“I’d Transfigure these into a robe for you but--”
Hermione gritted her teeth and didn’t deign to follow his eyes as he gestured to his boxers and instead followed in the girls’ wake, rubbing her arms and trying not to shiver. Belize was warm especially when one came from England’s winter, but it still wasn’t warm enough to be outside--at what, 2 am?-- in one’s nightgown. Those girls had better be inside.
She paused at the door.
“Whose house is this? Or did they just break in?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s ours.”
“You mean it belongs to you Malfoys?”
“If you insist to clarify it as such.” She could hear the wryness in his voice. “I think my father’s transferred ownership to me this morning, though. And the house probably recognised Callie and Lia as Malfoys so the door opened to them without need of the key.”
There were a lot of things she wanted to controvert and question in that but she swallowed her words for the moment. She let him usher her over the threshold. Her bare feet-- the shoes Fred had haphazardly slapped onto her person had been lost in the Portkey crossing. She was going to strangle Fred-- left the grass and met smooth and cool terra cotta tiles.
Surprise, surprise: the interior sprawled endlessly, and she was only at what appeared to be the living area. From the accent lamps left burning, Hermione could discern potted palms and palmettos and rattan furniture on bamboo rugs. One wall was wholly composed of bamboo blinds, almost certainly screening a picture window.
A wooden staircase curved to the loft. The balcony there was lit softly and one of three doors was ajar, leaking bright light.
“I’m going back to bed. Tomorrow-- later, we’re going back to England.”
Without turning to see if he agreed or not, she climbed the stairs. When she lifted her hand from the railing, her palm was coated with dust. As if on cue, she heard explosive sneezing from the room ahead. She pushed the gaping door all the way open and found Lia and Callie blowing their brains out, clutching the neck of their nightgowns to their running noses. Their eyes were streaming.
Hermione banished the dust on every surface and shot a purifying spell into the air. Another door in the room led to a bathroom. Hermione repeated her dust banishment and then looked in the cupboard for an antihistamine or a Pepper Up. She found the latter. It wouldn’t stop the girls from sneezing and tearing up but they’d fall asleep without clogged noses, at least.
“I can’t believe this,” said Draco, coming into the room and grimacing in sympathy as the girls greeted his entrance with an unbroken chain of six sneezes. “This place has caretakers. Two ancient, very ornery and very particular caretakers. I wonder where they’d gone.” He tugged at Callie’s nightgown and gave her the bed covers to use instead.
“Did you Scourgify that?” said Hermione sarcastically, raising an eyebrow.
Draco gave her an exasperated look, not getting it. “And the bed, ma’am. And the curtains.”
Hermione went back into the loo to fetch a box of tissues. She tugged the bed cover away from both Callie and Lia and gave them the box. They groaned (in between sneezes) when they saw the bottle of Pepper Up.
“I suppose you’re regretting dragging us here, now, aren’t you?” said Hermione as she dosed them.
“Doe,” said Lia.
Hermione and Draco laughed at how she sounded.
“Well, whatever they are, your plans,” said Hermione, “haven’t been off to a good start.” She Scourgified the much maligned bed covers and shook it back over the bed.
“We got you here, didn’t we?” said Lia.
“And we’re going right back to England in a few hours so--”
“No.” It was Callie. She climbed into bed and folded back the covers for Lia. Lia followed and disappeared under the blanket until only the top of her head was visible. Callie tucked the blanket to her chin and spoke to the ceiling. “If you try to Apparate with us, we’ll squirm and we’ll all be horribly, possibly incurably splinched. If you make us unconscious so you can transport us, we’ll never speak to you again. If you arrange for someone else to come and take us back or for something to happen that would force us to come back, we’ll leave you and live with Uncles Fred and George. We’ve got ever so many supporters for this change of custody and it will be a public trial. We’re staying here until the end of the Yuletide holidays and you’d best be resigned and just enjoy that fact.”
She smiled at the ceiling and whipped the blanket over her face.
Hermione exchanged a stunned look with Draco.
“I’m going to kill my father,” he said.
“Promise to let me help,” she replied.
Draco spent the next few minutes puttering around the villa and finding evidence that Pietro and Pierra had indeed deserted them. Or did his father simply forget to mention the absence of the help? It was hilarious that his parents (and his grandparents before them) had spent years and years in futile attempts to chase away the Squib caretakers who had come with the house, but now that they were gone, Draco was desperate for them. The pantry was thankfully magically stocked and kept. None of the food had spoiled. Draco cleaned the house of dust and opened one window to let the air circulate. He tapped his wand thrice on the vase nearest him and all vases in the house sprouted jasmines and other freshly-scented blooms, perfuming the air.
He wondered what Hermione was doing up in the loft.
Just then, he heard and smelled her as she approached. She was redolent of the lemon and mango soap in his bedroom, the one currently occupied by the twins.
“Draco, where are the other bedrooms? The third door leads to a balcony.”
Oh. Right. Draco bit his cheeks to keep from smirking.
“What other bedrooms?” he answered.
“You mean to say that the only bedrooms in this monstrous house are those two in the loft?”
“Hey. It’s small but it’s not hideous, is it? Yes, two bedrooms. One for me and one for my parents. Before they had me, the second bedroom was for a guest. But only if that guest isn’t averse to rusticate. Very few in my parents’ circle are so inclined.”
Hermione clutched the bridge of her nose. “This is small? All right, I’ll sleep with the girls.”
“Assuming I’ll let you hog them to yourself?”
“I knew you’d say that. We’ll take it in turns to sleep with them.”
“What’s wrong with sleeping with me in the other bedroom?”
She turned her back to him and marched back upstairs.
Well, he tried. Draco pointed his wand next at the ceiling fans and their whir made him pleasantly drowsy. Assured that the villa wouldn’t embarrass him any longer, he followed Hermione upstairs. Just as he made it to the landing, the door of the twins’ bedroom banged open and Callie dashed out.
“Daddy!” she sobbed. “She kissed me good night.”
Draco almost bowled Callie over in his dash into the room. But Hermione appeared fine by then, sitting on the edge of the bed with her arms braced on her thighs, catching her breath. Lia looked white.
“Draco,” called Hermione. He was at her side in an instant.
“Are you all right?” He noticed the way the blankets seemed to have been pulled to the floor. “Did you fall after kissing Callie?”
She turned to him with a quizzical expression. “There is something I don’t understand here--” She trailed off as she noticed Callie beyond Draco. “I’m sorry, darling. It’s not your fault. Don’t cry.” And then Hermione turned back to Draco. “See?”
“Pardon me?”
“Try talking to Lia.”
“I talk to Lia all the time. We talked a lot in school and in France, didn’t we, pygmy puff?”
Lia barely nodded, still discomfited. Draco reached out and stroked her hair once. And then snatched back his hand and stared at it as he realised what he’d done and what wasn’t happening as a consequence of what he’d done.
Hermione nodded at his flabbergasted expression. “Callie, come here, honey.”
Draco tugged and pushed a reluctant Callie until the girl sat in her mother’s lap, wrapped in her mother’s arms.
“Hermione--”
“In school, we think of them as students, and even when we don’t, they are our students. In France, you thought Lia was Callie, and because of the Polyjuice, she was Callie. Conversely, Callie was Lia. When they tried to switch their colouring, the agreement wasn’t fooled. We nearly died when we grabbed the wrong girl but now--”
“But--” interrupted Callie. “But you grabbed the wrong girl once before, too!”
Hermione’s mouth fell open. “We did? And were we affected so badly we don’t remember it?”
“No, no,” said Callie, squirming and finally getting up from Hermione’s lap and stomping on the floor in her excitement. “Lia! Remember?”
Lia frowned for a second, and then nodded fervently. “Yeah! When Dimwit blew up the Potions classroom. I forgot. Hey, that’s why I thought changing our colouring might work--”
“We grabbed the wrong girl then?” said Draco, looking from one twin to the other.
“We were absolutely black with soot, weren’t we?” said Lia, smirking at her father.
Hermione squeezed Draco’s hand. She must have squeezed too hard because he turned to her startled. But when she let go, he grabbed her hand back. “Is this what I was supposed to be seeing, then? This glitch?” he asked.
She nodded, still reeling from the girls’ additional tidbit. “Why was it all right back then but it wasn’t all right during Halloween? And now, look at us, we’re talking and touching the wrong girl and we’re none the worse for it.”
“Well, you nearly died earlier when you kissed Callie.”
Hermione tugged Callie back into her lap and-- before Callie or Draco could protest-- kissed her loudly on the cheek.
“How in Merlin’s--”
When Hermione only raised an eyebrow at him, Draco in turn leaned back on the bed and kissed Lia on the forehead.
No one started choking.
“Not that I’m complaining, but this is mad. What’s happening?” said Draco, half grinning and half grimacing. He climbed all the way on the bed and slung an arm around Lia. “Look at you, my little puffskein. I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve been with you this whole time,” said Lia, trying to get out of her father’s death grip and failing.
“You know what I mean.” Draco commenced tickling.
“Muuuuum!”
But Draco could see Hermione and Callie with their heads together. No rescue for Lia was forthcoming. Lia landed a kick, though, and that ended the very belated tickle fest. He kissed her again at the same time that he heard more of Hermione’s smacking kisses. He and Lia both turned around to find Hermione smooching Callie all over the face like Callie was one instead of eleven.
Draco was one to talk, wasn’t he? He just tickled Lia like she was nine months old instead of eleven.
“How do we ensure we get to repeat this, hmm?” he said. “Is it Belize?”
Hermione turned to him with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes. It took his breath away. “Not Belize. We can do this in Britain, too. What’s the difference between now and awhile ago when I kissed Callie?”
Draco gritted his teeth and forced his brain to function again. It didn’t take long. “I wasn’t in the room?” And then he scoffed. “But we were certainly both there during Halloween as well and we still almost died.”
“I think the agreement’s become sentient. Think about it. Remember what we used to sign it?”
Draco caught his breath. “Blood.”
Hermione was nodding. “I’ll have to look into it to be certain-- someone in the Department of Mysteries will be able to help me-- but I think I just might be right. The agreement’s started to think for itself. We inadvertently imbued it with a smidgen of life. A very tiny bit, but enough. Perhaps it's even adopted our own humors. It’s been stewing for more than a decade after all. That time of the dungeon explosion, the danger had been real so perhaps that was why we haven’t been punished for grabbing the wrong girl. During Halloween, on the other hand--”
“Yes. I can see now. On Halloween, the girls had been playing tricks.” Draco cast a wry glance at said girls. “And we’ve been punished for being taken in. The agreement probably thinks we should have known better.”
“But...” said Callie. She’d been saying ‘but’ a lot lately. Lia continued Callie’s line of thought. “But we played a trick with the Polyjuice, too. So why--”
“Potions have their own potent magic. As your mum said, you were Lia and you were Callie while your potion doses circulated in your blood. The agreement recognised the change.” Draco turned to Hermione. “And now?”
“Well, now, I think the agreement recognises that tacit permission has been given. That I’m allowing you to touch my child and you’re allowing me to touch yours.”
“Simply because we’re in the same room?”
“Didn’t you look at Lia when we all first got together in the Headmistress’s office?”
Draco remembered. And understood.
“And you knew who she was but you didn’t die. When I first saw Callie in the bookshop during the summer, I didn’t know who she was so I was able to look my fill.”
“You saw Callie during the summer?”
“At Joanna Bowling’s meet and greet.”
“Right, right. But don’t be so smug about it. I also saw Lia in the summer.”
“You did?”
“She was with you, as a matter of fact. You two sort of spilled into Ollivander’s while Callie and I were waiting inside.”
Lia looked stunned. “That was you?” she said to her sister, who only shrugged. “Were you wearing wigs, then? Or did you charm your hair black?”
“A baby turned our hair black,” said Draco, scooting on the bed until he could lie down on the pillows. “We still have a couple of hours before daylight. Let’s go back to sleep, girls.”
“Excuse me?” said Hermione. “I thought it was my turn first.”
“And you’re going to cuddle Lia and ignore Callie to keep from dying at the ripe old age of thirty while I sleep by my lonesome in the other room? This bed could accomodate five grown men. Lie down, Hermione.”
“Don’t order me around.” But she lay down on the opposite side of the bed.
The girls, giggling madly, followed suit and snuggled down between them. Draco turned on his side and looked beyond the blonde and brunette heads on level with his chest. Hermione was also on her side, already with an arm around Callie with her hand curled loosely around Lia’s upper arm.
Draco snuffed the lamps with a wave of his wand. “This is cosy,” he said in a low voice.
Hermione ignored him, and ignored him still when he also extended an arm over the girls and let his hand rest atop her silky arm. He was sorely tempted to stroke, but he didn’t want to push his already immense luck for the night.
He was no longer going to kill his father. Belize was looking promising. Very, very promising.