Hermione didn’t want to take her eyes off the lovely, lovely portrait in her hands, but she decided she could stare at it all night later and placed it on her desk, on the very spot Thalia’s photo used to occupy.
Draco sat down on the armchair opposite hers by the fire. “What are we eating? Shall I call for--”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I have tea and I can make us sandwiches. I have cucumber and peanut butter.”
She grimaced. He grinned. “Thank you for remembering.” Without asking for permission, he tapped the teapot with his wand, and the spout immediately emitted steam. “Where’re your teabags?”
She looked up from slicing the cucumber to catch his badly suppressed grin. It made her childishly mulish. She was not about to play ‘I Remember You and Yours’ with him. “No, I won’t break out my teabags with you. Just take some chamomile from the canister on the mantel, thank you.”
While the tea steeped, Draco proceeded to become such an intrusive and presumptuous lout, opening her cupboards and looking in drawers, taking out plates and cutlery, plunking the jar of peanut butter on the table where she was occupied with the sandwiches and suddenly taking away the knife, the remaining three inches of cucumber and waving his wand to slice the rest of the meats and bread perfectly.
“There’s no point using knives when it’s just sandwiches, not potions. Now, sit back and eat and let’s talk, amada.”
Hermione huffed and shut her eyes against that endearment and the sight of him dunking the cucumber in the peanut butter. She heard the crunch when he bit on the vegetable. She busied herself pouring the tea. “Draco, I’m thinking of making another agreement with you to nullify the other.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
He magically arranged an egg and cress for her and placed it in her hand. He nodded at her to take a bite. She took a bite. Only then did he answer. “Blood oaths aren’t terminated as conveniently as that. We probably should have used ink and not blood. Marriages don’t have blood oaths because then no one could divorce and people would die right and left when they so much as begin to leer at someone else. Think of our agreement as our marriage certificate. Only, we can’t just sign a divorce agreement to get out of it.”
What an analogy. “But why?” Hermione was so woebegone it was several seconds before she realised what she’d just said and clapped a hand to her mouth.
Draco took in the last bite of his cucumber just then and choked on it. His loosely-fisted hands slapped down on his lap. “I can’t believe you,” he said, talking past the cucumber still in his mouth. “Are you saying you made that agreement without knowing the full ramifications if we signed it with blood?”
Hermione felt the blood rise and pulse in her head. “Don’t take that tone with me. I wasn’t-- I wasn’t being stupid. I’ve read about Wizarding agreements. I made one in fifth year! We swore to one ourselves! I know signatures are binding. I thought-- I only thought to increase the consequences of breaking the agreement so I had us sign in blood. I didn’t want to see you again. Ever. And I wanted to ensure you stayed away. That I stayed away.” She laughed bitterly. “I was an idiot, wasn’t I? Yes, I was.” Draco was frowning at her, but not in castigation. He looked more bewildered than irritated with her. “If you knew about it so much, you could have refused to sign in blood and stopped me from signing in blood--”
It was several moments before he answered. The sandwiches in the table between them were forgotten, and their tea was getting cold.
“How could I have? You looked like you’ll stab us all with the quill if I didn’t sign and get out of there.”
Was I really that furious? Despite what she said, Hermione remembered being heartbroken more than she remembered being furious.
“When we’re hurt, we’re beasts, remember? You were a right beast just then as much as I. And beasts are stupid.”
She stared at him. And then burst into laughter, the mirthless kind, the disgusted kind.
“Thank you for excusing me. So magnanimous of you.”
He barely finished letting her say that. He probably didn’t even hear it. With undisguised fervour, he said “Hermione, can I see more photographs of Thalia? From when she was a baby? Surely you have some here? I can show you Callie’s, too. But I left them at the cottage.”
Hermione wanted to hit something and she was barely containing the crackle of her ire. She stood up. “I’m going to bed. You can see yourself out.” Draco rose with her. At her words, his face shuttered. She watched him turn away from her and cross her carpet with heavy strides. Only when he was at the door did she call out, “Those are all of Lia’s photo albums on the top shelf to the right of my desk.”
He stopped. Before he could face her again, she went to her bedroom. As soon as she closed the door behind her, she bent at the waist and thumped her fists on her thighs, much the same way Draco had done earlier, but with a force that would probably show bruises in the morning. The pain did her good, channelled some of the pain inside outward. There were also sobs fighting to get out, but she held them back. It was easy. She’d been in practice, after all. Oh, crying over Lia and Callie was new. But crying over Draco was not. It was so old, so passé and she was not about to do it again.
The bastard had finally acknowledged that she was hurt, but instead of apologising, he’d called her a beast and then dismissed the subject and as innocent as pie asked to see Lia’s photographs. Goddamn him.
There were four girls in the Slytherin first-year girls’ dormitory that night. Two were Gryffindors. Two were still awake. One dark and one fair head lying close together on one pillow in the four-poster with the mysterious chicken scratch on one post.
“We should probably give up waiting for her. For all we know, she might be spending the night with that Quillian in your House.”
“The Head Boy? They’re together?”
“They’re not?”
“I don’t know.”
“Should I wear gloves tomorrow?”
“You’ll only call more attention to yourself if you do that.”
“So then I’m going to walk around with my hands in my bag? How am I going to function? I want to be able to eat at breakfast and lunch. I don’t fancy being fed like tonight.”
After piling food on Lia’s plate, they had brought it and the girl back to the dungeons and Callie spoon-fed Lia because her hands were not only red, but also stiff as if they’d been stuffed with hardened jelly. Soft but unyielding. The stiffness had worn off now, but the skin was still a funny crimson. It almost glowed in the dimness.
“Miss August might fix your hands. And even if we don’t find her, you can eat. So what if your hands are red? I saw a fifth-year with antlers yesterday. It didn’t bother him.”
“Mum will see. She’ll be on me faster than a vampire on a Blood Pop.”
“Then don’t go to breakfast. I’ll meet you at break and feed you again. And then it’s only Potions and it will be easy to hide your hands then. Why don’t you want to go to Madam Pomfrey?”
There was a pause.
“Why didn’t any of you remember her tonight? Ugh.”
Callie and Lia snorted at themselves and giggled, muffling the sound in the bedclothes.
“Aren’t we such green first-years? When we’re not dying or dying with pain, we forget the matron. We can still go to her right now.”
“No. Let’s go to sleep. You’re ruining my perfected bedtime. Good night, priss.”
“Good night, swine.”
“Oi! That’s not fair! ‘Priss’ is not bovine. It’s not even an animal. It’s simply somebody prissy. You are.”
Callie harrumphed. “Thank you for that so very enlightening vocabulary lesson. Does ‘swine’ annoy you?”
Lia laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen any before.”
Callie rolled her eyes.
Lia laughed again. “Nope, doesn’t annoy me. Not from you. You sound so sweet, priss.”
“Well, 'priss' irritates me. That makes us even.”
“Are you insinuating you’re the only one who sounds sweet? I’m plenty sweet.”
“WILL YOU TWO SHUT UP OVER THERE BEFORE I GARROTTE YOU WITH YOUR BLANKETS?”
“How’s that done, then?”
“ARGH!”
Callie clamped a hand over Lia’s mouth before she could bait Kia further.
Draco had transcended Hogwarts and the too small armchair he was ensconced in. He had even forgotten his exasperation with the witch who was currently just a door away from him, the witch whose clutch on grudges was so tenacious she couldn’t grasp anything else, even hints as big as Bludgers so blatantly dangled before her pert nose. And people touted her as the smartest witch of her age.
But all that was Evanescoed from Draco’s mind. The only things rattling around in his cranium just then were endearments in all the modern and dead languages, and adjectives from the world over that said ‘beautiful.’
He was mesmerised by his baby daughter. All over again. He’d been like this with Callie. And Thalia was just as angelic.
In the earliest photos, he might as well have been looking at Calliope. Except that Callie’s hair had been a delicious sorrel that only darkened and mellowed to its current rich shade. Thalia’s was a wispy fluff of yellow. A thick fluff that perched on top of her head like frosting. Most blonde babies are bald-- Draco himself had been bald-- but not Thalia. And like Callie, she had long, dark eyelashes and rosebud lips. Of course, he had seen her after she was born, he had stared at both his daughters and the sight had been etched indelibly in his mind, but he had only been given one of them, and this other one who had been taken from him now flooded his mind with her beauty, beauty he hadn’t watched as closely as he wanted, as he’d done with Callie.
“Accio Calliope’s First Album.”
Draco touched a lock of Thalia’s baby hair. There were even several teeth in the album. He touched them, too, chuckling softly. Tiny envelopes held ‘first nail clippings’. And Thalia’s ‘Fortnight Footprint’ wasn’t even as long as his pinkie. He found himself looking for her footprints. On her first birthday, two tiny, tiny handprints were included. The pages where they were pressed still smelled of baby powder.
A clatter on one of the windows startled Draco, and as his head snapped toward the noise, something wet dropped to his cheek.
To his utter surprise, it was his. A tear. From his brimming eyes. He scrubbed at them (not without bewilderment and irritation) with the heel of his hand and went to retrieve the album he’d called from his cottage so he could look at both his babies and imagine seeing them again together, watching them grow from wrinkled infants to plump noisy tots together.
Before he could open the tome he had Summoned, however, there was another noise, this time of Hermione’s bedroom door banging open, and Draco jumped again-- not as much from the disturbance as from the sight of Hermione standing there in her floor-length, nightdress. A sleek, silk thing with insubstantial straps.
Red. Against her ivory skin. It was stunning.
“You’re still here?” she said, lowering her wand and calming her breath.
“Er--” Draco forced his eyes-- which were seemingly stuck to watching her very interesting respiration-- back up to meet hers.
“What was that noise?”
Draco picked up the heavy album from his lap and waved it at her like an idiot. Realising he looked like an idiot made him come to.
“And before you ask what this is and if you want me to answer coherently, can you put on a robe, please? Unless you want me to--”
Hermione silenced the rest of that with a malevolent glare. She pointed her wand toward her bedroom and a peignoir flew to her hand. It matched her nightdress, but instead of silk, it was made of velvety fabric that reflected both shadow and light. Draco averted his eyes for his own good, but the photo to which he happened to have flipped just then was just as damning, because it was of Hermione and baby Thalia in the bath together, their bare shoulders matching in their creamy deliciousness, their smiles big-- Hermione was laughing and Thalia looked so proud of her three front teeth. It was a Muggle photo; mother and daughter frozen in a moment of glee.
She marched over to join him and plucked Callie’s album from his hand.
“What’s in this boo-- oh.”
She sort of folded and it was only lucky she’d stood in front of the other armchair. It caught her, and she sunk into it, cuddled into it as if she had no plans to get up in the near future.
“Hermione, who took this photo?”
“Hmm? She’s so beautiful.”
“Of course she is. They both are.”
Hermione was smiling. “I forgot she has this tiny dot just below her thumb. Is it still there?”
“Yeah. My mother says it’s why Callie likes to work with her hands. She plays the piano and paints.”
"Lia carves and models. My father already got her a kiln.”
They exchanged a look at that.
“Do they know now?” Hermione asked.
Draco couldn’t help smirking at her. “No, it’s still our secret.”
Because, of course, Draco hadn’t had the time or the inclination to carve in years. Instead, he’d watched Callie. Her antics had been more cathartic, and had been more than enough for him. At least, until now. Now, he also wanted Thalia.
“Can I have this photo?”
Hermione looked up at him and grinned when she saw which one he was talking about. She reached for the album from him, and carefully extracted the photo from the protective film. She stroked it, grinning all the while. “You know, Lia was colicky. I swear, she was only quiet when I was nursing her. She rarely shut up her first two months. And then she suddenly became this giggly imp. Even when she was cutting teeth, she wasn’t grumpy. She laughed so much at almost any and everything she had to be cured from gas so often. Of course, she wouldn’t settle down either. If I didn’t have the Weasleys, my parents and Harry, I would have died from sleep deprivation.”
“She likes her baths,” Draco said with a smirk.
Hermione waved him off. “I was getting to that. Since she won’t easily sleep, I had to take her with me even to bathe. And that was the trick. Just let her play in the water and she conks out right afterward.”
“Who took this photo? Not Potter or Weasley?”
“If it’s either of them, you won’t want it?”
Draco rolled his eyes and grabbed the album and the photo from her as she made to tuck it back under the protective film. “You’re in the bath. Or were you fully dressed under the suds? They didn’t hurt Thalia’s eyes?”
Hermione laughed. “No, I was naked and no, the milk bath is a Muggle thing with a ‘no tears’ guarantee. And it’s my mother who took that photo. Satisfied? Why is she crying here? Look, she looks so irritated.”
“Let me see.”
Before Hermione could struggle with Callie’s heavy tome of an album to show him what she was asking about, Draco pointed his wand at her armchair. In an instant, Hermione--chair and all-- was beside him. Her scent wafted up his nose. Damn it all to Hades. Summoning her closer wasn’t a smart move for his sanity, was it?
Hermione pretended nonchalance at their sudden proximity, but inwardly she wanted to pound on her chest to get her insane cardiac muscle to quit being melodramatic. Her fingers sank into the album’s padded cover as she gripped it for composure, to stop herself from doing something stupid like bashing Draco’s head or clutching at her robe’s neck. Even with her hair almost swallowing her from the head to waist, she suddenly felt exposed in her two layers of clothing.
She kept her eyes on Callie’s photo instead. It helped because her daughter happened to be flailing and wailing in the picture.
“Oh, that. We don’t know. We think that’s her first cry. Maybe she didn’t like the look of Healer Gascon.”
“Her first cry?”
“Did she even cry when you delivered her?”
“Of course. She-- she’s the first-born. It’s her who announced I’m officially a mother.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
Hermione could only hum in answer. An uneasy rather than an indifferent sound.
“How long was the gap between their births?”
“Eight minutes and forty-three seconds. Thalia took her time.”
“She gets that from you.”
Hermione ignored that, resisted the urge to head-butt Draco’s chin and turned the page in the album. She smiled. Callie always seemed serene, in comparison to Lia, who traded crying with laughing and then talking. “Was Callie a quiet baby, then?”
She heard Draco turn the page on his album as well. “Very quiet. She had us worried for a bit. Healer Gascon said nothing’s wrong with her, though. Of course, with so many of us hovering over her all the time, how could she have a chance to cry for something? Mother got her a wet nurse--”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What? It’s traditional. We weren’t about to feed her Muggle milk formulas. If a wet nurse was to be had, why bother with those things she might not even take to? Anyway, Nurse was devoted to Callie. When we noticed Callie’s too quiet, Nurse tried not suckling her on schedule. But Callie still didn’t cry. She just sort of whimpered and wriggled in her cot. That’s them.”
Draco needn’t have pointed. Hermione swatted his arm off and stared at the woman who had taken Hermione’s place in Callie’s infancy. ‘Nurse’ was plump and dimpled, and looked for all the world as if she was already a grandma. Her hair was snow-white. Hermione gaped at Draco.
“Believe it or not, she has babies of her own at the time. She looks decrepit because of popping many, many babies. And the witch doesn’t have a single vain bone in her body, so she doesn’t dye her hair. It’s strawberry blonde at the back.”
“She’s not decrepit,” Hermione snapped in defence. She owed this woman.
She looked at Callie, content, being rocked by Nurse in her canopied, frilly yellow cradle. She looked so small. How could any mother have parted with a baby that small?
She was shaken out of her gloom by Draco nudging her with an elbow. “Did this hurt?”
She saw just what might have hurt, blushed to the roots of her hair and hissed, “Of course not, you idiot.” She swiped at her stinging eyes, got up from the chair and marched to her desk. From the lap drawer she withdrew a framed photo. Her favourite. A present from her parents. Taken by a hoity-toity, famous photographer who catered to royalty and supermodels. She couldn’t remember his name now, but she didn’t begrudge him his talent. Not when what it produced was something so perfect and precious.
She shoved the portrait under Draco’s nose. “Does it look like it hurt?”
It was probably unfair, Hermione mused, as Draco inhaled and stared and reached for the portrait. She only blushed again when it was already in his hands and it was too late and too ridiculous to snatch it away from him and hide it again.
The photo Draco had asked about was something Harry had snuck and took while Hermione was trying her damnedest to get Thalia to nurse because the tiny hellion had gone almost all morning on juice and biscuits only, crawling all over the house and the yard, dodging everyone intent to bring her to her mother, tempting all of them to hit her with a Full Body Bind. Finally, close to lunch, they’d captured Thalia when she paused to inspect Pigwidgeon, whom Fred had planted in Lia’s path. In the picture, the squirming nine-month-old still had the poor little owl in one fist and was flailing (with the fist holding Pig, who was never right again after that) to be put back down to play even as she suckled from Hermione.
It was one of those exasperating-turned-hilarious moments and everyone had a copy of that ridiculous photo. In contrast, in the portrait commissioned and paid for in several hundred pounds, six-month-old Lia nursed like a very angel, so plump and delicious with her blonde ringlets draping over Hermione’s arm, one tiny hand clutching a lock of her mother’s hair close to her mother’s breast, her rosy lips caught in a pucker as she suckled, so that she looked like she was kissing rather than feeding, understanding and returning the love in her mother’s gaze.
“Hermione, this is...”
Draco was speechless and breathless. Hermione could understand that. So was she. For different reasons, however.
Hermione sat down on the arm of his chair, looking at the portrait over his shoulder. It seemed only yesterday since it was taken. But it wasn’t. More than a decade had passed. More than a decade lost.
The sob escaped from her even before she was aware of it.
“I wish-- Oh, I wish--”
She let Draco tug her into his lap. She let herself bury her nose in his neck and clutch at the front of his shirt. She closed her eyes and let him comfort her. She let herself grieve over her daughter. However belatedly, however much the blame on herself and Draco, she was entitled to cry over spilled milk, wasn’t she?
“I wish I’d nursed Callie, Draco.”
“You haven’t?”
“I didn’t touch them until you’d taken one of them away. If I touched them, I wouldn’t have been able to let them go.”