“Draco Takes a Mark” is updated to Chapter 31
graphic by @selenelinh-blackburn
Draco looked around their cold but sheltered spot by the lake, imagining it lit with sunshine. “Remember when we were here together on your seventeenth birthday?” he said. “That was a nice afternoon. Normal, quiet time together, though we’ve never really been a normal, quiet couple. We’ve had hardly any days like that this year.”
She hummed. “What about the day we spent together in Harry’s house in London during the holidays? The circumstances were strange but it was just you and me, quiet and fairly normal all day long -- not running or scheming or pretending anything. Kind of a domestic paradise -- or at least a fantasy of one.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I could live like that.”
Normally, she would have given a smile and a quick word of agreement. But the mood was different tonight, not a time for flippant responses. She tipped her head back to try to see his face in the darkness. It seemed important to be able to read him. Unsatisfied, she took a scrap of parchment from her pocket -- the prefects’ schedule, which she could easily replace -- crumpled it into a ball, and lit it on fire. It burned slowly, suspended in the air beside them, orange, warm and bright.
In the soft light of her spell, Draco took both of her hands, cupped them between his own and breathed on them, opening his hands again to kiss each of her knuckles.
“Hermione,” he began. “I won’t say that the benefits our love charm might have for other people shouldn’t be factors in planning our futures. And I won’t say that I wouldn’t rather be having this conversation when we’re older and it made more sense. What I will say is that I know I’ll never meet anyone who is braver or wiser or better in every way that matters to me than you. No one will ever be as beautiful to me. No one will ever make me as happy as you do. Your ability to accept me as I am is -- I don’t understand how you do it. But right now, it's the key to what little is still good in my life.”
She mewed a sweet sound. “Draco, don’t praise me for that. It’s easy for me to love you -- inevitable, irresistible. It’s necessary for my own happiness. It’s not some act of noble longsuffering. I love you just because I do.” She bent her head and kissed his hands in return.
And then she noticed the ring. The small platinum ring pushed against the joint of his ring finger, she touched it with her fingertip...
