people, my kind, were not party to your saga of colonialism, so don’t pass your overcompensating self-flagellation on to me as some sort of panacea. We were different civilisations with different moral codes which should have been kept separately, and yet you and people like you come in, blundering and full of yourself, much like your silly Christian missionaries, converting the savages. Just like your mission to save the house elves back in school-- ridiculous, culturally insensitive, badly thought out and horrendously executed. Glad to see you’ve gone and outdone yourself in your future career.’
‘Why you-’ Granger spluttered, her assumed calm shattering under his assault. She was the one supposed to be making sweeping arguments, convincing people off their erroneous beliefs, and not some Slytherin bigot in a bar in Nowhere.
He was satyr-like as he leered at her over his whiskey. ‘Yes, I read your history; I am living in your world now. I do not seek to change it though; I accept it for what it is. A courtesy one cannot expect from people like you.’
She drew solace and fresh arsenal from how often she had had this debate and won.‘You talk as if we are forcing people to give up their magic. It is voluntary, you know. And there is a whole rehabilitation programme- and if you decide it is not for you, you can take the inhibitor out.’
‘I’ve heard about that-people disappearing, going mad, after extractions. Some legally, some done by healers on the run. I know, Granger, I know you can’t perform magic on the subject for at least 24 hours after the chip is removed or it causes a severe shock to the system, and quite often the subject’s own magic kills them. Healers just have to stand by and watch them die, because their magical healing would kill them anyway. So yes, nice try, but NO deal!'
‘Clinical tests are still ongoing, Malfoy, and very few people have wanted to be off the programme in any case.'
‘What you mean is that very few people have been statistically acknowledged to be wanting out. Wouldn’t want to muddy the figures, would we?’
‘Malfoy,’ she said, drawing her hand resignedly through her tangled hair, ‘we could argue about this forever. I don’t want to. I can’t convince you. You can’t convince me. We’re stuck here on the middle of winter and we can’t get out-shall we try to get along for the two days it takes for us to be able to go our separate ways?’
‘I don’t want to squabble, Granger. I will give you dinner if you’ll let me. I am actually quite pleased to see you, you know.’
‘Are you?’ she said, gingerly getting to her feet, testing the ground for solidity.
‘Yes, I am. You made me realise I’ve come to terms with my past. It can't hurt me any more. At the Lutyens’, at nine,’ and with that, he was gone.
X
She next saw him in the restaurant. He looked well- the years had given him presence and breadth and muscle and every eye in the restaurant drew to him for a moment, and it wasn’t just because of his strangely coloured hair. A part of Hermione was pleased that it was to her table that he made a beeline to, ushered by a splendidly be-turbaned waiter.
She didn’t know how to greet him, so she sat rooted to her chair and he immediately made her feel underdressed, gauche and ill-natured as he drew from behind his hand a single white rose-bud, which he presented to her.
She accepted, flustered and half-rose from her chair uncertainly, only to sit down again as he settled gracefully into his own.
‘You have been working on you social skills, I see.’
‘And I see that you are as pleasant and forgiving as ever,’ she countered. He merely quirked an eyebrow and perused the proffered menu.
‘Don’t order the pheasant,’ he said, ‘it’s actually chicken, but much drier.’
Of course when the time came to order, she had the pheasant, while he settled for something with lamb.
Of course he was right and she struggled with her tough meat while pretending to enjoy it.
‘You know, Granger, under different circumstances, had you not been so horrid at school, I might actually have liked your company,' said Malfoy, delicately slicing his food.
This made her put down her fork in defeat on her plate, and a hovering waiter whisked it away.
She followed her plate with startled eyes, while saying: ‘Really. Somehow I doubt that very much.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I ordered us a platter of the best shish kebabs’, and with that he set his own cutlery down and his place too was cleared in efficient silence. He toasted her with champagne, which had magically appeared on the table, or she had been so busy wrestling with the pheasant that she hadn’t noticed when her flute had been filled.
‘Drink your fill, and we shall dance until the platter arrives, ’he said flirtatiously, camp-ly, baiting her to be urbane.
She was still a little dizzy from all that brandy on an empty stomach, but the cool champagne looked so inviting in the candle-light that she complied and drank it all down, enjoying the bubbles teasing her palette.
‘No, it’s true. You see, I like taking gauche, socially unskilled people under my wing. Witness Vincent and Gregory.’
‘Uhh, ‘she wrinkled her brow ‘-Crabbe and Goyle?’
‘Yes, indeed. Now sadly no longer with us, thanks to the war. Would you care to dance? Just so we fit in with this motley crowd denigrating romance?’
‘Sure, I’ve never danced with a Slytherin before.’ She felt reckless and strange, the spirits buzzing in her ears, making the giggling couples all around, looking sappily into each others’ eyes, endearing rather than irritating. Surely alcohol was a gift from the gods.
The band struck up a tango rhythm, and she was led masterfully to the beautiful parquet floor, where she felt heavy and lumpen, and he looked all graceful and alien, and it was as if the two decades, two husbands and two children between her first step into Hogwarts and now had never happened- she was still the ill-at-ease outsider looking into his world.
‘This is magic,’ he whispered into her ear, breath warm on her skin.
She felt him, in her head, prickling probing fingers just under her scalp, and then he was in. She felt herself, but she also felt herself giving in and when the piano started its strong Latin rhythm, she felt her leg swivel out in perfect time to his, her hand held captive in his. Her foot did an immensely complicated decoration over his leg in time to a complex two-four beat and her head moved in perfect staccato rhythms in time with his. She turned, spun and twisted; stalked, shimmied and strummed in a masterly display of the argentine tango. Not with her sensible Steve, her current sensible choice of husband, or during her first ill-judged love affair with the dead Ron Weasley, or with any of her subsequent conquests and compromises, had she felt this way.
And then when they were cheek-to-cheek and chest-to-chest, moving rhythmically across the floor in prefect time, she could feel the awed gawking of even the most vacuously self-absorbed couple.
She missed it.
The magic that now ran electric pulses in her, which she knew would make her so very sick the next morning.
But there was no time for that now, as he picked her up her in a complicated lift and her hand knew exactly where to find his, her head angled perfectly, her carriage every inch that of a dark queen of the night entertaining her favourite gaucho. She had a fleeting moment to admire his immense skill as he seamlessly directed both his body and hers in perfect coordination. And then she felt herself bend perfectly in a half moon backwards into a beautifully judged drop as he leaned over her, smirking. The music stopped and the applause began; he straightened, elegantly, leisurely. His mind withdrew in a painful jerk, and her own body realised its uncomfortable position; unused muscles protested at unaccustomed effort and bones creaked in sudden pain.
Unaccountable tears strung her eyes as she struggled upright in an ungainly shuffling of limbs, undoing the poetry of grace and elegance they had created, and he did not stop her when she ran from the ballroom like a Regency heroine.
X
Malkit Singh was in his usual irritable mood the next morning. The Malfoy chap, the only sensible guest in the entire hotel had left early in the morning, carrying nothing but his back-pack, trudging through meter deep snow up the Hindustan-Tibet road, saying he would make it past the Sutlej and into Rampur, before mid-morning. Surely he would perish on the way, and somehow he would be held responsible, wasn’t that what always happened?
Just look at the case of the horribly rude Firangi woman who had been dining with Malfoy last night. Here she had stood plain as day, knocking back the drink like there was no tomorrow and now she was terribly sick in her room, completely denying having drunk any alcohol at all and blaming the ‘soup’ she’d had for dinner last night, for giving her Delhi belly, when everyone knew what she had eaten; the pheasant cooked by the idiotic new chef.
And the stupid Bengali Chatterjee was blaming him for letting her imbibe irresponsibly.
Really, some things never changed, but then in his polishing of his bar he lifted the heavy crystal vase on the comer and discovered ten crisp five-hundred rupee notes underneath and suddenly the world was much better, and he was even able to stop muttering rude things as Mr. Malfoy’s friend came to the bar, complaining about the soppy love-birds strewn all over the hotel.
‘Now this is very nice! An Arts and Crafts influence, I see. Obviously restored. Could I have a large brandy, please?’
‘Please, miss, you had a lot of brandy yesterday and that normally makes you sick if you’re not used to it,’ Malkit began patiently, trying to avoid further words with Chatterjee.
But she looked at him as if he had two heads.
‘I think you may have mistaken me for some other Englishwoman,’ she said slowly and loudly as if he were an idiot child; ‘I have never been to the bar before.’
‘Some things never change,’ thought Malkit, and wordlessly poured out the cognac.
Ten miles to the north of Wildflower Hall as a wizard wrapped in a cloak on a fast broomstick can fly, Draco Malfoy rode the errant current of the winds from the glaciers, darting from cloud to cloud. For although he had left Shimla and the fear of being photographed by camera-happy tourists far behind, he did not want talk of yet another flying yeti to reach the ears of the obliviated Granger.
For the first time in the twenty years that had passed since he first met Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy felt no resentment against her or her kind-- only a mild pity. Perhaps that blinking bracelet, now lying in his pocket, protected by an Impervious barrier usually used to handle poisonous substances in a Potions laboratory, was a mistake-he would not immediately know. But Hermione Granger was just one part of his old life come back, and he could look it in the eye again, and perhaps he owed her this favour, or this mischief-he did not yet know what to call it.
He was happy, he realised, as he did a corkscrew loop into a vast tree-filled incline that showed no tell-tale twinkling lights of habitation, bare even of the ubiquitous terraced fields that clutched doggedly on every other sweeping mountain in the vicinity. Happy and at peace with himself, living not in the past, not in a different place, but here and now.
A thousand feet below him he saw the eternal thrust and parry of millennia, stony crannies wedding granite nooks on a gigantic scale across the undulating valley floor, as the green ribbon of the Baspa flowed furiously to meet the black torrent of the Sutlej, until the distant clouds veiled the majestic tectonic dance from his awed eyes. This was Geological story-telling on a vast scale, and he could really, really see it now. Into this vast tumult he dropped the little package from his pocket, removing the Impervious as it fell, until it was no longer visible even to his keen Seeker eyes.
And next time when he came down to collect the Landrover and the rest of his belongings; he knew he would taste the Glenfiddich, and not the bitter memory of the stolen Firewhiskey of fourth year.
Final Notes: Feedback is not welcome. It is needed. And yes, Wildflower Hall is a real place.
REQUEST
Would you prefer an art or fic valentine? Fic
Describe your ideal valentine in as few words as possible: Older - out of school, they dine, dance, and converse - ultimately finding that they can fall in love
Dealbreakers (absolute no-no's): Slash (implied or otherwise), Mushy!Draco, MarySue!Hermione
Title: The Long Aftertaste of Stolen Firewhiskey and Other Impossible Conversations
Author: agarttha
Type of Valentine: Fic
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J K Rowling. No profit is being made.
Rating: PG13
Warnings: Character/s death.
Notes: Thanks to Kyra, my beta. Thou rocketh muchly.
Summary: One can live a million miles away and still stay in the very same spot. A Valentine’s Day chance meeting in a snowbound grand residence in the Himalayas. What could go wrong? Really.
"The Long Aftertaste of Stolen Firewhiskey and Other Impossible Conversations"
The deodars, proud timber of the gods, stood black in the quick-falling twilight. It was a night of magic, for if one could have looked beyond the solid cloud, metallic and clamping down on the tree tops, one would have see that the majestic moon of the Whole Month was out, a-hunting the senses of mortal men.
The sky threatened further snow, which lay in thick swathes on the Himalayan panorama, blanketing craggy mountain and sweeping valley, making everything preternaturally bright even in the growing darkness. A majestic Victorian building stood incongruously in this landscape, its steep gables and ornate eaves decorated with icicles and dustings of the snow; paned windows bright with the warm yellow light of welcoming bonhomie. Some of the light spilled out of a few of the un-curtained windows and fell in cold golden blocks onto the even snow of the lawns unblemished by anything except the stick footprints of myriad birds and the quick scampering paw-prints of the occasional squirrel.
From a French window of the East wing, a long trench of footprints led across the extensive grounds that sloped gradually under giant flat-topped cedars until it tumbled down a steep hill-side, down and down, fully two thousand feet into the mist-filled valley floor.
At the very edge of the snow-filled soft-edged lawn, precariously perched between the mists of the valley and the lead of the horizon, stood a fairy summerhouse, completely bare except for the wooden seat that ran around its circumference, and in it, stood a lone man. A stray pine cone rattled in a sudden gust and one of a livelier imagination than the current occupant of the building would have imagined unseen terrors and started.
Not Draco Malfoy, however.
He stood tall, like Cassius defying the lightning, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of his pale grey trousers, thin shirt clinging to slender body as the wind rippled and sussurated across him, lifting his pale silver hair off his brow in wisps of thistledown. It was bitterly cold, and the wind made the snow from the tall slender conifers drop soundlessly onto the blanket of snow below it, and yet he seemed unperturbed by it.
The wind carried with it the smells of pine fires burning in some distant valley, fresh and tingling, of the glaciers on the Mountains of the Thieves, and of something else… It brought with it the tang of a snow-covered land far, far away, where too snow-laden winds had whistled at him on a crenulated tower. An owl called, as if on cue, but when he opened his eyes, it was not on the dropping strewn floor of the Owlery at Hogwarts, but the bleached boards of the summer house of Wildflower Hall in the Shimla hills in India that he stood.
And it was not a boy who gazed at the panorama below him with eyes filled again with the façade of ennui, but a man, grown taller, broader, more bitter and hardened, and a fugitive.
Though not here. Not yet.
A deferential cough behind him made him turn.
‘Would sir like to come in? There is a nice fire in the Cavalry Bar…’
Mr. Chatterjee, the assistant manager of the hotel had no doubt come to make sure that Draco would not die of pneumonia while on their property. Or maybe he just was concerned about an underdressed man standing all alone on Valentine’s Day, when the rest of the hotel was full of smirking, cloying, romancing couples. Perhaps he needed to be less cynical... Was that consideration left in him? Could he be that boy who still believed in all’s right with the world and care packages and the certainty of family and the constancy of friends?
And here he was, starting to shiver in the violent wind, and the man behind him was held so taut in the numbing cold, Draco thought he would hear him snap if he waited but a moment longer. He did not need to; Draco’s thinking was done for the day.
‘Perhaps you are right, Mr. Chatterjee! This is not a night for standing about in the wind. But promise me you shall keep the honeymooning couples away from me,’ said Draco as he turned around and walked back across the virgin lawn to the main building.
The manager followed with a painful eagerness, almost shooing him up the lawn.
‘Of course, Mr Malfoy! The bar is closed on Tuesdays as you know. But Malkit Singh has lit the fire just for you. He likes listening to your stories,’ Chatterjee said, in words clipped together in freezing bursts as his uniform trousers and thin shoes became soaked in the snow.
Draco laughed softly, flattening his wind-ruffled silver hair into place, and if the manager noticed that his trousers and shoes were as dry as when he had left the shelter of the summerhouse, while his own clung to his legs in folds of frozen weight, he did not comment on it, but led his guest deferentially through the teak-panelled parlour into the dark-stained wood and leather interior of the Cavalry Bar, where behind a spectacular edifice of centuries old hardwood, stood a splendid Sikh gentleman, who should by rights have been long past the age of retirement, had such things any meaning in India. The manager then shut the heavy panelled door behind Draco with expensive smoothness.
Draco slipped onto a leather-padded bar stool with familiar ease, enjoying the warmth of the fire which burnt and spat fresh pine resin onto the stone hearth, while Malkit Singh poured him a practised measure of Glenfiddich.
‘Open on a Tuesday just for me Malkit?’ he said, sipping his golden dram, pretending it was something entirely different he was drinking, yet trying to not insult the excellent single malt. His brain said it should have been excellent; his heart could taste it turning to acrid water in his mouth.
Something of his conflict seemed caught in the Sikh’s old eyes, as they reflected the firelight and their age, and had they been the twinkling blue of a June sky on a clear day and not the hazel of the dried Deodar twigs of a winter-barren October, he could almost imagine that the magnificent beard and eyebrows belonged to another old man from a time very long ago.
His brain lurched as automatically he occluded Malkit Singh’s all too wise eyes, going back to the years of practise his hermit life had not extracted from him.
‘It looks like you will be with us for one more week, I think, Mr Malfoy,’ said the old Sikh, polishing his heavy crystal tumblers with a crisp white dishcloth. They had switched to familiar Hindustani rather than the formal English employed by the rest of the hotel staff to all guests. A clever translation charm had worked well for Draco the first year he had moved to India, but since then he had picked up the language and its various dialects and accents with surprising ease. And if ever Malkit had wondered why the same pale youth who had spoken at him in stilted but perfect Punjabi three years ago, but making no sense, had never again employed the language-- he never mentioned it.
‘Really? Surely not, Malkit! We’ve only had a foot of snow and we’re pretty high up here aren’t we? I think I’ll be crossing the Sutlej tomorrow, as planned-- I have all the provisions and company I need for the next two months,’ said Draco, knowing full well that he was wrong; he just liked Malkit Singh to talk at him, the old dry voice soothing him in a way that very little else did these days.
‘But there would have been landslides-there always are when we have snow in February. Oh yess, the road up from Rampur will be closed, and they’ll take a week, at least, kickback-taking slackers that they are, the PWD people, to remove the debris.’ Malkit spoke with relish, as if the elements, by ruining everybody else’s plans, had done him a personal favour.
‘Oh, don’t worry abut me Malkit-- I’ll hitch a mule up to Kinnaur if I have to. You can drive the Landrover up in the spring when the road opens,’ provoked Draco.
The old man chuckled. ‘Well you know that the shepherds will be coming south in this weather, not going the other way, Mr Malfoy, and you a hill man!’ he admonished.
‘Honorary, Malkit, still honorary. Negi up in Wangto still call me ‘white plainsman’, though I’ve lived up in Pangi for almost five years now. He thinks I am a plainsman, and most times I think I am very much a plainsman. My home was in a flat bit of country, you know.’
Malkit beamed, eager to show off his knowledge of the wider world, much of which he had gleaned from talking with select patrons at this very bar: ‘In Blighty? Wiletshire, yes?’ he said, pronouncing the place names with a strange musical cadence, making them sound alien rather than familiar. But they were alien to Draco now, weren’t they?
Malkit was now gingerly picking up the bits of red ribbon (that some unfortunate manager had forced him to festoon his bar with in deference to the Valentine’s Day celebrations) as if it were a live snake, a filthy live snake, and depositing it in the bin. ‘And Umballa, where my village is, is the flattest bit of land you’ll ever see. Nary even a hillock or a mud mound to break the flatness, except the ugly houses, but out in the fields? You can look on and on from mustard to wheat to barley and see nothing but the sky meeting earth. I thought that would be home, you know? But life-it has its own ways. But that doesn’t matter, you know-- where you grew up. Life is very long, if you are lucky, and I may not live by this wisdom, as I am an old stubborn man, but you shouldn’t let the past bind you. Aye, you laugh at me now, but heed an old man’s words. Let it free you, but not bind you.’ With that he had removed all bits of romantic trash from his sovereign domain and so brushed his hands with satisfaction.
Settling back behind the bar, he filled Draco’s glass once again.
‘Of course, once the mountains have you, how can you go back? Mr Oberoi offered me a nice pension and the chance to keep his house in Goa aired, but I said no, you know… When the mountains have you…’ He stoppered his best whiskey and put it back on the shelf.
Draco had heard this tale every day he had sat at the bar in the past three years he had been coming here.
‘Goa is nice-balmy and all that. Good for arthritic bones of old men; you’d like it.’
With the warm comfort of arguments often made and frequently reprised, Malkit bristled: ‘There’s nothing wrong with my bones! I could still take all the little muscle-bound striplings who come up here, ordering me about, flashing their new wealth. No stomach for a fight these young people, just puffy muscle, all full of air. Now I’ve fought in two wars as did my father and his father before him. I say it’s not in the arms that your strength lies, it lies in your heart and your liver and your convictions. Some people just don’t have that. Wimps, all of them!’
This was new.
‘Has Mr Chatterjee been rubbing you the wrong way? You can’t challenge him to a fight, you know,’ said Draco. Malkit never seemed to get along with any of the ‘new-fangled’ managers who tried to make him change his age-old ways.
‘Silly young Bengali! Thinks he knows so much about bar-keeping because he attended bar-keeping college. “Ho-tull-management”. Pah! He was telling me the other day what a Patiala peg was-me, who actually served the maharajah when he used to come up to Chail for the season. I was a mere boy then, of course, but I know more about a Patiala peg than that young whippersnapper could ever learn from his stupid degrees. Really, these people from down south, they know nothing about anything. And what kind of degree is hotel management anyway? In my time people studied Science or Mathematics, or even, god forbid, Law, not this nancy-boying around in gloves!’
‘Don’t worry, he’ll settle down once he realises things run better just as they are,’ soothed Draco.
‘Yes, but I bet he’s never fought in any wars has he? Never won a medal for bravery, hell,never even been on a losing side- too busy learning how to meddle in other people’s business in college, I bet!’
They were both content in the warm afterglow of good spirits, when an altercation could be heard, muffled, through the thick teak doors.
Then the door was pulled open a fraction and a woman’s voice said in a distinct London accent: ‘No, I know the bar is closed on Tuesdays, but everywhere else is full, my room isn’t ready yet, and I refuse to spend an hour in your stupid lounge with all those wittering soppy idiots! I demand that you let me have a drink in peace!’
This shrill announcement was followed by the placating tones of the floor-manager but they obviously failed to convince the harridan as the door was pulled open, and in strode a woman of indeterminate age, wrapped in a giant coat and woolly scarf. She stomped to the bar, while the hapless manager closed the door behind her.
‘Now this is very nice! An Arts and Crafts influence, I see. Obviously restored. Could I have a large brandy please?’ she said, removing her coat and scarf.
Malkit complied, muttering, no doubt castigating the rudeness of females who unceremoniously interrupted the quiet time of quiet men.
Draco would have slipped away to the comfort of his own room, but something about the untidy hair of this new arrival arrested him.
And it was his very stillness and wariness that attracted the woman’s attention and she turned to face him.
‘Draco Malfoy. Imagine!’ she said.
‘Hermione Granger,’ he replied, his voice still bitter with the effluvium of an age past.
‘How strange to see you here!’ She seemed determined to retain a façade of normality and vapid hypocrisy masquerading as politeness; he was having none of it.
‘It is strange for me to see you here, Granger, yes; but I do not think it a coincidence. I imagine you are here because you are looking for me.’
She acknowledged his statement with a slight nod. ‘The government is interested in you, but we didn’t expect to find you here,’ and she waved an imperious hand at the restored luxury of Lord Kitchener’s residence.
‘The Malfoy head is hard to disguise…. Did you hear tell of an old-young man in the Himalayas all the way up in stuffy London?’
‘Something like that,’ said Hermione, gratefully sipping her cognac, which Malkit had placed before her.
‘Are you here for long?’ asked Draco, hiding his initial irritation, and now for all the world catching up with a long-lost acquaintance.
‘Umm, yes, the road up from Shimla is closed- we had to trek up the last mile to the hotel. I was offered a yak, which I declined.’ Granger rolled her eyes in the same supercilious manner as she always had at school.
‘Looks as if we’ll be cut off for at least a couple of days then,’ shrugged Draco, displaying the exaggerated fatalism that Indians so often assume in the face of foreign exasperation. ‘Good skiing, though.’
‘They didn’t have a room ready for me, because they thought I wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, what with the snowfall and the roads closing, and somebody who had to check out today couldn’t because, you know. Why they would like to keep me out of here and with those stupid couples making mooneyes at each other, when you are sitting here, is beyond me!’
‘Probably because they like me,’ said Draco, smugly.
‘They are stranger even than I thought, then,’ she retorted, still secure in her Gryffindor world-view, despite War and Insurrection and Time.
‘Or perhaps they know a good thing when they see it,’ he winked at her, and it was especially enjoyable because it was infuriating to her.
Predictably, Hermione sniffed, her nose still red from the cold. ‘Same old Malfoy-so full of himself.’
‘Yes, I’m the same, essentially. Not you though. You’re…’
‘Grown up? Not a girl any more?’
‘Fatter, I would have said had I been just the same, Granger, which I won’t because you’re not. Fatter, that is. Just not a girl any more.’
She looked abashed, and pulled down her unflattering jumper sleeves over her un-manicured hands.
‘No, definitely not a girl.’
‘Working for the Ministry, I presume.’
She looked up quickly at him as he leaned negligently on the bar, looking at her and yet body twisted as far away as possible from her.
The barman had disappeared into some strange domain of barmen, and they were alone with only the flickering fire light for company.
‘You know I work for the Ministry-- the government. You may be living here in the middle of nowhere but you still follow what’s happening in the world.’
‘The world?’ he scoffed. ‘Eurocentric neo-imperialism at its utter, ignorant best! Why should the world be in London, Granger? My world is here. My life is here. A billion people live here. This is the world, you know! I like it here and don’t care two bits about your world!’
She was taken aback, but only for a moment. ‘Then perhaps you will be interested to know that “My world” still has interest in you, Malfoy. There are still a couple of case-files open that feature your name far too many times.’
‘I’ve never been officially charged with anything and I‘ve surrendered my residency rights to the Malfoy properties in Britain.’
‘You can’t leave everything behind just like that! Like it or not, you had some role to lay in the formation of our nation and we would-’
‘We would? Well, I don’t bloody care what you would. I left; I will not go back!’
‘These people do no know who you are, what you are!’ She spoke with a suppressed passion, as if wary of eavesdroppers.
Draco stared at her beetle-brown eyes, his own turned red by the firelight.
‘They have a much broader understanding of how life should be. They have lived with some form of magic all their lives; they accept it. They are neither horrified by it nor do they treat it like a Blackpool freak show. And in these mountains? There are more magical people here than there ever were in Diagon Alley and yet they never divided themselves from the rest of the populace; they never had ‘Muggles’. And that is why they never had the War.’
‘Division of the populace by magical ability was wrong. The government is working to rectify the divide-’
‘Rectify the divide? You don’t-- can’t treat difference by eradicating it! Are you one of them, then?’ He started and moved back, making his hand squeak against the polished wood. ‘You are! How could you not be, being the face of the new Ministry?’
‘I wear my Badge of Nullity and Equality with joy.’ And she pulled up the jumper sleeve on her left arm to show the silver band blinking green and red in an unfailing digital sequence.
‘The bone!’ muttered Malfoy, one hand going instinctively to feel the comforting presence of his own wand in his trouser pocket.
‘It is the rational thing to do. The world cannot survive with some members of the population having powers and abilities that affect the lives of so many others. We must therefore voluntarily decide to resist using our so-called powers-they cannot solve the problems of mankind…’
‘The problems of mankind? The problem of mankind is that a few mediocre politicians love power more than anything else and to seize it they will give up what little magical talent they ever had, convincing nitwits like you that it is a noble thing to do. And who would challenge them? Voldemort, Potter, Professor Snape, Dumbledore, all the senior figures of the Wizengamot are dead, and so your lot of snivelling political rats come along with this initiative. It’s utter bollocks!’
‘It is the way forward, it erases conflict!’
‘It is nothing except the triumph of mediocrity over substance!’
‘The process is entirely voluntary - if it didn’t make sense why would the majority of the Wizarding population in Europe submit to the Bone?'
‘Because you offered them immediate relief from conflict. Because their livelihoods and relatives had been killed in a war between purebloods and half-bloods and Muggle-borns, because they thought nothing could be worse? They were vulnerable and people like you jumped at the opportunity for power this gave you. Nulay Burr is the worse thing that has happened to the Wizarding world-worse even than Voldemort and Grindlewald. And if you didn’t have your eyes blinkered by your stupid middleclass left-wing righteousness, you would know it too.’
‘Shut up, Malfoy! What would you, a child of privilege and power, know about reparation and reform?’
‘I knew enough to fight for the cause I believed in, and to support the interests of Wizard-kind.’
‘We support the interests of mankind,’ she said, smug in her own often-ruminated rhetoric.
‘Sanctimonious twaddle. You support only Nulay Burr and his sycophants and people like you and Percy Weasley who would never have a significant role in a traditional government.’
She decided to be the force of reason; calm, rational argument in the face of his passion. ‘You could come back, you know. Wear the bone and the Ministry will give you back your land and titles. A place on the House of Seers and a say in future policies.’
He was having none of it, his colour heightened both by the spirit and the argument. ‘Rubbish! You want me as the face of the Purebloods. The Malfoy name, infamous, notorious, what have you, it is still a name to conjure with, now that you have no Potter to play with. To convince the populace that I agree with you. Well, I don’t and I will never willingly go back to Britain!’
She looked startled, maybe even a little guilty. She did have a brain somewhere still underneath all that tired political correctness.
‘This hurts you, doesn’t it?’ he goaded, now turned fully towards her, confidently slipping back into the role of the taunting bully.
‘What?’ she said defiantly draining her drink, which Malfoy re-filled automatically with a flick of his wand. Her eyes widened with shock, perhaps a little longing.
‘That you convert to their cause, be their poster girl, and yet you are never, ever the ultimate prize. They still need me. And you the brightest witch of the day, Muggle-born, discriminated against, the whole spiel, and yet they send you as a head-hunter after me.’
She was flushed with the cognac and the heat of the fire.
‘You are so cynical and bitter, Malfoy. Just because your plans for your racist, supremacist domination came to naught, you think everybody else is a power-hungry megalomaniac like you!’ She stopped and looked up from her drink and straight into his eyes, ‘and your father.’
That taunt had stopped hurting a long time ago, and he let it pass with a pleasantly surprised insouciance. ‘Granger, Granger, Granger, don’t go pinning your dirty left-wing post-imperial guilt on me. These concepts, these ideas that you hold so dear and wish to uphold-- no, to deny, to negate, oh so desperately, aren’t mine. They weren’t ours, our Pureblood society’s.'
He settled down on a stool next to her, sprawled out in lazy disrespect. 'We never went plundering out into the world and subjugating Wizard-kind from other countries, wily-nilly imposing our will and Imperial majesty over them, declaring their land Terra Nulla. And my people, my kind, were not party to your saga of colonialism, so don’t pass your overcompensating self-flagellation on to me as some sort of panacea. We were different civilisations with different moral codes which should have been kept separately, and yet you and people like you come in, blundering and full of yourself, much like your silly Christian missionaries, converting the savages. Just like your mission to save the house elves back in school-- ridiculous, culturally insensitive, badly thought out and horrendously executed. Glad to see you’ve gone and outdone yourself in your future career.’
‘Why you-’ Granger spluttered, her assumed calm shattering under his assault. She was the one supposed to be making sweeping arguments, convincing people off their erroneous beliefs, and not some Slytherin bigot in a bar in Nowhere.
He was satyr-like as he leered at her over his whiskey. ‘Yes, I read your history; I am living in your world now. I do not seek to change it though; I accept it for what it is. A courtesy one cannot expect from people like you.’
She drew solace and fresh arsenal from how often she had had this debate and won.‘You talk as if we are forcing people to give up their magic. It is voluntary, you know. And there is a whole rehabilitation programme- and if you decide it is not for you, you can take the inhibitor out.’
‘I’ve heard about that-people disappearing, going mad, after extractions. Some legally, some done by healers on the run. I know, Granger, I know you can’t perform magic on the subject for at least 24 hours after the chip is removed or it causes a severe shock to the system, and quite often the subject’s own magic kills them. Healers just have to stand by and watch them die, because their magical healing would kill them anyway. So yes, nice try, but NO deal!'
‘Clinical tests are still ongoing, Malfoy, and very few people have wanted to be off the programme in any case.'
‘What you mean is that very few people have been statistically acknowledged to be wanting out. Wouldn’t want to muddy the figures, would we?’
‘Malfoy,’ she said, drawing her hand resignedly through her tangled hair, ‘we could argue about this forever. I don’t want to. I can’t convince you. You can’t convince me. We’re stuck here on the middle of winter and we can’t get out-shall we try to get along for the two days it takes for us to be able to go our separate ways?’
‘I don’t want to squabble, Granger. I will give you dinner if you’ll let me. I am actually quite pleased to see you, you know.’
‘Are you?’ she said, gingerly getting to her feet, testing the ground for solidity.
‘Yes, I am. You made me realise I’ve come to terms with my past. It can't hurt me any more. At the Lutyens’, at nine,’ and with that, he was gone.
X
She next saw him in the restaurant. He looked well- the years had given him presence and breadth and muscle and every eye in the restaurant drew to him for a moment, and it wasn’t just because of his strangely coloured hair. A part of Hermione was pleased that it was to her table that he made a beeline to, ushered by a splendidly be-turbaned waiter.
She didn’t know how to greet him, so she sat rooted to her chair and he immediately made her feel underdressed, gauche and ill-natured as he drew from behind his hand a single white rose-bud, which he presented to her.
She accepted, flustered and half-rose from her chair uncertainly, only to sit down again as he settled gracefully into his own.
‘You have been working on you social skills, I see.’
‘And I see that you are as pleasant and forgiving as ever,’ she countered. He merely quirked an eyebrow and perused the proffered menu.
‘Don’t order the pheasant,’ he said, ‘it’s actually chicken, but much drier.’
Of course when the time came to order, she had the pheasant, while he settled for something with lamb.
Of course he was right and she struggled with her tough meat while pretending to enjoy it.
‘You know, Granger, under different circumstances, had you not been so horrid at school, I might actually have liked your company,' said Malfoy, delicately slicing his food.
This made her put down her fork in defeat on her plate, and a hovering waiter whisked it away.
She followed her plate with startled eyes, while saying: ‘Really. Somehow I doubt that very much.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I ordered us a platter of the best shish kebabs’, and with that he set his own cutlery down and his place too was cleared in efficient silence. He toasted her with champagne, which had magically appeared on the table, or she had been so busy wrestling with the pheasant that she hadn’t noticed when her flute had been filled.
‘Drink your fill, and we shall dance until the platter arrives, ’he said flirtatiously, camp-ly, baiting her to be urbane.
She was still a little dizzy from all that brandy on an empty stomach, but the cool champagne looked so inviting in the candle-light that she complied and drank it all down, enjoying the bubbles teasing her palette.
‘No, it’s true. You see, I like taking gauche, socially unskilled people under my wing. Witness Vincent and Gregory.’
‘Uhh, ‘she wrinkled her brow ‘-Crabbe and Goyle?’
‘Yes, indeed. Now sadly no longer with us, thanks to the war. Would you care to dance? Just so we fit in with this motley crowd denigrating romance?’
‘Sure, I’ve never danced with a Slytherin before.’ She felt reckless and strange, the spirits buzzing in her ears, making the giggling couples all around, looking sappily into each others’ eyes, endearing rather than irritating. Surely alcohol was a gift from the gods.
The band struck up a tango rhythm, and she was led masterfully to the beautiful parquet floor, where she felt heavy and lumpen, and he looked all graceful and alien, and it was as if the two decades, two husbands and two children between her first step into Hogwarts and now had never happened- she was still the ill-at-ease outsider looking into his world.
‘This is magic,’ he whispered into her ear, breath warm on her skin.
She felt him, in her head, prickling probing fingers just under her scalp, and then he was in. She felt herself, but she also felt herself giving in and when the piano started its strong Latin rhythm, she felt her leg swivel out in perfect time to his, her hand held captive in his. Her foot did an immensely complicated decoration over his leg in time to a complex two-four beat and her head moved in perfect staccato rhythms in time with his. She turned, spun and twisted; stalked, shimmied and strummed in a masterly display of the argentine tango. Not with her sensible Steve, her current sensible choice of husband, or during her first ill-judged love affair with the dead Ron Weasley, or with any of her subsequent conquests and compromises, had she felt this way.
And then when they were cheek-to-cheek and chest-to-chest, moving rhythmically across the floor in prefect time, she could feel the awed gawking of even the most vacuously self-absorbed couple.
She missed it.
The magic that now ran electric pulses in her, which she knew would make her so very sick the next morning.
But there was no time for that now, as he picked her up her in a complicated lift and her hand knew exactly where to find his, her head angled perfectly, her carriage every inch that of a dark queen of the night entertaining her favourite gaucho. She had a fleeting moment to admire his immense skill as he seamlessly directed both his body and hers in perfect coordination. And then she felt herself bend perfectly in a half moon backwards into a beautifully judged drop as he leaned over her, smirking. The music stopped and the applause began; he straightened, elegantly, leisurely. His mind withdrew in a painful jerk, and her own body realised its uncomfortable position; unused muscles protested at unaccustomed effort and bones creaked in sudden pain.
Unaccountable tears strung her eyes as she struggled upright in an ungainly shuffling of limbs, undoing the poetry of grace and elegance they had created, and he did not stop her when she ran from the ballroom like a Regency heroine.
X
Malkit Singh was in his usual irritable mood the next morning. The Malfoy chap, the only sensible guest in the entire hotel had left early in the morning, carrying nothing but his back-pack, trudging through meter deep snow up the Hindustan-Tibet road, saying he would make it past the Sutlej and into Rampur, before mid-morning. Surely he would perish on the way, and somehow he would be held responsible, wasn’t that what always happened?
Just look at the case of the horribly rude Firangi woman who had been dining with Malfoy last night. Here she had stood plain as day, knocking back the drink like there was no tomorrow and now she was terribly sick in her room, completely denying having drunk any alcohol at all and blaming the ‘soup’ she’d had for dinner last night, for giving her Delhi belly, when everyone knew what she had eaten; the pheasant cooked by the idiotic new chef.
And the stupid Bengali Chatterjee was blaming him for letting her imbibe irresponsibly.
Really, some things never changed, but then in his polishing of his bar he lifted the heavy crystal vase on the comer and discovered ten crisp five-hundred rupee notes underneath and suddenly the world was much better, and he was even able to stop muttering rude things as Mr. Malfoy’s friend came to the bar, complaining about the soppy love-birds strewn all over the hotel.
‘Now this is very nice! An Arts and Crafts influence, I see. Obviously restored. Could I have a large brandy, please?’
‘Please, miss, you had a lot of brandy yesterday and that normally makes you sick if you’re not used to it,’ Malkit began patiently, trying to avoid further words with Chatterjee.
But she looked at him as if he had two heads.
‘I think you may have mistaken me for some other Englishwoman,’ she said slowly and loudly as if he were an idiot child; ‘I have never been to the bar before.’
‘Some things never change,’ thought Malkit, and wordlessly poured out the cognac.
Ten miles to the north of Wildflower Hall as a wizard wrapped in a cloak on a fast broomstick can fly, Draco Malfoy rode the errant current of the winds from the glaciers, darting from cloud to cloud. For although he had left Shimla and the fear of being photographed by camera-happy tourists far behind, he did not want talk of yet another flying yeti to reach the ears of the obliviated Granger.
For the first time in the twenty years that had passed since he first met Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy felt no resentment against her or her kind-- only a mild pity. Perhaps that blinking bracelet, now lying in his pocket, protected by an Impervious barrier usually used to handle poisonous substances in a Potions laboratory, was a mistake-he would not immediately know. But Hermione Granger was just one part of his old life come back, and he could look it in the eye again, and perhaps he owed her this favour, or this mischief-he did not yet know what to call it.
He was happy, he realised, as he did a corkscrew loop into a vast tree-filled incline that showed no tell-tale twinkling lights of habitation, bare even of the ubiquitous terraced fields that clutched doggedly on every other sweeping mountain in the vicinity. Happy and at peace with himself, living not in the past, not in a different place, but here and now.
A thousand feet below him he saw the eternal thrust and parry of millennia, stony crannies wedding granite nooks on a gigantic scale across the undulating valley floor, as the green ribbon of the Baspa flowed furiously to meet the black torrent of the Sutlej, until the distant clouds veiled the majestic tectonic dance from his awed eyes. This was Geological story-telling on a vast scale, and he could really, really see it now. Into this vast tumult he dropped the little package from his pocket, removing the Impervious as it fell, until it was no longer visible even to his keen Seeker eyes.
And next time when he came down to collect the Landrover and the rest of his belongings; he knew he would taste the Glenfiddich, and not the bitter memory of the stolen Firewhiskey of fourth year.
Final Notes: Feedback is not welcome. It is needed. And yes, Wildflower Hall is a real place.
REQUEST
Would you prefer an art or fic valentine? Fic
Describe your ideal valentine in as few words as possible: Older - out of school, they dine, dance, and converse - ultimately finding that they can fall in love
Dealbreakers (absolute no-no's): Slash (implied or otherwise), Mushy!Draco, MarySue!Hermione