Chapter Text
It’s past eight o’clock and the light is finally bleeding from the sky, but lengthening days don’t mean warmth off the coast of Finland in March. The temperature is at freezing with the wind. The water around the small pelagic trawler slaps the hull as Draco watches a weary owl approach from the west. He doesn’t recognise it as his mother’s or Pansy’s, the only people he’s corresponded with for years. His own post owl is less his than she is a creature who lends her services to Draco when it suits her. He found the raven-feathered beast in the woods near the hut where he ice fishes when he has the time. He named her Severa because she reminds him of Snape. He hasn’t seen her in months.
The tawny stranger wobbles in for a landing as though it’s flown for days with the blood red envelope tied to its foot. Draco holds out his arm for the owl and removes the envelope, thick card stock addressed with his name in neat calligraphy, and slips it into a breast pocket of the heavy wool coat he wears against the Finnish winds. His fellow fishermen on the trawler are a dozen wizards and a couple of witches, a number of them better correspondents than Draco so he doesn’t have to go far to find a snail for the bird. He entreats the owl to rest and it makes a nest for itself in the shadow of the prow, where the watchman makes room for the visitor. Draco is curious about the envelope, which looks like an invitation. But he’ll read it later, after he’s done the job he’s come on deck to do. It’s time to haul their nets out of the sea and sort through the catch.
It’s arduous work and Draco is at it well past sunset and into the first hours of darkness. He’s joined by three of the crew and they work together like a practiced team. The others speak English much better than Draco speaks Finnish, but he doesn’t expect them to use English on his account. They speak very little, in fact. Their voices are drowned in the churning of chains that raise the nets, and the flapping of fish deprived of oxygen. The wizards wear gloves to protect their hands from the sting of fish scales that work their way under the skin, and scrabble at the nets to remove any life caught there that should be saved. The net kills most of the fish they catch even before they bring them in so there’s a very short window to identify any unwanted species still living and return them to the dark waves below. The fish are fresh and smell of salt water when they’re pulled from the sea, but the trawler is carrying weeks of catch in its hold and no matter how much ice and salt they pack the fish in, the stench of herring is in the wizards’ clothes and hair and the soles of their boots.
The work strains muscles in Draco’s shoulders and back and thighs that he’s built from more than five years of labour aboard vessels like this one, and he relishes the way his heart rate rises, his lungs expand, and sweat cleanses him from the inside out. No memories, no desires, no shame. Only work.
Later, when it’s his turn to eat and rest, he spells himself clean and realises he’s begun to miss the feel of an actual shower on his back. They use relatively little magic on board. Their food larder holds significantly more, and more varied, food than its size should allow. There’s always fresh water to drink. But they rarely spell themselves warm against the elements and never take short cuts with the sail rigging or hauling the fish. It took some getting used to. Draco hadn’t understood the point of labour that could be accomplished with a wand. He’s learned to appreciate the small ways Nordic wizarding vessels accomplish cleanliness and order with magic while preserving a connection to the sea through work they do with their hands.
When he’d been at sea only six months on and off with several wizarding vessels and complained of the labour, they told him not to come back until he’d been out with Muggle fishermen. He found a crew in a Muggle bar in Helsinki and spent one of the most gruelling months of his life with them on board their small boat. The filth they lived with, the freeze dried strips of pork and salmon that passed as meals day in and day out, the rationing of fresh water—all of it nearly broke him.
Worse than any of that was the sense of vulnerability. Even wizarding vessels sink sometimes. No amount of magic can entirely protect humans from the power of the sea. Brooms, the ability to exert some small control over wind and water, and Apparition as a last resort often provide escape, though, in the worst of storms.
He’s heard stories of a wizarding vessel going down with everyone on board. He had one close call when a wave swamped the boat he was on before anyone could react, but they had reacted, and they’d survived. Nothing he’s experienced sailing with wizards was as terrifying as the experience of weathering a storm with Muggles aboard a boat with no broom and Apparition an unthinkable choice. It was the revelation of his own weakness—helplessness—that resolved him to get strong, physically and mentally. He’s still struggling to build mental fortitude, but his mind is calmer than it has been in twenty years. Perhaps calmer than it’s ever been.
When he’s finally settled in his bunk, his thighs stretching a pair of long johns in a way that tells him he’s put on muscle in the past few weeks at sea, he turns the heavy envelope over in his hands and slips his finger under the seal. Inside is an invitation, as he’d guessed. The occasion, however, is a shock.
The Hogwarts Class of 1998 Reunion Committee
Invites You To Our 15thReunion
Where: The Great Hall, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
When: Eight O’Clock in the Evening, Saturday, 29 June, 2013
Dress: Semi-formal
*Accommodation available in Hogsmeade for those who wish to stay on for the weekend.
Please owl your RSVP to Hermione Granger-Weasley by 15 June.
Granger. He lets the petty meanness arise in him at the thought of her. It does without effort. His father raised him to ensure the uncharitable thoughts arrive instantly. They require no consciousness on his part, simply spring forth. But now he can observe them, notice the utter lack of feeling behind them, interrogate them. Hermione Granger is Muggle-born. Reunions are a Muggle tradition. He’s heard of them.
Self-awareness has its limits. Honestly, what could possibly possess someone as intelligent as Granger—Mrs Granger-Weasley—to believe that this, of all the things to borrow from Muggles (and he’s learned quite a few things from Muggles in the last decade or so), is a tradition worth borrowing? It’s twisted. The thought of their war-torn class tittering over wine and canapes fifteen years later, reminiscing about the deaths they’d witnessed or, worse, caused.
Draco wonders, given Granger’s intelligence, if it isn't Weasley’s brainless idea. The fact that Granger is on board means something though. He hasn’t seen a single classmate since shortly after the trials, when he left the country and never looked back. He knows from Pansy and his mother that the English wizarding community has moved on from the war. He knows that England’s wizards are not rent and hurting as they were when he left. On some level he knows this, but it’s still impossible to imagine how a reunion of his class, of all classes, could be a good idea. Even the choice of the year, fifteen years after they should have graduated. But how many didn’t make it alive to 1998? How many actually graduated? He tries to imagine Pansy, or Blaise, mingling with the Hufflepuffs. Greg Goyle as a grown man. He isn’t, in Draco’s mind. In his mind, Greg is still a teenager; sullen, nasty, unimaginative, and mourning Vince’s death as though it were yesterday. It’s uncomfortable to imagine his classmates at all.
His mind skirts around the most uncomfortable thought of all, but then he touches the edge of the thought and succumbs. Draco doesn’t think of Harry Potter often. He works actively not to. Sometimes he catches a reflection of his bare chest, and the faint scar there forces him to remember the pain, just as quickly as the faded mark on his arm reminds him of every moment of his own cruelty. There are no thoughts of Harry Potter that aren’t accompanied by shame.
Draco is tempted to banish the invitation and the RSVP card, but chooses to set it aside on the small shelf by his bunk and banish the contemplation of it instead. An RSVP saying he won’t attend is the courteous thing to do. He’s mature enough to know he owes that much to Granger.
____________________
The boat docks in Helsinki a few days later, on the 1st of April, and Draco is eager to spend some time in the tiny shower back in his flat not far from the Hietalahti Market. There’s a lot of work to do when they dock, first, and he tries to keep his mind in the present. He’s friendly with many of the wizards on board, and he wants to keep it that way. He also wants to keep working, which means pulling his weight as they unload the boat and scrub it clean from top to bottom. By necessity, they dock among Muggles in the harbour and have to ready the boat without magic above deck and very little below. Draco volunteers to swab the deck. It’s raining and everyone’s exhausted, so it’s not a popular task. He’s still trying to prove himself a little, even after five years at sea. But he’s also learned that physical labour under hard circumstances is the strongest protection he has against the mental self-flagellation he’s prone to.
As he’s finishing up, he sees Eetu climbing up from below deck. Eetu’s a big man, bigger than Draco. He wears his light brown hair at shoulder length, currently tucked under a wool skullcap against the rain. He has a strong, bearded jaw and blue eyes, and Draco would call him burly-handsome. He isn’t Draco’s type, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Eetu glances Draco’s way and Draco imagines he’s wondering if they’re going to keep fucking now they’re on land. Draco’s wondering the same thing, but isn’t sure it’s a good idea. They get on well, which is to say that, like the wizards at work on the nets, they don’t talk much. They’ve provided each other simple pleasure on the last few vessels they’ve sailed together, and Draco worries that bringing the sex back to his flat will only complicate things. This is the first time they’ve both had a break between jobs in more than six months, and Draco can feel the question about how they’re going to handle it hanging between them. Neither of them has anything lined up until the middle of April.
Draco is lonely. It’s an odd thing to feel, given how much time he spends at sea and how little privacy he has aboard the trawlers. The invitation to his Hogwarts reunion packed away in his knapsack along with his simple wardrobe and a handful of personal items is a reminder that he left his childhood and adolescence behind, and that the men he calls friends now, including Eetu, wouldn’t recognise the person he was then or the place he came from. Most of the time he takes solace in that, but contemplating spending a couple of weeks with Eetu in Helsinki has him wondering who he’s become. He wonders if he knows himself well enough to have anything more than a convenient and temporary relationship with another person.
He decides he’s not ready to foreclose the possibility of seeing Eetu, and also not ready to invite him back to his. He stops to talk to Eetu on his way below deck with the mop and bucket of filthy water. He’ll spell it clean and dump it overboard, but he can’t do that in the open air with so many Muggles about. “Do you have plans?”
Eetu eyes him up and down, the suggestion plain in his expression. “You can be my plan.”
“I’ve got things I have to take care of. Meet me for dinner on Friday?” He tells Eetu about the food stall run by a talented witch from Portugal, the only witch in the Muggle market by his flat. “She makes the best grilled octopus I’ve ever had.”
Eetu smiles. “Dinner, yes. And then?”
Draco nods. “And then.”
“Okay.”
____________________
It’s seven o’clock on Sunday morning, the second Sunday on land, and the sun is already up, forcing Draco from a too short sleep. He let Eetu spend the night for the first time, and he’s regretting that decision as he struggles out from under the heavy arm pinning him to the mattress not nearly wide enough for the both of them. Some Finns are parsimonious with their beds. Nothing like Americans. Draco spent six months in America about eight years ago, and although he didn’t find a home there, he discovered the joys of a plush, California King mattress. He could spell this bed larger, but the small bedroom in the Muggle flat wouldn’t hold it.
There’s an owl pecking at his windowpane. It must have been that sound, and not the sun, that woke him. The shaft of sunlight that found him on the bed was misleading, it turns out. He watches the small break in the clouds close as he opens the window and lets the familiar grey owl hop inside. It’s misting rain and dark clouds are advancing from the north, almost cold enough to snow. He scoops his silk robe from the chair and slips it on, holding out his arm for Elektra, who digs her talons in while he carries her out of the room. He closes the door quietly behind him, not wanting to disturb Eetu. Wanting some privacy to read Pansy’s letter. He has a treat of dried herring for Elektra in the kitchen, and he makes a nest for her with a dishtowel on the kitchen windowsill. It’s more than two days’ flight from London to Helsinki, even for a post owl, and Elektra usually rests a day or two before returning.
The letter she’s brought is in Pansy’s distinctive silver envelope and written on parchment Pansy special orders from a shop in Paris. Draco knows this is why he hasn’t formally declined Granger’s invitation to the reunion yet. He’s been waiting to hear what Pansy thinks of the affair.
Dear Draco,
I hope you haven’t fallen into the sea, taken as the unwilling spouse to a merman. Only the MerKing will do for you.
Seriously, Draco, you owe me a letter. And Hermione tells me she hasn’t received your RSVP yet.
Yes, let’s discuss the reunion. I know what you’re thinking. Please do consider coming. Rather, you must come. I thought it was a wretched idea when Hermione told me about it. It was her husband’s idea, as you can imagine. I’m sure I had the very same thoughts you had initially. Why would I want to stand around drinking second rate champagne with a bunch of aging Hufflepuffs and self-righteous Gryffindors? Even if we hadn’t fought a war and lost our last years at Hogwarts to violence, even if you and I hadn’t been miserable human beings back then, why would I want to subject myself to an unseemly exercise in sentimentality?
But then Hermione asked me what I would think of her if she and I hadn’t worked together for the past decade, if we hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years. She asked me to think about people I haven’t seen since the war, and to imagine them today. I thought of Blaise, who disappeared even more quickly than you did after the trials. I tried to picture him as a thirty-three-year-old man and I saw an eighteen-year-old boy, growing into his looks but still smug in a way that is only possible at eighteen. I thought of you. I realise I haven’t seen you in almost fifteen years. I know you’re not the same person, Draco, but I don’t know precisely who you’ve become. I don’t even know what you look like. And Hermione? If I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years, I would imagine her an ill-humoured know-it-all with no fashion sense. Well, she still doesn’t have much fashion sense, but she’s a friend. She’s brilliant, and funny, and she’s right about this. It’s not despite the war, but because of it, that we need this reunion. A chance to see that we aren’t the only ones who have grown up.
We need you there, Draco. I know you’re ashamed of the mark you carry and what it means about who you were. Trust me, I know all about shame. But you held us together. And even though we were so very wrong, we were also friends. It won’t be the same if you’re not there, not for me or any of the Slytherins.
Because I knew you well once, and I can’t imagine this has changed in fifteen years, I expect you’ll wonder if Potter is coming. The truth is that it’s unlikely. Hermione will try her best to get him there, but he’s become a recluse and as much as you’ve turned your back on your past, Harry Potter is hiding from the world. In Scotland, I hear. Outside Aberdeen. Which means he hasn’t far to travel to Hogwarts, but word is he doesn’t leave his home. You’ll say you’re relieved he won’t be there and secretly you’ll be disappointed. I can’t help that. Come for me. Come to London and stay with me. A week. A month. Visit your mother, for Merlin’s sake. Her townhouse is lovely. Nothing like the Manor. She’s my neighbour, as you know. She’s nearly fifteen years older than when you last saw her, and it’s time for a visit. We can spend an hour at the reunion, or four. We can Floo back to London the minute you hate it, or we can spend a weekend in Hogsmeade. Whatever you like. Just promise you’ll come.
Your friend, still,
Pansy
Draco recognises the echo of his own thoughts from a couple of weeks earlier in Pansy’s words—I don’t know precisely who you’ve become—and can’t suppress the pang of nostalgia he feels. Not for the Pansy he’s gotten to know through correspondence over the last decade, but for the savage wit and incurable snob she was at Hogwarts, for the girl who wouldn’t have given Hermione Granger the time of day, let alone jump aboard her Reunion bandwagon. Of course, thirty-three-year-old Pansy is no more like sixteen-year-old Pansy than Draco is like his sixteen-year-old self, and he wouldn’t befriend the younger versions of either of them today. The nostalgia is an emotion all its own, close but not the same as longing for the past. He is in the grip of something though, this emotion, this nostalgia, and it dares him to feel more than he typically allows.
He glances up from rereading the letter to see Eetu’s large, naked body in the frame of the doorway. “Who is this letter from?” Eetu’s English is excellent and only identifiable as a second language from his slight accent and the way he uses it as a blunt instrument, always going for the shortest distance to his meaning.
“An old friend from school. She wants me to return to England for a visit.”
Eetu nods and makes his way to the kettle, which is spelled to dispense hot water on demand, one of the few luxuries, along with his green silk robe, Draco has indulged since he moved into this flat. Eetu has only been in his kitchen a couple of times but he makes himself at home, pulling mugs out of the cupboard and setting strong black tea to steep for them both. “You will see your mother?”
Draco thinks it must be a cultural thing, but Eetu is overly preoccupied with his relationship with Narcissa. He asked Draco about his mother the day they were introduced a couple of years earlier. “Is your mother a good woman?” “Are you close?” That’s what Eetu had wanted to know about him before he knew anything else.
“I haven’t decided to go. But yes, it would be a chance to see my mother.”
“You must go, then.”
Draco cinches the thin robe tighter around his waist. He’s inured to the drafts in his flat after years at sea but the conversation and the sight of Eetu’s unabashed nudity in his kitchen leaves him chilly. Draco was an argumentative child, and absolutely contrary as a teen. It’s one of the qualities he’s fought hard to train out of himself. He’s learned to do the work assigned to him without complaint, to stand down when he disagrees with a captain about his business, to speak up only when he believes that not to would put someone in danger. But he wants to argue now. He must go? Says who? Says Pansy? Says Eetu? He complains in his head. Who are they to tell him what he must do? He doesn’t say it out loud. Instead he nods and changes the subject.
“When do you sail?”
Eetu, his penis flopping as he moves, fishes another treat, a little ball of freeze-dryed reindeer, out of the jar where Draco keeps them and feeds it to Elektra, who is watching them from her perch on the windowsill.
Draco wishes he’d put some pants on.
“Wednesday. Uncle is sorry you won’t join us.”
Eetu’s uncle, Akseli, is a mentor of sorts. Draco met him his first winter in Finland, ice fishing for burbot on Niemisjärvet, lakes outside of Evo. Draco had learned fly-fishing from Muggles in Wyoming and had latched onto it as a meditative hobby. It had also forced him to begin re-examining his relationship with the natural world, which had been as perverted by his father as his relationship with humans, magic and Muggle alike. Akseli found him still learning how different it is to catch fish under a solid sheet of ice, and invited him to try commercial fishing. Draco had boarded Akseli’s trawler a month later.
“Bad timing,” Draco says. In truth, he’s avoided sailing with Eetu and Akseli together since he and Eetu started having sex. He worries Akseli will get attached to the idea of his nephew settling down. If Draco ever entertains fantasies that settling down with Eetu could cure his loneliness, the past couple of weeks have unburdened him of that particular delusion. He’s not in love, and although it strikes him as a ridiculously old fashioned notion, he’s pretty sure he’d have to be to want someone in his life like that.
Eetu hands him his tea. “How long will you be at sea?”
“Two months, and a bit,” Draco says. He’s not due back in Helsinki from his next job until the 25th of June. He’d have almost no time to turn around before he’d have to get to London, or straight to Hogwarts, if he intended to go. Elektra watches him as he thinks this and he knows he’s going to spend the next twenty-four hours worrying over a decision he thought he’d already made.
“And then you will visit your mother.”
Draco sips his tea and nods again, not interested in an argument with Eetu when he likely won’t see him for months. This feels like an end of something that never quite got off the ground.
____________________
It’s Draco’s birthday and he’s trying not to resent pulling the early morning shift, cleaning and freezing the remaining catch from the night before and storing it in the freezers below deck. The past six weeks have been some of the most miserable he’s spent at sea since he started commercial fishing. He should have been more cautious when he signed up with this crew. He’d been so keen to avoid sailing with Eetu and Akseli that he’d ignored the slight misgivings he’d had when he met the boat’s captain. The wizard has turned out to run an undisciplined ship, half the crew drunk on any given night, and the work falling heavily on anyone who’s sober enough to do it. The thought of another twenty days of this is nearly unbearable.
He throws himself into the job and chats occasionally in Finnish with Dalmar, one of only a few wizards on board Draco can stand. Several hours into his shift, he’s coming up from below to haul the next box of frozen fish down to the freezers when he sees a large, black bird making its way from the east. He recognises the owl’s sure flight instantly, and smiles for the first time all day. Maybe all week. He lingers on deck until Severa has landed on his outstretched arm and shaken out her feathers.
“Hello,” Draco says, petting her head.
She squawks in reply and blinks at him, large grey eyes that he fancies are nearly the colour of his own. Dalmar sees them and brings Severa a snail from the basket where they keep them.
“No letter,” Dalmar says, watching Severa swallow the snail whole. She’ll regurgitate the shell in a bit. Draco finds owls’ eating habits disgusting, but as with so much in his life these days, he’s trained himself not to judge. Or at least, to keep his judgement to himself.
“No letter.” Draco agrees. Severa rarely brings him letters. But when she does appear, she has a habit of hanging about until he’s brought himself to write one to his mother. Sometimes he thinks the odds that he found a magic post owl wandering free in the woods of Finland and that she wasn’t planted there by his mother to encourage him to write are slim indeed.
“Rest,” he tells her. “I have work to do.”
Later, when he’s finished his shift, he leaves Severa on her perch above board and goes down to his bunk. His bunkmate is snoring, still, at noon, from the top bunk. The cabin reeks of soured whisky that seeps from his bunkmate’s pores. And rotten fish. This boat is not kept nearly as clean as Draco prefers. He rips off the foul gloves he wears and hurls them into a hamper by the door. But before he can Scourgify and change his filthy clothes, he finds himself pulling a small tin from under his bed. He keeps parchment and quills in it. It also contains the RSVP card he never got around to returning, as well as Pansy’s last letter, which he hasn’t answered.
He opens the tin and picks the RSVP card out from the bottom, turning the heavy card stock over in his hands. He’s thirty-three years old today. He thought he might hear from his mother. He still might. And he can’t blame Pansy for ignoring the date. He hasn’t been much of a friend to her. The thought of the reunion still makes him slightly nauseated, but he’s lonelier than he’s felt in a decade, when he was wandering aimlessly, driven only by a need to be away, wherever away was. Perhaps now he’s motivated by the realisation that he and Eetu aren’t going anywhere, or the fact that he’s chosen to sail with a bunch of drunken strangers rather than Akseli, the man who has been, if not like a father, fatherly at least.
Draco tries not to think much of Lucius, but his father had spoiled him rotten, especially on his birthday. It’s constant labour to reframe memories that once sat at the heart of everything he valued and look on them instead as reminders of the hate he was taught and the pain he and his family are responsible for. Lucius has been dead for more than a decade, and Draco, when he’s most honest with himself, can admit it’s almost more work not to mourn for him than it would be to let himself feel the grief.
“Fuck,” he mutters, gripping the RSVP card tightly in his callused hand. He doesn’t think he wants to go to this ridiculous reunion, but he does want to see Pansy. He would like to see Blaise, if he would go. He’d even like to see Greg, he thinks. At least in this moment it seems like not such a bad idea. The fact that he’s nearly desperate to lay eyes on Harry Potter, too, after almost fifteen years, tells him he’s in a bad place. But before he can second-guess the horrid mood he’s in, he ticks “Will Attend” on the card and sits down to write to Pansy and his mother to tell them he’s coming. Severa will stick around until he’s finished the letters.
____________________
He gives himself two days in Helsinki to tidy his flat and get in touch with Akseli to sort out his next job, which will require him back in Helsinki in late July. Not that he plans to be away that long, but he has the time if he wants it. He shaves and trims his hair to his shoulders before he goes, conscious that even well-groomed, which he hasn't been for months at sea, he looks very little like the boy he was when he left home.
He makes the trip to London on the night of the 27th of June. It’s been ages since he’s Apparated anywhere further than Helsinki to Evo and he’d been unsure how many jumps it would take. He’d fretted about it until he got to his flat and found a Portkey and a note from Pansy telling him she would be expecting him. The Portkey is a literal key, though large and heavy enough that he has to hold it with two hands. He’s packed a small knapsack and realises he’ll have to purchase an appropriate dinner outfit when he gets to London. He used to love to shop, and although he doesn’t think of it often, he imagines he’ll enjoy it still. Assuming Pansy comes along.
The short journey by Portkey is exhilarating, and a bit terrifying after years with his feet planted on nothing more tumultuous than the deck of a boat. But then he’s standing alone in the large lounge of what looks like a tastefully decorated London townhouse.
“Hello?” he calls toward the open doorway. “Anyone home?”
There’s no answer, so he sets his knapsack down by the fireplace and ventures into the house. It’s night and the lights are out in the rest of the home, so the fact that the lounge has been left ablaze tells him Pansy must have been expecting him, even if she herself doesn’t seem to be here. Pansy is married to a bloke named Grim, or at least that’s how she refers to him. Draco’s never been sure if it’s short for something like Grimwald, or if it’s meant to be a descriptive nickname. He’s never met Grim, who is a graduate of Durmstrang and several years their senior, but he imagines him to be the serious sort. They have a nine-year-old daughter, Cate, who is apparently chummy with the Granger-Weasley girl. All of this Draco knows from Pansy’s letters, and none of it has seemed real until this moment, standing in Pansy’s darkened house, seeing signs of a both a husband (large wellies and a man’s overcoat in the front hall) and child (a child’s artwork—precocious, no question—on the walls in what looks like a playroom).
Draco casts Lumos with his wand as he makes his way through the empty house. A clock strikes ten upstairs, and it occurs to him that his mother lives only three houses down and is likely waiting up for him.
Unsure of how best to travel, he decides to walk, opening and closing the front door behind him, hoping the locking mechanism works without any interference from him. They’re in an upscale wizarding neighbourhood, so presumably the door will only open for Pansy and her family. He’s never been here, but he knows his mother’s address and finds her house easily. She moved here shortly after the trials, when the Ministry confiscated Malfoy Manor and the Malfoy fortune. She lives on a more modest Black family inheritance, a small portion of which Draco took with him when he left England. It’s been a decade since he accepted any money from his mother, and he’s relieved to see that at least from the outside, it looks like she’s landed in a comfortable home.
Several rooms on the ground floor of the modern townhouse are lit, and he looks down at his clothes as he waits for someone to answer his knock. He’s dressed in his nicest slacks, which are dark and worn, and the only button-down shirt he still owns. His mother will not approve.
He expects to be greeted by a house elf, but instead it’s Pansy who opens the door. She gapes as soon as she sees him.
“Merlin! Draco, is that you?”
He’s tempted to say he’s not sure, standing there in front of one of his oldest friends, who is both familiar and unknown to him. He’d recognise her, he believes, even out of context. The sleek hair in a neat bob, the stylish suit and red lipstick. But she’s a grown woman, beautiful in a way she wasn’t yet at eighteen. “Pansy,” is all he can say, as she pulls him in for a hug. She’s smaller than he remembers.
She lets go of him and beckons him inside. “Narcissa!” she calls down the hall. “He’s here!” And then to Draco she says, “Whatever you do, you must tell her she hasn’t aged a day.”
Draco nods and thinks he’s not ready for his mother to have aged, so it’s just as well.
Except the woman he finds in the kitchen has aged, more than the nearly fifteen years he’s been away. She’s still beautiful in an icy sort of way, long hair shining black, but she looks fragile, thinner and older than her fifty-eight years. “Draco, dear,” she says, rising and kissing him on both cheeks before taking his hands and giving him a critical once-over. It’s a few anxious moments before she smiles at him. “I’m relieved. You look well.”
“He looks like a Muggle rugby player,” Pansy says. “I’m not sure I would have recognised you.”
“Manual labour seems to agree with you,” Narcissa says, and Draco isn’t sure if that’s meant to be a dig. It would have been, in the past. He has no idea what to think, now.
“It does,” he says, in case there’s any question. “I like working outdoors.” And then he remembers to add, “You look well, too, Mother. You haven’t aged a bit.”
Narcissa frowns at that. “Please, Draco, let’s not lie to each other.”
Draco decides not to press on the sore spot and moves further into the kitchen to join them at the table, where it looks like they’ve had a late supper. He doesn’t see a house elf about, but he expects one to appear at any moment.
“Have you eaten?” Pansy is already at the stove, carving what’s left of a chicken from a platter and spooning roasted vegetables onto a plate.
Draco hasn’t eaten since much earlier in the day and is grateful for the meal, though curious about who prepared it. He doesn’t want to insult either of them, but it appears… “Did you…?” he ventures.
“I cook, yes,” says Pansy. “Your mother’s the real chef though.”
“Mother?”
“I have a house elf who comes several days a week, so please don’t give me that look, Draco. I know very well you’ve been living without domestic help since you left home and you seem to be thriving. The world didn’t stop turning in your absence.” It isn’t that he expected it to. Guilt over abandoning Narcissa when she’d already lost her husband has forced him for years to imagine—at least to hope—that she was doing as well as she sounded in letters. But the truth is that it was hard to believe she had gone on. “I’ve learned to cook, and I quite enjoy it.”
Draco's drive to leave was entirely selfish, and he loves his mother for having let him go. It’s eased his mind to know that Pansy was close by and looking in on Narcissa, but it’s only hitting him now how grateful he ought to be that he was allowed to leave them behind. “I should have known,” he says. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
Narcissa and Pansy both look sad for a moment, but then Narcissa waves away his apology and pats him on the cheek, beckoning him to sit where Pansy has laid his plate. “Nonsense. I knew you’d come back when you were ready.”
____________________
By the time Pansy takes his arm for a Side-Along to Hogwarts on Saturday evening, Draco feels as prepared as he’s likely to feel for the night ahead. He’s bought himself a suit, over Pansy’s objections. She lobbied for robes, but relented when it was clear it meant something to him. He’d enjoyed his day with her, even if he felt disorientated being back in England, in London, everything familiar and foreign at once. Pansy’s husband had taken their daughter to his parents’ house for a long weekend, and Pansy confessed that Grim, which turns out to be short for Grimwald, and Cate had plans to visit the Granger-Weasley girl at her grandparents’. Confessed, because Pansy is clearly self-conscious about the connection she has with the Weasley family, if more happily resigned to her friendship with Granger. Draco wishes he could find a way to tell her it’s okay. None of it means anything to him now. Or rather, it does, but it doesn’t mean what it used to. He respects Pansy more for the ways she’s changed, even if it’ll take him a while to adjust to the version of his friend who spent Friday evening on a Muggle mobile phone talking to Hermione Granger about the DJ’s set list.
The first person he sees when he lands on the front steps of Hogwarts is Headmistress McGonagall. Unlike his mother, she truly doesn’t look a day older, though she’s old enough. She’s greeting a line of well-dressed men and women as they file into the enormous doors, and Draco thinks this could be any crowd of strangers before he focuses and begins to see the vaguely familiar faces around him. Above them he sees younger, curious faces peering out of windows. School is still in session. He can’t fathom that Hogwarts has gone on, restored—altered, surely, but not in any way obvious at first glance—while he’s met witches and wizards in far corners of the world whose histories owe little or nothing to this place that meant everything to him.
“Mr Malfoy,” McGonagall says when it’s their turn to enter. “You’ve grown up nicely.” He listens for sarcasm in the tone, but it almost sounds like she means it.
“Headmistress, it’s good to see you.” He’s surprised, but it feels true.
“Welcome back,” she says, and purses her lips in a smile.
Pansy says hello to McGonagall and drags Draco over the threshold, whispering in his ear. “She’s perving on you, I swear."
“That’s disgusting, Pansy,” he says, and surveys the pristine stonework as he ushers her into the Great Hall.
Pansy peers around the Hall as though she’s looking for someone in particular. Draco has been restrained for two days now, never once asking after anyone other than Blaise, whom Pansy assures him will be here. The fact that Pansy hasn’t offered information about Potter either means he’s definitely coming, or he’s definitely not coming. Or she doesn’t know. So, it could mean anything.
The Great Hall has been transformed into a large nightclub, with a dance floor installed in the centre, the DJ’s booth next to it. There are bars on either side of the room, a large buffet along the back wall, and tables spotted around the edges of the Hall. The house flags fly from the ceiling, but that’s the only reminder of the rivalries that divided them during their years here. The rest is floating candles, glitter, flowers, and iridescent balloons that hang in mid-air.
Pansy perks up and waves at someone in the crowd that’s gathered around the buffet table, and she pulls Draco along as they make their way towards a stunning woman in a red dress. “I helped her pick it out,” Pansy says, knowing perfectly well that it’s caught his eye. He recognises Hermione Granger before they reach her and he admits to himself that she was always beautiful. She’s smart and lovely. And Muggle-born. He swallows around the familiar shame he feels at the bigotry that had seemed so natural to him for the first eighteen years of his life. It’s taken him nearly as long to overcome it, and he doesn’t always trust that he has.
“Pansy!” Hermione seems genuinely enthusiastic when they reach her, and she clutches Pansy in a tight hug before holding out a hand for Draco. To his utter shock, she kisses him on the cheek. “Draco, I’m so glad you could come. Pansy tells me you travelled all the way from Finland.”
Draco rocks back on his heels, unsure how to meet the open, friendly look on the face of a woman he treated like shit in school. A woman who was tortured in his home, by his own family. Draco’s natural poise escapes him for a moment, and he has to take a deep breath to recover. “Thank you,” he says, and reminds himself they’re adults and he must use her first name. “Hermione. Thanks for inviting me. It’s a good excuse to come home for a bit, visit my mother.”
“Of course,” she says, and continues to smile. “You look great. I know lots of people will be glad to see you.”
Draco tells himself that there’s no reason to suspect anything she says. There’s no reason for sarcasm or undercurrents. Pansy has assured him that Weasley and Granger genuinely wanted an opportunity for everyone to put the past well behind them, and Draco believes her, even if it’s difficult to get his instinctive distrust to back down.
“Is everything in order?” Pansy asks. “Do you need any help?”
“All set. The food is here, the decorations are up, and the DJ has our set list."
A set list that consists of mostly 90s Muggle pop. Draco hadn’t interfered when he overheard Pansy discussing the music choices, but he now wishes he had.
“Great. Where’s your husband?”
“Oh, he… had an errand to run,” Hermione says, glancing at Draco and then back to Pansy when she says it. “He’ll be here by nine. He promised.”
Pansy also looks at Draco before smiling at Hermione, and Draco can’t help the direction of his thoughts.