(IX) - 'The Hermit'
Draco sighed. It felt like he was pulling out breath from somewhere deeper than his lungs - some cavernous hollow that extended all the way down to his boots, perhaps - and it made the girl behind the bar glance at him again. He noticed and didn't care. If she had some suggestions to make him, he had a roll of Galleons to say the contrary. That was how these things worked, wasn't it?
He stared at his tiny glass, past it, and past the bar and into nowhere. Well, that was how it worked now.
He was contemplating other ridiculous things to spend ridiculous amounts of money on, having already established to himself that paintings were right out. The moving ones were tedious and mouthy, and the non-moving ones were tedious and boring. As far as Draco could see, the purpose of paintings was to fill up blank walls, and one shouldn't have such a stupidly huge manor with that many blank walls to fill up in the first place.
Birds were out also, on the grounds that they were only marginally more useful than paintings. Draco gripped his glass and shifted it back and forth idly and muttered, "Maybe I'll eat those fucking peacocks." He tapped the glass on the bar twice, hard, and the sound was loud enough to get the attention of whoever else was here as well as the bargirl. Draco noted how he also didn't care about their attention right now. The girl poured him out another shot, and whatever she may or may not have been about to say was stifled in her throat when she looked at his face. They had an arrangement now.
Could you even spend ridiculous amounts of money on alcohol? Not quickly, Draco assumed. Not the way he was thinking of. He drank, of course; wine here, brandy there, that sort of thing. But now he was in the mindset of a drinker, seeking out spirits that would clang around in his head like the angry and primal ghosts they shared a name with. He would get numb the same way one might get numb from breaking a bone to forget about a headache. This was his mission.
He liked the sound of that. Smiling, he threw back the shot. Mission - it made what he was doing sound noble.
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He had seen the stairs and wanted to take a moment and right himself. The night had become cool, which was a blessing; and the railing held firm despite looking likesomething flimsy that would be prone to swaying - that too was a blessing. The stairs suddenly looked very inviting, very solid, and Draco performed a somehow graceful maneuver where he held the rail and spun-swung himself into a sitting position. The only thing that spoiled the effect was the bottle held in his other hand smashing and spilling its meager contents down the stairs.
Good riddance, he thought. Carrying the bottle had become a burden.
He had his wand somewhere, he was sure of it, but searching through his pockets produced nothing. He had it in his mind to shout ‘Accio wand!’ and demand the stupid thing into his hands, but then realised how foolish it would be and grimaced. Well, maybe he could stay here, then. The step was comfortable and the railing on it was solid. Yes, he could just stay here until the sun wanted to show itself or his neck wanted to support his mercury-filled head properly, whichever came first. Lord Malfoy, Master of the Stairs With the Solid Railing.
In assessing his lordship, he hadn't noticed the woman approaching him until it was obvious she was headed for him and not just about to pass on by. Draco thought for a second she would perhaps tell him these were her stairs and that he wasn't welcome on them. To that he felt he could have responded with a tongue-lashing that had been brewing in him all day; one that started with ‘Do you know who I am?’ and possibly ended with a lecture about who was or wasn't fit to sit on whose stairs.
Instead she held something out to him. It was long and pointy. It was his wand. He took it from her and flicked his hand once in a sharp gesture, but nothing happened. Flicked it again, and still nothing. Flicked a third time, and while there was a bellow of laughter from a group further up the street that were also heading home, Draco had probably done nothing to cause it.
"What are you doing?" Draco's samaritan asked, calm and unconcerned, as if she was instead asking the time of day.
"Calling the Knight Bus," he said, and his teeth felt like wood and his lips like dumb rubber. "Move or it'll knock you down."
"You have to be on a wider street than this," she informed him in the same it's-a-nice-day-today tone, "or it won't appear directly. The best you could hope for here is that it pops in at the end of the street down there and notices you, but that's not very likely if you stay in the dark.
"Besides," she finished, "you don't summon the Knight Bus with your wand."
Draco looked up to give her a withering glare, but he suspected it fell short because his face felt uncooperative, and it really was too dark to see anything properly. He couldn't pick out any features on his helpful new friend save for her long pale hair. Draco jammed his wand into his pocket and went to signal the Knight Bus, but felt his wrist catch in his new friend's hand. He stared up at her, dumbstruck and unsure how to proceed.
"I know something faster," she said, and was there a smile in her voice now? Before Draco had time to analyse what she had just said, she added, "Hold tight."
A question formed in his mouth; the What sat right on his tongue. Before it could come out, the jostling angry winds of Apparating rushed in on Draco. He shut his mouth, closed his eyes, and held tight to his helpful new friend's wrist.
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He landed in a chair in some tiny apartment with no lights on. The chair was deep and felt like it was made of cushions. Devil with the stairs, he thought, this chair is a much better kingdom, and what he knew to be a very uncharacteristic smile bloomed on his face. It was, thankfully, unnoticed in the dark.
There was some movement in the tiny apartment, and then came light. The movement came from the wrong direction for Draco to get a better look at the mystery lady, but the light was enough for him to see the walls covered with frames with pieces of paper in them. Some of the frames were quite small and contained fragments, while others housed multiple pages and took up almost entire walls. Draco was still wondering what these could be while the apartment's owner(?) came from behind and sat opposite him, setting two glasses on the low table between them. One was the clear ambery-orange of strong alcohol, and it was this glass that Draco reached for, but the woman intercepted him.
"This is for me. The other's yours. We'll both drink quick and be equal." As she spoke, Draco got his first proper look at her. Although he hadn't seen her in years, he recognised her immediately, his memory doing that eerie shuffle to put this newer face onto images of the past.
"What's in the other one, Lovegood? It looks like stew."
"We don't have to be formal here," Luna Lovegood said. "Unless you would prefer to be Malfoy instead of Draco tonight."
Draco sighed. "I'd rather be Draco," he admitted, giving very little thought to his reply.
"It's mostly wheat with some grasses and vegetable juice." Draco tried to look bewildered at this non-sequitur, and he thought he did a pretty decent job of it. Luna indicated towards the table. "In the glass."
Draco picked it up to inspect the contents. "You have wheat, grasses, and vegetable juice handy, for moments like this?"
"It's good to be prepared," she replied, and Draco couldn't tell if she was being cryptic or not. Luna tapped her glass to his and said, "Bottoms up."
"Cheers," he agreed reluctantly, and drained his glass. It tasted like drinking a haybale. Almost immediately he felt his sinuses clear, which was an odd sensation, as they hadn't (as far as he knew) been blocked in any way. The clearing rushed through his head, and he felt capable of many things again – standing up and staying stable, for instance, or making his tongue tell the difference between l's and p's.
Draco set the glass back on the low table and saw Luna was watching him. Her glass was similarly empty.
"I'm going to stand up and kiss you now," she said, "And then I plan to take you by the hand and lead you to my bedroom." She left a pause not quite long enough for Draco to wonder if there had been anything other than wheat, grass, and vegetables in what he just drank. "Do you think you're prepared?"
"Prepared as I'm going to be," he came back with, and realised that, however sober the rest of him was, the little sensible, worrisome part of him he'd set out to numb up was still drunk and stumbling and barely able to speak to him.
And that suited him just fine.
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It wasn't the kind of heated animal fornication that ended with sweaty bodies and clothes strewn about in need of repairing. It wasn't the dispassionate intercourse of two people coming together to forget the problems they had. It wasn't the awkward joining of first-time lovers or the comfortable love making of long-time friends.
It was sex, and it was good.
"Do you feel the need to sleep?" Luna asked. Draco shifted so he was closer to sitting than lying down. They had not been embracing, though they lay beside each other, and both had barely enough time to catch their breath. Draco thought again about how little time was wasted with his companion.
"Not especially," he replied.
"Perhaps we could talk." She was making no effort to move, despite the fact they were both on top of the bedcovers (said covers therefore doing quite badly at their job). Draco looked down at her and raised his brows.
"What about?"
"Did you lose something today?"
He realised – not for the first time tonight – that he would have to spend more time in Luna's company to predict these sudden changes in topic. "Lose...?"
"And is that why you were looking to be lost yourself? Two things that are lost, they might meet up and travel together." Her tone was serene but he could feel the seriousness at the core of it – or maybe that was just his perception being reflected back, as it felt like the world had suddenly turned serious. He gave no reply, and looked at one of the walls. There were more framed... letters? Book pages? What were those things?
"My father publishes a newspaper," Luna said. Draco glanced at her, but she wasn't looking at him; she too was looking at the wall, possibly even at the same framed whatever he had been staring at. "And in it are the things that he believes. They were things I believed, too, because they were true to my father. But there was a day when it was too hard to believe them all. We fought. And, I think, we lost each other a little."
Draco was unsure where this was going. He knew about Xeno Lovegood – it was hard not to know about him and a handful of his eccentricities – and could easily imagine the hogwash he printed could even become unbelievable to his own daughter. His mind kept wanting to try to connect the present with the last time he had seen Luna, and it was making him uneasy.
"I went out into the world and I looked for the truth. I wrote some articles for other papers and then started my own, just like he did when he was a young man. But it only deals in truth. We talk still, but it's not the same as it was because of what was lost. He thinks I resent his ideas, and that I think he's silly for holding on to them." Now Luna looked at Draco, and her voice wavered a little from serenity.
"I don't. He believes in wonderful things, and I found wonderful things when I went out looking for the truth. And I know that if I keep looking, and if I find something that he believes in, that will be the thing that was lost."
Draco blinked. He had planned to mull on this for a while, possibly in silence, but found himself asking, "Where were you looking, when you looked for the truth?"
"The truth is everywhere," she replied. "But I started in Sweden." Luna tilted her head a little, and Draco could have almost predicted the topic shift this time, if the clock had not been working its way steadily through the small hours.
"The Swedish word for 'dragon' is the same word for 'kite'," she stated.
Draco was about to ask what this had to do with anything and stopped himself. No, there was something there. He might have the logic of it...
"So they can be the same. A dragon can be a kite, but still be a dragon," Luna concluded.
Yes, he did.
"In Sweden," he said, feeling wry.
"Yes."
"We're not in Sweden."
"Sweden," she said, "is like the truth: it can be everywhere."