December 09
´
Title: Alphabet
Author: Sage
Rating: R
Word Count: 6,215
Prompt: Icicles
Warnings: Cursing
Summary: People don't give enough credit to the alphabet - it is the core from which we build something bigger and more defining.
A/N: Thanks for nominating me to write for you guys! ;) Big thanks to the ever amazing spadul for the beta job. Happy Holidays, lovies!
.a
He settles down into the flow of night, the harsh mellow of liquor igniting his tastebuds as it rolls down his tongue. The chair keeps his back at a formal tilt so he presses his shoulders back, but his spine is the only thing that bends. The fire is roaring on in front of him, beating its golden tempo against the onset of autumn, and he watches the reflection of his fingers bending around his knees.
“Hello?” his mother calls, her voice echoing out in all the space between them until all he can hear is a buzz in his ears.
He holds his breath, listening to the sound of her feet as she passes by the doorway before stuttering it out into his drink. It fogs the glass, outlining the pressure of his fingertips, and he shuts his eyes.
.b
They watch him - the younger ones afraid and the older ones angry. He doesn't look at them because they are not worth the second it would take from his life, or because he doesn't want to know what he could find there. He doesn't know why he bothered to come back here at all; he was fine within the recesses of the Manor's library, with the fading sun barely touching his morning skin. His father had insisted, somewhere between a charity donation and a forced smile, that he complete his education. He doesn't think it is very wise to do anything his father insisted upon any longer but he realizes that money goes the way of rushing water and he still doesn't want to be a Weasley.
He needs his education - he isn't going to increase the depleting family wealth by his name alone, not anymore.
He sits at his House table to catch malevolent looks aimed at his raised nose while the rest of the Hall ignores him. He can't help the direction his eyes take as he turns his cheek to the bitterness bruising his skin, searching for three shades of color across the room but only finding one. She's staring back at him, her eyes black in the distance and he can't tell what they mean. The last time he had seen them they were wet and too wide, staring up at a barren ceiling. Suddenly he can feel a phantom heat of memory against him, sinking in to force his chest to sweat emotions he tries not to recall.
c.
Christmas is spent with him standing between his parents, greeting strange faces and staring at the door.
d.
She is there, silently and awkwardly though he had not heard her coming. If he had, he would have walked away as if it was a moment that never happened. He's breathing too quickly, releasing the cold handle that is causing his sweaty palm to tremble. He tries to hold his breath but he needs the oxygen too badly, so it stops for just a second and then climbs in volume, like a tornado down the dry passage of his throat.
She has a fistful of flowers that she presses to her chest before placing them reverently on the floor. He doesn't know why, and though there's something telling him he should, he forgets when she steps towards him. A single flower twirls in her fingers, her arm stretching out, like an offering to something dangerous. Within the tightness of her cheeks and the wrinkles in her brow is something he hates as well as he knows, so he takes it without question or answer before she walks away.
Fred Weasley, he remembers then, turning back to the Room of Hidden Things. The stem breaks within his clenching fingers, but the knob turns this time.
e.
His marks are not what they were, not even what they could have been, but he is used to this concept by now. He has read his textbooks several times but it doesn't communicate on paper because there is a bigger part of him that finds it useless. What did it matter if he had to stir a potion clockwise when he had lost a war? What did homework even mean when you had tortured people you used to think you knew?
He learns about abstract potions, complicated charms, Muggle inventions, and Defense Against the Dark Arts is just ironic. Bitterly ironic, and that is his life now. He can make a piece of parchment look like a fire breathing dragon the size of the room and he can turn on a television. Were these the things his mother meant when she told him he could make his life into something else? That he was too young for the war to have ruined it? Because it feels like the war sent a bludger through the base of his skull, and he's pretty sure it ruined everything.
Will pressing the power button of a Muggle box change anything? Will it morph him into someone who had it right in the beginning, before it was too late, and give him thicker skin and less of a conscious? Fuck televisions.
She is standing at the edge of the pitch. He is so far above her but he can see the wind turning her hair a less controlled wild. He tries to ignore her but she is persistent with her staring - it makes him angry, because he thinks she knows the things it makes him think. She is trying to torture him like she had been tortured, but she should know that it wasn't him who did it. It was never him, not to their side.
“What?”
“The Headmistress wants to see you.” She doesn't even acknowledge the anger in his tone.
“Nice clothes, Granger.”
She acknowledges that, the green potion mess on her uniform making her self-conscious. He can tell by the way she pulls her robes tighter. “You look like you're dead.”
“That's because I'm dying.” He isn't at all, but her wide eyes turn like a deer to his, like an animal, and at least she leaves him alone.
f.
He's made to drop off potions at the infirmary but he doesn't complain because he feels like he owes things to certain people. Himself, too, but that was supposed to come later. Maybe these were steps to becoming a better person or forgetting about the past - he couldn't know until it was over, until he was there, which usually made him think he was screwing it up again.
“What are you dying from?”
He stares at her and her unassuming book-formed hunch. She straightens up, shifting her books, and she isn't backing down no matter how long he looks at her. She was like that, though he doesn't understand it.
“Nothing.”
Maybe she's convinced he's lying or she wants something, but he's sure she's trying to screw with his head again when she follows him. He tells her that he was lying, but she still doesn't stop talking, even when he tries to escape her accusations. There is a lot of yelling but she sends the gathering crowd away to make room for the storm between them. Some time between his defense and her anger he feels a savage sort of happiness. It is in the mix of popping tendons and raised veins, the strain of vocal chords, that things wash from his chest like the sea. It feels so good to explode and they do, a wild abandon to all pretense, to pretending that the past is actually that, and it makes him dizzy. He builds and reshapes every emotion into anger and it crashes into hers until both of them are shaking in hate-joy. It's more beautiful than hope.
g.
She glares at him for a week in something so familiar that he goes out of his way to piss her off. Then she is back to ignorance, and then the staring starts again. He doesn't know why she has to constantly ruin good things.
h.
He doesn't know what to do with himself so he thinks, and when he is physically sick of thinking he reads. The library is usually empty so he stays there like he had in his own, but sometimes she haunts him around corners, always bringing the ghost of the past with the ghost of herself. She has hardly left him alone for weeks and he wonders how she has any friends at all. Harry Potter has survived a few Killing Curses though - maybe it prepared him for Granger.
“No one likes you.”
He's almost amused when he looks up at her three tables away, her hair a monster in the candlelight of the library. “Are you going to stick your tongue out at me next? Try a little harder, Granger.”
She becomes flustered, and it's not something he's used to seeing so he stares at her when he meant to return to ignorance. “I meant… Even your housemates. I know Slytherin hasn't changed tha--”
“Curiosity killed a lot of things.”
“Well, you know what they say about satisfaction.”
“No, Granger,” he murmurs, and looks up at her from his textbook. “What do they say about satisfaction?”
He watches her eyes flick across his, as if she were reading a book, before settling somewhere between his shoulders. She holds her breath, her ears turn red, and she pretends it never happened. When she begins to talk again later she sticks to books and not people.
I.
He says goodbye to Crabbe the day he bids farewell to Hogwarts, one last apology spoiling his mouth. He stands very still in the place where he had once stood, where he had learned the last things the war could teach him - how it only takes a moment to be too late, and the abyss of loss that never stops pulling. He mimics it one last time, a masochist to his guilt, shutting heavy eyelids to see the carvings the memory had made there. His hand reaches out, hanging in his grief and regret, and his fingers curl into the nothingness of air again.
j.
He doesn't know why he slows his steps on his way off the train - why he waits for her. It was somehow important to letting go of all of it. To stop his memories from shifting between seeing orange light weave through her hair, or remembering how she screamed every time he looked at her. He wants to leave it behind, like he left behind Crabbe. He wants to try.
Her arm slides across his as she brushes past him, warm and soft, typical skin. He used to think everything about her must have been different; some other type of species, diseased like a rat in his youth, and then just…something he couldn't understand.
“I wish I could say it was a pleasure to know you.” She sounds very serious and even her eyes are unblinking.
He agrees with the tone, a solid nod of his head because they both mean what they say. “I wish I could say I never knew you at all.”
He moves first because he must, putting her behind me, behind me.
k.
His father thinks a lot. He used to plot and become a man of action - now he thinks and doesn't do much at all. He wonders if it's harder for his father to know his side failed, or that his son did. But he loves him, still, in the past and always, and it is returned like the metal supports under a bridge - seen on the surface only in a disaster, but steady, needed, constant.
“I'm proud you finished,” his father says, handing him a drink of something dark that burns.
“Thank you.” He wishes to say more but his tongue stutters on air and lays limp in its bed. Nothing felt like it was really finished yet.
l.
“Society rarely forgives.”
He wants to ask her why she hasn't been leaving him alone, from the library at Hogwarts until now. Why he still thinks of her somewhere between himself and the door to the parlor. “Perhaps I don't want forgiveness.”
She glances back towards the banquet then to his feet. “Then what do you want?”
To forget. “I don't know. What do you want?” The question comes harshly.
Her cheek bunches up in what could be half of a smile or nothing at all. “I don't know.”
He waits for her to leave, turning away from her strange expression, but she sits instead.
m.
He cuts the ribbon to a new library at a Muggle university somewhere near Surrey, angled towards the few Wizarding photographers in odd dress, his father's hand clamped around his shoulder. He feels like a liar.
n.
His father and her are standing in his parlor, a hundred different emotions falling from her face to crash to the ground between the three of them. He meets her eyes, her face too tight to not be painful, and both of them are pale.
o.
“--of Magical Creatures. It's my job to be here, Malfoy. Because of the new laws for the proper treatment of hou--”
“I still say you're stalking me.”
p.
He has always loved to fight with her. It's better now because everything she throws at him makes him have to dig for something to defend himself with, and it makes him feel like a better person when he finds it. The things he tells her are the things he reminds himself of later, to make him feel like maybe there was something in him that wasn't coming all wrong.
His mother nearly has a heart attack when she breaks the antique figurine off the mantel with an angry swipe of her arms. She somehow manages to put it back in perfect condition while still ramming her finger into his chest, never pausing for breath. His mother ruins the fire of their argument this time, complimenting her on the spell. She pants out an exaggerated explanation and his mother ignores the bruises on his skin.
He glowers at them before realizing it is the first time he has forgotten memory for the present at the sight of her in his parlor.
q.
His eyes are rubbed raw from lack of sleep when he raises them to meet hers. He doesn't like or want her here, but he doesn't want anyone here. He glares at her for her trespass and she clears her throat, curling her hands into her shirt.
“I like it here.”
“Of course you do, Granger. It's a library.”
She smiles and he scowls at the sight of it. “What are you reading?”
“This history of language.”
“Really?”
“You are the only person in the world you could possibly get excited at the prospect.” She might be the strangest person he had ever met.
“I like language,” she sniffs. “I love everything about it. It's defining of cultures, of people. Invented for communication, a connection between two other people who might not have ever truly known the other person. It helps express--”
“No wonder you like talking so much.”
She glares at him, leaning over to glance at the page he was on. “The alphabet?”
He glares back at her smirk, wondering why she was here again. He was a second away from telling her to keep the book and leave him alone. “I--”
“People don't give enough credit to the alphabet. It's simple, yes, but it's the base of all language. It represents the core from which we build. The letters that make up the words that make up--”
“Are you going to keep chattering on?”
“Yes. Maybe you should have some input. It'll go a lot better for you.”
r.
He helps his mother decide on what flowers to put in the garden, his skin slick under the late summer sun and his hands full of dirt. He doesn't bother to tell her that it's almost autumn and it wouldn't be much use. Planting them late just meant they would have to wait for next year to see them really grow, but they will grow. He is beginning to learn that even if things start late or take a lot of time, it doesn't matter as long as it eventually gets there.
s.
“I want to make a donation. To your department.”
“Oh.”
“You said you needed funding? For the new laws?”
“Yes.”
He stares at her and her front teeth sunken into her lower lip. “Granger, for fu--”
“Will this be in your family's name?”
He understands then - the stiff pictures on the back pages of the newspaper, his father's attempts to climb the mountain of bad decisions and a society's harsher judgments. He's almost offended, close to arguing, but then he remembers that's why he wanted to do it in the first place. For the sake of it, instead of any other purpose. Though maybe it is a lot for himself as well, but no one has to know that.
“It's from my inheritance. Anonymous.”
“An--” she cuts off, surprise spiraling out from her irises as they meet his across the room.
She smiles then. Smiles, at him, with her teeth showing. A grin even. It makes him uncomfortable so he looks away, some strange sensation inching across his shoulder blades. It only takes her a second then to start rambling on about her work and he wishes he never said anything at all.
t.
It's the first time she doesn't storm away after a fight, her frizz bouncing with the furious, heavy thuds of her feet. They don't fight as often as they have a normal conversation anymore - not including the snide remarks and insults that he thinks will always be typical in conversation between the two - so maybe that is why she doesn't stalk off.
She sits down in the chair she usually takes in his library when she asks him asinine questions about his house-elves and then babbles on forever about nothing. “Do you regret it?”
His head snaps up then, grey meeting brown across the light from the window. A hundred particles of dead skin float between them and the light turns her eyes a brighter color. He doesn't even say anything but then she nods, like it is simple to see, and he wonders if it is.
u.
He goes through photographs of times when there was black and white, and the only color he saw was in the blue of Pansy's eyes, the red of pure blood, and the amber of stolen firewhiskey in his dorm. It makes his chest collapse at first until he can hardly breathe through the clutter of emotions, but he mines them like diamonds in mountain caves. Sifts past the dirt that had coated them only as prelude and he remembers a younger freedom and what it meant.
v.
Blaise had told him that the Ministry had only come to visit him three times since the new laws went into effect. The Malfoys' may have warranted more visits with their increased amount of house-elves, as well as the other various magical creatures on the property, but he highly doubted she should have been there once a week for months now.
He is angry, convinced she is trying to find something to send them into complete disrepair, and sends her an owl to meet with him on neutral ground. He walks into the cafe on Diagon Alley, glaring at the looks he receives until his eyes settle on hers. A dozen things burn across the tip of his tongue as he makes his way to the table, but they pull back, sinking into his gums bitterly.
“I got you a hot chocolate. That's what you drink at your house, right?”
He stares down at the dark chocolate and then up to a lighter brown, bright and inquisitive in front of him with a quirk to her mouth. “Yes.”
“What did you need to talk about?”
“One of the house-elves is sick.” What? He is supposed to be telling her how he's onto her plan and how it won't work. He is supposed to be demanding she stop visiting his house so much before he calls harassment.
“Badly?”
“No.”
“Oh. You don't have to inform me about that. It's common.” She smiles, and he might have snapped at her for pointing out the obvious had the entire thing not been a lie anyway.
He shifts, hesitating to his breath as he held it, and his fingers curl hard into the back of the chair. The hot chocolate is still steaming, she is still smiling, and then he is sitting down when he's still mostly convinced he should leave.
w.
“I appreciate your plan and effort, Draco, and while we are trying to rebuild our name to what it deserves to be, I do not agree.”
He looks up at his father, accidentally scraping his fork across his plate in his surprise. “Excuse me, Father?”
“Granger.”
He blinks twice, trying to process the information and connect what his father said to what he could have possibly meant. He feels the tips of his ears heat up when he puts it together but tells himself it is because of his anger at the insinuation than the way he had caught himself staring at her earlier.
“I assure you there is nothing between us.”
Then his anger does flash, wondering why he is bothering to assure his father about anything. If he wants to marry a pure-blood he will. If he wants to shag Granger in the library with her teeth sinking into her lip, he'll do that too. He loves his father but respect has become a different monster to them now. There are only so many blind paths his father's hand can usher him down towards doom before he got a clue and started putting on the light. Blind trust was for the youth.
“You spent four hours in the library today. Taken a new insatiable desire for house-elf rights, Draco?”
“It might be good - for you to only date her, I mean. It would make for very positive news in the paper. Especially since she's--” his mother starts, cutting off as his chair scrapes back.
Both of his parents look to him as he stands, pushing his chair back in. “The charity functions are fine, but involving me in schemes for family honor restoration is a familiar story I'd rather not live again.”
He leaves to the library and his parents in silence.
x.
Her fingers are short compared to his. He feels like he can engulf her hands in one of his own, though he's always been keen to some exaggeration. They dance across the keys and he would think by her smile that she is managing to create some beautiful masterpiece.
“You are atrocious.”
“I've always wanted to learn how to play,” she laughs. “Show me?”
“I don't play.”
“Are you lying?” She narrows her eyes at him, but her tone is too playful for him to feel offensive.
“I know that one side is low, the other is high, and other people make that sound good.”
She laughs at him and his lips twitch, though a part of him wonders how she can do it without reserve in this place, with him. “Oh, oh, see… I think I'm getting the hang of it.”
“If you mean the gallows. If it didn't belong to my mother I would give it to you. You can make Potter and Weasley's ears bleed over the holidays.”
Her smile freezes like the icicles outside and he thinks he's paying too close attention to her if he notices this by her eyes. Her fingers tinker off into the high keys as her smile forms into some half-smirk low-grade version of it's former self. “Ron and I broke up a few months ago. I'm not sure if I'll be invited to the Burrow during Christmas.”
He isn't sure why she's bothering to tell him this. “Then you can bring the piano outside of his home and play it for revenge. I'm not seeing the downside here.”
She shakes her head at the keys, a devious look on her face as she looks up at him and raises her eyebrow. She brings her fingers down hard on the lower keys, a dun, dun, duh-un, and he smirks this time. “Or I can just tell him how often I come here.”
He stares at her for several seconds, noticing the red across her cheekbones and the way she won't look at him now. The silence in the room buzzes into his ears and through his skull, the lid closing over the keys to break it from tickling his tongue.
“It's your job.” But he thinks that isn't the only reason as much as he knows they shouldn't give up that pretense.
“Yes. Except for the amazing piano playing.” She grinned when he snorted. “And the reading, and…such. I really like your house-elves.”
“Yeah?” He grins at her in a way that might be contradicting his need for the pretense, but it's worth it to catch the blush staining her skin again.
y.
When Granger had offered him a position in her department he had almost refused before realizing it was a good thing. It is incredibly hard to get hired anywhere with a past that burns like his. He is almost certain he knows everything about that department from the newest report to the oldest bint due to Granger's headache inducing rambling. The job is not an endpoint but a beginning, and he's found he rather likes those a lot more.
He wakes up feeling like there is something set within the blurred future of his destinations; like he has mined something that might not be a diamond but it still glitters. He can take that now for something better. He finally feels the step forward instead of the stillness in the lay of his bones as the world spun out and left him.
He had thought she was bringing him to something job related. He has no idea why he is currently standing in a Muggle square, watching Granger snap an icicle from the corner of a building. He briefly wonders if she's going to stab him with it when she gives him a maniacal grin, but he stops himself from stepping away from her. She is a lot stranger than he ever thought her sometimes.
He watches with something akin to disgust twisting his mouth when she pops the sharp end of the icicle into her mouth. “You're eating that?”
“No, I'm sucking on it.” He can not help the mirage of images that flutter through the front of his brain at this statement, or the way some part of his mind is memorizing the quote in sound for…eh, later. “It's just water. Try some.”
“No.”
“Malfoy, it's water. Are you allergic to water?”
“I'm allergic to the germs that come any time you start sucking on something once attached to the side of a roof.”
“Malfoy, just try it. Live--”
“No.”
She pouts at him and his eyes trace the line of her nose to the curve of her lips, her mouth red and bright in contrast to the white of winter around them. The cold bites at the tender skin of his neck and cheeks, but he's warm within the layers of fabric so he doesn't complain.
She bends over, the puffiness of her coat making her look like a red marshmallow with legs as she shoves the tip of the icicle into the snow. Draco Malfoy is a pansy, she writes before sucking the snow from the ice. He sneers at the icicle and kicks a drift of snow over the words she wrote. He smirks at her sound of protest but jumps back at the crazy way in which she is swinging the icicle around.
He knows her poking, savage finger all too well. He doesn't intend to die by icicle after the war, when things were slowly starting to make sense, and on Christmas Eve. He snatches her wrist while she yells at him about how hard she worked while he just ruined her beautiful creation, and glares when he has the audacity to laugh at her.
“Beautiful like your piano playing?”
“No, beautiful like your morning hair.”
He narrows his eyes. “You came at eight in the morning, I could hardly--”
“I was scarred. And to think all those years when you were picking on me about my hair--”
“It's terrifying.”
“--covering up some insecurity about your own bed head. It's all right--”
“I'd like to see your bed head, Granger. Or will it be like--”
“It's a lot better than yours. I braid--”
“Not braided then.”
She sniffs and he grins, pulling the killer icicle from her hand. Her fingers are just as cold as what she had been eating when she wraps them around his hand, which Draco considers to be the only reason it set his fine hairs on end. She gives a regretful sigh when her icicle hits the snow, and his face is a warning when she glances at him.
“Well, it doesn't matter since you'll never see my bed head anyway.” She is blushing or red from the cold when he catches a hint of her cheek, pulling them farther into the square.
“I wouldn't be so sure. I never thought you would see mine either. Perhaps I'll carry around safety goggles and--”
“So, this is my present.”
The rather wicked smirk he was throwing in her direction falls away as he glances around them before staring at the top of her knitted hat. Her hand falls from his, but he can still feel the cold imprint of her fingertips. “Your present?”
“Yes. I'm sure you didn't get me anything, which is fine because this isn't even really a gift. I don't know if you'll even like it. I hated it at first, but it grew on me after Harry and Ron dragged me.”
He stares at her, confused and something he can't place though he knows it isn't bad. “Granger--”
“Have you ever heard of a flash mob?”
“What?” In Draco's opinion nothing with a mob ever meant anything good.
Granger is reaching for an icicle, hopping to grab it, but he doesn't even flinch to help her. She might thank him when her tongue didn't fall out. “You were telling me how you didn't like Christmas beyond Christmas morning, since you're greedy for gifts--”
“I don't believe I said that last bit,” he drawled.
“So I thought I should help you get in some Christmas spirit by doing something you wouldn't do on your own.”
“A flash mob? Are you going to have people stone me to death? Is--”
He cuts off on the devious grin she threw at him, and jerks his head to the left at the sound of a whistle. He only has a moment to register the once normal passersby breaking into quick movement as snowballs flew through the air. The next and one smashes into the side of his face on the air of a victorious laugh.
Draco looks back at Granger in shock as she takes off running, scooping up snow as she went. It only takes four hits from the audacity of strangers in the mob of people before he grabs a handful himself, chasing after her.
z.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
“I was hoping to catch you with bed head.” The braid looks strange on her and he thinks he likes it wild on her scalp instead. He will never tell her. “Do you have any idea how impossible it is to get someone to tell me where you live?”
She laughs at him. She never gave him her pity for the hardships he encountered after the war, but it doesn't stop her from being curious about it and at times finding amusement. It wasn't until she laughed at the children running away from him that he found it remotely funny.
“How did you find out?”
“A house-elf. Apparently they can make house calls in case they need you.” His is still slightly disbelieving of this fact, but she nods like it's as simple as blue skies.
“What's in that bag?” She is always curious about everything - most days it drives him insane.
“A present. It would have been rude after your…gift this morning to not return the favor.”
She eyes it in suspicion, an array of colors lighting her skin from the decorations along the hall wall. “It's not going to eat me, is it?”
He laughs and it surprises both of them, her eyes flashing to his above her smile. “No. I didn't wrap it either.”
She takes the bag from him carefully, pushing her lips together with her eyebrows drawing down as she glances at him. It only took a second after she peeked into the bag for her to break into laughter. “Ice cubes?”
“Much cleaner than rain gutter icicles, I should think. Packaged and everything. I even got the ones with the little holes in the event you want to put them on a straw or something to get the full effect.”
“This is…the best gift I've ever gotten.”
“Your friends and family sadly lack in the gift department then.”
She flashes a look at him but she's still smiling, and he shifts in the puddle the melting snow is forming under his boots. He feels the awkwardness begin to creep across his skin and pressure his bones, like he knew it would before he came. Like he knew it would when he had stood outside of her building for ten minutes, freezing with the ice cubes and staring at the wreath on the door.
“You sho--”
“I think I might kiss you.”
He stares at her with his eyelids somehow glued open, like the moment will change if he blinks. If his heart thuds a little harder in his chest he pretends it doesn't. “What?”
“I think I might kiss you. But I want you to know that it doesn't mean you get to see my hair in the morning. That's a… Well, that is not a Christmas gift. That is a dinner and some other things sort of gift. If you are even inclined to call it a gift, though--”
“All right,” he says, and it's in the way that really means shut up.
She stares up at him, wide-eyed, and he laughs. Which isn't the best timing, and her face turns as red as it had after the snowball fight earlier, but at least her blush finally shatters that patience he's just learning to have.
He doesn't like that his fingers curl around the back of her neck without sinking through a million layers of her hair first -- but he can fix that later, tomorrow, doesn't matter, because he kisses her then. Hermione Granger. He kisses Hermione Granger. Her lips are cold, like she had been sucking on those icicles again, which he really hopes she hasn't because he doesn't want rain gutter germs. He doesn't even know why he's thinking about this, but his mind is sort of frantic and he might be losing it.
His life spins down like a vortex in his mind, and maybe this is coming full circle or maybe it's just a new beginning, but that doesn't matter either. All that he really knows -- outside of the way she pulls his bottom lip between hers, or her fingers curling into his shirt, and the little hum she makes when she presses closer, closer -- is that it is something good. Something he doesn't have to stop himself from thinking about anymore. All he had to do was make sure she didn't try stabbing him with an icicle again, and maybe if he kept kissing her like this this could be a blinding path that somehow built things.
Her fingers slide along his neck and he dips the tip of his tongue into the little groove of her bottom lip, and then it is fire. Heat wraps around his skin, flaring in his stomach as he spins his tongue around hers, both their breath rushing out. He can distantly hear the ice cubes thud against the floor over the rapid beating of his heart in his ears, and Granger pulls him past her door, into her home.
Yes, he can build something from this. This didn't have to be hard. This could be as easy as an alphabet, the base of something bigger, vaster, defining. He drew letters over the nape of her neck, the dance of her tongue, and pulls her closer, closer still.
Title: Alphabet
Author: Sage
Rating: R
Word Count: 6,215
Prompt: Icicles
Warnings: Cursing
Summary: People don't give enough credit to the alphabet - it is the core from which we build something bigger and more defining.
A/N: Thanks for nominating me to write for you guys! ;) Big thanks to the ever amazing spadul for the beta job. Happy Holidays, lovies!
.a
He settles down into the flow of night, the harsh mellow of liquor igniting his tastebuds as it rolls down his tongue. The chair keeps his back at a formal tilt so he presses his shoulders back, but his spine is the only thing that bends. The fire is roaring on in front of him, beating its golden tempo against the onset of autumn, and he watches the reflection of his fingers bending around his knees.
“Hello?” his mother calls, her voice echoing out in all the space between them until all he can hear is a buzz in his ears.
He holds his breath, listening to the sound of her feet as she passes by the doorway before stuttering it out into his drink. It fogs the glass, outlining the pressure of his fingertips, and he shuts his eyes.
.b
They watch him - the younger ones afraid and the older ones angry. He doesn't look at them because they are not worth the second it would take from his life, or because he doesn't want to know what he could find there. He doesn't know why he bothered to come back here at all; he was fine within the recesses of the Manor's library, with the fading sun barely touching his morning skin. His father had insisted, somewhere between a charity donation and a forced smile, that he complete his education. He doesn't think it is very wise to do anything his father insisted upon any longer but he realizes that money goes the way of rushing water and he still doesn't want to be a Weasley.
He needs his education - he isn't going to increase the depleting family wealth by his name alone, not anymore.
He sits at his House table to catch malevolent looks aimed at his raised nose while the rest of the Hall ignores him. He can't help the direction his eyes take as he turns his cheek to the bitterness bruising his skin, searching for three shades of color across the room but only finding one. She's staring back at him, her eyes black in the distance and he can't tell what they mean. The last time he had seen them they were wet and too wide, staring up at a barren ceiling. Suddenly he can feel a phantom heat of memory against him, sinking in to force his chest to sweat emotions he tries not to recall.
c.
Christmas is spent with him standing between his parents, greeting strange faces and staring at the door.
d.
She is there, silently and awkwardly though he had not heard her coming. If he had, he would have walked away as if it was a moment that never happened. He's breathing too quickly, releasing the cold handle that is causing his sweaty palm to tremble. He tries to hold his breath but he needs the oxygen too badly, so it stops for just a second and then climbs in volume, like a tornado down the dry passage of his throat.
She has a fistful of flowers that she presses to her chest before placing them reverently on the floor. He doesn't know why, and though there's something telling him he should, he forgets when she steps towards him. A single flower twirls in her fingers, her arm stretching out, like an offering to something dangerous. Within the tightness of her cheeks and the wrinkles in her brow is something he hates as well as he knows, so he takes it without question or answer before she walks away.
Fred Weasley, he remembers then, turning back to the Room of Hidden Things. The stem breaks within his clenching fingers, but the knob turns this time.
e.
His marks are not what they were, not even what they could have been, but he is used to this concept by now. He has read his textbooks several times but it doesn't communicate on paper because there is a bigger part of him that finds it useless. What did it matter if he had to stir a potion clockwise when he had lost a war? What did homework even mean when you had tortured people you used to think you knew?
He learns about abstract potions, complicated charms, Muggle inventions, and Defense Against the Dark Arts is just ironic. Bitterly ironic, and that is his life now. He can make a piece of parchment look like a fire breathing dragon the size of the room and he can turn on a television. Were these the things his mother meant when she told him he could make his life into something else? That he was too young for the war to have ruined it? Because it feels like the war sent a bludger through the base of his skull, and he's pretty sure it ruined everything.
Will pressing the power button of a Muggle box change anything? Will it morph him into someone who had it right in the beginning, before it was too late, and give him thicker skin and less of a conscious? Fuck televisions.
She is standing at the edge of the pitch. He is so far above her but he can see the wind turning her hair a less controlled wild. He tries to ignore her but she is persistent with her staring - it makes him angry, because he thinks she knows the things it makes him think. She is trying to torture him like she had been tortured, but she should know that it wasn't him who did it. It was never him, not to their side.
“What?”
“The Headmistress wants to see you.” She doesn't even acknowledge the anger in his tone.
“Nice clothes, Granger.”
She acknowledges that, the green potion mess on her uniform making her self-conscious. He can tell by the way she pulls her robes tighter. “You look like you're dead.”
“That's because I'm dying.” He isn't at all, but her wide eyes turn like a deer to his, like an animal, and at least she leaves him alone.
f.
He's made to drop off potions at the infirmary but he doesn't complain because he feels like he owes things to certain people. Himself, too, but that was supposed to come later. Maybe these were steps to becoming a better person or forgetting about the past - he couldn't know until it was over, until he was there, which usually made him think he was screwing it up again.
“What are you dying from?”
He stares at her and her unassuming book-formed hunch. She straightens up, shifting her books, and she isn't backing down no matter how long he looks at her. She was like that, though he doesn't understand it.
“Nothing.”
Maybe she's convinced he's lying or she wants something, but he's sure she's trying to screw with his head again when she follows him. He tells her that he was lying, but she still doesn't stop talking, even when he tries to escape her accusations. There is a lot of yelling but she sends the gathering crowd away to make room for the storm between them. Some time between his defense and her anger he feels a savage sort of happiness. It is in the mix of popping tendons and raised veins, the strain of vocal chords, that things wash from his chest like the sea. It feels so good to explode and they do, a wild abandon to all pretense, to pretending that the past is actually that, and it makes him dizzy. He builds and reshapes every emotion into anger and it crashes into hers until both of them are shaking in hate-joy. It's more beautiful than hope.
g.
She glares at him for a week in something so familiar that he goes out of his way to piss her off. Then she is back to ignorance, and then the staring starts again. He doesn't know why she has to constantly ruin good things.
h.
He doesn't know what to do with himself so he thinks, and when he is physically sick of thinking he reads. The library is usually empty so he stays there like he had in his own, but sometimes she haunts him around corners, always bringing the ghost of the past with the ghost of herself. She has hardly left him alone for weeks and he wonders how she has any friends at all. Harry Potter has survived a few Killing Curses though - maybe it prepared him for Granger.
“No one likes you.”
He's almost amused when he looks up at her three tables away, her hair a monster in the candlelight of the library. “Are you going to stick your tongue out at me next? Try a little harder, Granger.”
She becomes flustered, and it's not something he's used to seeing so he stares at her when he meant to return to ignorance. “I meant… Even your housemates. I know Slytherin hasn't changed tha--”
“Curiosity killed a lot of things.”
“Well, you know what they say about satisfaction.”
“No, Granger,” he murmurs, and looks up at her from his textbook. “What do they say about satisfaction?”
He watches her eyes flick across his, as if she were reading a book, before settling somewhere between his shoulders. She holds her breath, her ears turn red, and she pretends it never happened. When she begins to talk again later she sticks to books and not people.
I.
He says goodbye to Crabbe the day he bids farewell to Hogwarts, one last apology spoiling his mouth. He stands very still in the place where he had once stood, where he had learned the last things the war could teach him - how it only takes a moment to be too late, and the abyss of loss that never stops pulling. He mimics it one last time, a masochist to his guilt, shutting heavy eyelids to see the carvings the memory had made there. His hand reaches out, hanging in his grief and regret, and his fingers curl into the nothingness of air again.
j.
He doesn't know why he slows his steps on his way off the train - why he waits for her. It was somehow important to letting go of all of it. To stop his memories from shifting between seeing orange light weave through her hair, or remembering how she screamed every time he looked at her. He wants to leave it behind, like he left behind Crabbe. He wants to try.
Her arm slides across his as she brushes past him, warm and soft, typical skin. He used to think everything about her must have been different; some other type of species, diseased like a rat in his youth, and then just…something he couldn't understand.
“I wish I could say it was a pleasure to know you.” She sounds very serious and even her eyes are unblinking.
He agrees with the tone, a solid nod of his head because they both mean what they say. “I wish I could say I never knew you at all.”
He moves first because he must, putting her behind me, behind me.
k.
His father thinks a lot. He used to plot and become a man of action - now he thinks and doesn't do much at all. He wonders if it's harder for his father to know his side failed, or that his son did. But he loves him, still, in the past and always, and it is returned like the metal supports under a bridge - seen on the surface only in a disaster, but steady, needed, constant.
“I'm proud you finished,” his father says, handing him a drink of something dark that burns.
“Thank you.” He wishes to say more but his tongue stutters on air and lays limp in its bed. Nothing felt like it was really finished yet.
l.
“Society rarely forgives.”
He wants to ask her why she hasn't been leaving him alone, from the library at Hogwarts until now. Why he still thinks of her somewhere between himself and the door to the parlor. “Perhaps I don't want forgiveness.”
She glances back towards the banquet then to his feet. “Then what do you want?”
To forget. “I don't know. What do you want?” The question comes harshly.
Her cheek bunches up in what could be half of a smile or nothing at all. “I don't know.”
He waits for her to leave, turning away from her strange expression, but she sits instead.
m.
He cuts the ribbon to a new library at a Muggle university somewhere near Surrey, angled towards the few Wizarding photographers in odd dress, his father's hand clamped around his shoulder. He feels like a liar.
n.
His father and her are standing in his parlor, a hundred different emotions falling from her face to crash to the ground between the three of them. He meets her eyes, her face too tight to not be painful, and both of them are pale.
o.
“--of Magical Creatures. It's my job to be here, Malfoy. Because of the new laws for the proper treatment of hou--”
“I still say you're stalking me.”
p.
He has always loved to fight with her. It's better now because everything she throws at him makes him have to dig for something to defend himself with, and it makes him feel like a better person when he finds it. The things he tells her are the things he reminds himself of later, to make him feel like maybe there was something in him that wasn't coming all wrong.
His mother nearly has a heart attack when she breaks the antique figurine off the mantel with an angry swipe of her arms. She somehow manages to put it back in perfect condition while still ramming her finger into his chest, never pausing for breath. His mother ruins the fire of their argument this time, complimenting her on the spell. She pants out an exaggerated explanation and his mother ignores the bruises on his skin.
He glowers at them before realizing it is the first time he has forgotten memory for the present at the sight of her in his parlor.
q.
His eyes are rubbed raw from lack of sleep when he raises them to meet hers. He doesn't like or want her here, but he doesn't want anyone here. He glares at her for her trespass and she clears her throat, curling her hands into her shirt.
“I like it here.”
“Of course you do, Granger. It's a library.”
She smiles and he scowls at the sight of it. “What are you reading?”
“This history of language.”
“Really?”
“You are the only person in the world you could possibly get excited at the prospect.” She might be the strangest person he had ever met.
“I like language,” she sniffs. “I love everything about it. It's defining of cultures, of people. Invented for communication, a connection between two other people who might not have ever truly known the other person. It helps express--”
“No wonder you like talking so much.”
She glares at him, leaning over to glance at the page he was on. “The alphabet?”
He glares back at her smirk, wondering why she was here again. He was a second away from telling her to keep the book and leave him alone. “I--”
“People don't give enough credit to the alphabet. It's simple, yes, but it's the base of all language. It represents the core from which we build. The letters that make up the words that make up--”
“Are you going to keep chattering on?”
“Yes. Maybe you should have some input. It'll go a lot better for you.”
r.
He helps his mother decide on what flowers to put in the garden, his skin slick under the late summer sun and his hands full of dirt. He doesn't bother to tell her that it's almost autumn and it wouldn't be much use. Planting them late just meant they would have to wait for next year to see them really grow, but they will grow. He is beginning to learn that even if things start late or take a lot of time, it doesn't matter as long as it eventually gets there.
s.
“I want to make a donation. To your department.”
“Oh.”
“You said you needed funding? For the new laws?”
“Yes.”
He stares at her and her front teeth sunken into her lower lip. “Granger, for fu--”
“Will this be in your family's name?”
He understands then - the stiff pictures on the back pages of the newspaper, his father's attempts to climb the mountain of bad decisions and a society's harsher judgments. He's almost offended, close to arguing, but then he remembers that's why he wanted to do it in the first place. For the sake of it, instead of any other purpose. Though maybe it is a lot for himself as well, but no one has to know that.
“It's from my inheritance. Anonymous.”
“An--” she cuts off, surprise spiraling out from her irises as they meet his across the room.
She smiles then. Smiles, at him, with her teeth showing. A grin even. It makes him uncomfortable so he looks away, some strange sensation inching across his shoulder blades. It only takes her a second then to start rambling on about her work and he wishes he never said anything at all.
t.
It's the first time she doesn't storm away after a fight, her frizz bouncing with the furious, heavy thuds of her feet. They don't fight as often as they have a normal conversation anymore - not including the snide remarks and insults that he thinks will always be typical in conversation between the two - so maybe that is why she doesn't stalk off.
She sits down in the chair she usually takes in his library when she asks him asinine questions about his house-elves and then babbles on forever about nothing. “Do you regret it?”
His head snaps up then, grey meeting brown across the light from the window. A hundred particles of dead skin float between them and the light turns her eyes a brighter color. He doesn't even say anything but then she nods, like it is simple to see, and he wonders if it is.
u.
He goes through photographs of times when there was black and white, and the only color he saw was in the blue of Pansy's eyes, the red of pure blood, and the amber of stolen firewhiskey in his dorm. It makes his chest collapse at first until he can hardly breathe through the clutter of emotions, but he mines them like diamonds in mountain caves. Sifts past the dirt that had coated them only as prelude and he remembers a younger freedom and what it meant.
v.
Blaise had told him that the Ministry had only come to visit him three times since the new laws went into effect. The Malfoys' may have warranted more visits with their increased amount of house-elves, as well as the other various magical creatures on the property, but he highly doubted she should have been there once a week for months now.
He is angry, convinced she is trying to find something to send them into complete disrepair, and sends her an owl to meet with him on neutral ground. He walks into the cafe on Diagon Alley, glaring at the looks he receives until his eyes settle on hers. A dozen things burn across the tip of his tongue as he makes his way to the table, but they pull back, sinking into his gums bitterly.
“I got you a hot chocolate. That's what you drink at your house, right?”
He stares down at the dark chocolate and then up to a lighter brown, bright and inquisitive in front of him with a quirk to her mouth. “Yes.”
“What did you need to talk about?”
“One of the house-elves is sick.” What? He is supposed to be telling her how he's onto her plan and how it won't work. He is supposed to be demanding she stop visiting his house so much before he calls harassment.
“Badly?”
“No.”
“Oh. You don't have to inform me about that. It's common.” She smiles, and he might have snapped at her for pointing out the obvious had the entire thing not been a lie anyway.
He shifts, hesitating to his breath as he held it, and his fingers curl hard into the back of the chair. The hot chocolate is still steaming, she is still smiling, and then he is sitting down when he's still mostly convinced he should leave.
w.
“I appreciate your plan and effort, Draco, and while we are trying to rebuild our name to what it deserves to be, I do not agree.”
He looks up at his father, accidentally scraping his fork across his plate in his surprise. “Excuse me, Father?”
“Granger.”
He blinks twice, trying to process the information and connect what his father said to what he could have possibly meant. He feels the tips of his ears heat up when he puts it together but tells himself it is because of his anger at the insinuation than the way he had caught himself staring at her earlier.
“I assure you there is nothing between us.”
Then his anger does flash, wondering why he is bothering to assure his father about anything. If he wants to marry a pure-blood he will. If he wants to shag Granger in the library with her teeth sinking into her lip, he'll do that too. He loves his father but respect has become a different monster to them now. There are only so many blind paths his father's hand can usher him down towards doom before he got a clue and started putting on the light. Blind trust was for the youth.
“You spent four hours in the library today. Taken a new insatiable desire for house-elf rights, Draco?”
“It might be good - for you to only date her, I mean. It would make for very positive news in the paper. Especially since she's--” his mother starts, cutting off as his chair scrapes back.
Both of his parents look to him as he stands, pushing his chair back in. “The charity functions are fine, but involving me in schemes for family honor restoration is a familiar story I'd rather not live again.”
He leaves to the library and his parents in silence.
x.
Her fingers are short compared to his. He feels like he can engulf her hands in one of his own, though he's always been keen to some exaggeration. They dance across the keys and he would think by her smile that she is managing to create some beautiful masterpiece.
“You are atrocious.”
“I've always wanted to learn how to play,” she laughs. “Show me?”
“I don't play.”
“Are you lying?” She narrows her eyes at him, but her tone is too playful for him to feel offensive.
“I know that one side is low, the other is high, and other people make that sound good.”
She laughs at him and his lips twitch, though a part of him wonders how she can do it without reserve in this place, with him. “Oh, oh, see… I think I'm getting the hang of it.”
“If you mean the gallows. If it didn't belong to my mother I would give it to you. You can make Potter and Weasley's ears bleed over the holidays.”
Her smile freezes like the icicles outside and he thinks he's paying too close attention to her if he notices this by her eyes. Her fingers tinker off into the high keys as her smile forms into some half-smirk low-grade version of it's former self. “Ron and I broke up a few months ago. I'm not sure if I'll be invited to the Burrow during Christmas.”
He isn't sure why she's bothering to tell him this. “Then you can bring the piano outside of his home and play it for revenge. I'm not seeing the downside here.”
She shakes her head at the keys, a devious look on her face as she looks up at him and raises her eyebrow. She brings her fingers down hard on the lower keys, a dun, dun, duh-un, and he smirks this time. “Or I can just tell him how often I come here.”
He stares at her for several seconds, noticing the red across her cheekbones and the way she won't look at him now. The silence in the room buzzes into his ears and through his skull, the lid closing over the keys to break it from tickling his tongue.
“It's your job.” But he thinks that isn't the only reason as much as he knows they shouldn't give up that pretense.
“Yes. Except for the amazing piano playing.” She grinned when he snorted. “And the reading, and…such. I really like your house-elves.”
“Yeah?” He grins at her in a way that might be contradicting his need for the pretense, but it's worth it to catch the blush staining her skin again.
y.
When Granger had offered him a position in her department he had almost refused before realizing it was a good thing. It is incredibly hard to get hired anywhere with a past that burns like his. He is almost certain he knows everything about that department from the newest report to the oldest bint due to Granger's headache inducing rambling. The job is not an endpoint but a beginning, and he's found he rather likes those a lot more.
He wakes up feeling like there is something set within the blurred future of his destinations; like he has mined something that might not be a diamond but it still glitters. He can take that now for something better. He finally feels the step forward instead of the stillness in the lay of his bones as the world spun out and left him.
He had thought she was bringing him to something job related. He has no idea why he is currently standing in a Muggle square, watching Granger snap an icicle from the corner of a building. He briefly wonders if she's going to stab him with it when she gives him a maniacal grin, but he stops himself from stepping away from her. She is a lot stranger than he ever thought her sometimes.
He watches with something akin to disgust twisting his mouth when she pops the sharp end of the icicle into her mouth. “You're eating that?”
“No, I'm sucking on it.” He can not help the mirage of images that flutter through the front of his brain at this statement, or the way some part of his mind is memorizing the quote in sound for…eh, later. “It's just water. Try some.”
“No.”
“Malfoy, it's water. Are you allergic to water?”
“I'm allergic to the germs that come any time you start sucking on something once attached to the side of a roof.”
“Malfoy, just try it. Live--”
“No.”
She pouts at him and his eyes trace the line of her nose to the curve of her lips, her mouth red and bright in contrast to the white of winter around them. The cold bites at the tender skin of his neck and cheeks, but he's warm within the layers of fabric so he doesn't complain.
She bends over, the puffiness of her coat making her look like a red marshmallow with legs as she shoves the tip of the icicle into the snow. Draco Malfoy is a pansy, she writes before sucking the snow from the ice. He sneers at the icicle and kicks a drift of snow over the words she wrote. He smirks at her sound of protest but jumps back at the crazy way in which she is swinging the icicle around.
He knows her poking, savage finger all too well. He doesn't intend to die by icicle after the war, when things were slowly starting to make sense, and on Christmas Eve. He snatches her wrist while she yells at him about how hard she worked while he just ruined her beautiful creation, and glares when he has the audacity to laugh at her.
“Beautiful like your piano playing?”
“No, beautiful like your morning hair.”
He narrows his eyes. “You came at eight in the morning, I could hardly--”
“I was scarred. And to think all those years when you were picking on me about my hair--”
“It's terrifying.”
“--covering up some insecurity about your own bed head. It's all right--”
“I'd like to see your bed head, Granger. Or will it be like--”
“It's a lot better than yours. I braid--”
“Not braided then.”
She sniffs and he grins, pulling the killer icicle from her hand. Her fingers are just as cold as what she had been eating when she wraps them around his hand, which Draco considers to be the only reason it set his fine hairs on end. She gives a regretful sigh when her icicle hits the snow, and his face is a warning when she glances at him.
“Well, it doesn't matter since you'll never see my bed head anyway.” She is blushing or red from the cold when he catches a hint of her cheek, pulling them farther into the square.
“I wouldn't be so sure. I never thought you would see mine either. Perhaps I'll carry around safety goggles and--”
“So, this is my present.”
The rather wicked smirk he was throwing in her direction falls away as he glances around them before staring at the top of her knitted hat. Her hand falls from his, but he can still feel the cold imprint of her fingertips. “Your present?”
“Yes. I'm sure you didn't get me anything, which is fine because this isn't even really a gift. I don't know if you'll even like it. I hated it at first, but it grew on me after Harry and Ron dragged me.”
He stares at her, confused and something he can't place though he knows it isn't bad. “Granger--”
“Have you ever heard of a flash mob?”
“What?” In Draco's opinion nothing with a mob ever meant anything good.
Granger is reaching for an icicle, hopping to grab it, but he doesn't even flinch to help her. She might thank him when her tongue didn't fall out. “You were telling me how you didn't like Christmas beyond Christmas morning, since you're greedy for gifts--”
“I don't believe I said that last bit,” he drawled.
“So I thought I should help you get in some Christmas spirit by doing something you wouldn't do on your own.”
“A flash mob? Are you going to have people stone me to death? Is--”
He cuts off on the devious grin she threw at him, and jerks his head to the left at the sound of a whistle. He only has a moment to register the once normal passersby breaking into quick movement as snowballs flew through the air. The next and one smashes into the side of his face on the air of a victorious laugh.
Draco looks back at Granger in shock as she takes off running, scooping up snow as she went. It only takes four hits from the audacity of strangers in the mob of people before he grabs a handful himself, chasing after her.
z.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
“I was hoping to catch you with bed head.” The braid looks strange on her and he thinks he likes it wild on her scalp instead. He will never tell her. “Do you have any idea how impossible it is to get someone to tell me where you live?”
She laughs at him. She never gave him her pity for the hardships he encountered after the war, but it doesn't stop her from being curious about it and at times finding amusement. It wasn't until she laughed at the children running away from him that he found it remotely funny.
“How did you find out?”
“A house-elf. Apparently they can make house calls in case they need you.” His is still slightly disbelieving of this fact, but she nods like it's as simple as blue skies.
“What's in that bag?” She is always curious about everything - most days it drives him insane.
“A present. It would have been rude after your…gift this morning to not return the favor.”
She eyes it in suspicion, an array of colors lighting her skin from the decorations along the hall wall. “It's not going to eat me, is it?”
He laughs and it surprises both of them, her eyes flashing to his above her smile. “No. I didn't wrap it either.”
She takes the bag from him carefully, pushing her lips together with her eyebrows drawing down as she glances at him. It only took a second after she peeked into the bag for her to break into laughter. “Ice cubes?”
“Much cleaner than rain gutter icicles, I should think. Packaged and everything. I even got the ones with the little holes in the event you want to put them on a straw or something to get the full effect.”
“This is…the best gift I've ever gotten.”
“Your friends and family sadly lack in the gift department then.”
She flashes a look at him but she's still smiling, and he shifts in the puddle the melting snow is forming under his boots. He feels the awkwardness begin to creep across his skin and pressure his bones, like he knew it would before he came. Like he knew it would when he had stood outside of her building for ten minutes, freezing with the ice cubes and staring at the wreath on the door.
“You sho--”
“I think I might kiss you.”
He stares at her with his eyelids somehow glued open, like the moment will change if he blinks. If his heart thuds a little harder in his chest he pretends it doesn't. “What?”
“I think I might kiss you. But I want you to know that it doesn't mean you get to see my hair in the morning. That's a… Well, that is not a Christmas gift. That is a dinner and some other things sort of gift. If you are even inclined to call it a gift, though--”
“All right,” he says, and it's in the way that really means shut up.
She stares up at him, wide-eyed, and he laughs. Which isn't the best timing, and her face turns as red as it had after the snowball fight earlier, but at least her blush finally shatters that patience he's just learning to have.
He doesn't like that his fingers curl around the back of her neck without sinking through a million layers of her hair first -- but he can fix that later, tomorrow, doesn't matter, because he kisses her then. Hermione Granger. He kisses Hermione Granger. Her lips are cold, like she had been sucking on those icicles again, which he really hopes she hasn't because he doesn't want rain gutter germs. He doesn't even know why he's thinking about this, but his mind is sort of frantic and he might be losing it.
His life spins down like a vortex in his mind, and maybe this is coming full circle or maybe it's just a new beginning, but that doesn't matter either. All that he really knows -- outside of the way she pulls his bottom lip between hers, or her fingers curling into his shirt, and the little hum she makes when she presses closer, closer -- is that it is something good. Something he doesn't have to stop himself from thinking about anymore. All he had to do was make sure she didn't try stabbing him with an icicle again, and maybe if he kept kissing her like this this could be a blinding path that somehow built things.
Her fingers slide along his neck and he dips the tip of his tongue into the little groove of her bottom lip, and then it is fire. Heat wraps around his skin, flaring in his stomach as he spins his tongue around hers, both their breath rushing out. He can distantly hear the ice cubes thud against the floor over the rapid beating of his heart in his ears, and Granger pulls him past her door, into her home.
Yes, he can build something from this. This didn't have to be hard. This could be as easy as an alphabet, the base of something bigger, vaster, defining. He drew letters over the nape of her neck, the dance of her tongue, and pulls her closer, closer still.