Chapter Text
The cottage looks exactly the same as it did the last time I saw it, down to the rotten shutters and overgrown garden. The air is heavy with the threat of rain, the clouds that familiar, violent gray. I can hear the ocean slam restlessly into that jagged cliffside, even if I cannot yet see its endless expanse. I stop for a moment, let the sting of salty air settle into my lungs, and ground myself in the moment. Leaves, golden and red, swirl gently at my feet.
It’s been four months since that night at the Manor. In that time, the Wizarding world has done a remarkably shit job at pretending everything is fine, paving over wounds with placating press releases and the hiring of muggle borns to mid-level Ministry positions. Hogwarts reopened last month to fanfare and everyone’s overwhelming relief, as if Death Eaters weren’t trawling its ancient halls the last three years. Everything is washed out, coated with new paint, as though the plaster of time is thick enough to hide the rot.
Voldemort is dead. My parents are dead. And yet somehow, everything is easier now.
Snape is gone, off to Durmstrang to teach Potions to the next generation of brutish, Russian wizards. He left me with nothing more than a brisk nod, as though he hadn’t spent four months painstakingly putting me back together. It’s a funny thing, memory, and bloody fickle. In retrospect, total Obliviation would have been an easier hell to crawl out of. But oh no, I had to show off, ever the little shit, and make it specific, make it clever. Fuck, what an ass I am.
Still, Snape did his measured best, and exhibited a depth of patience I would have never expected from someone as feral and cold as he. If I choose to ruminate on it, I can probably assume that it’s the guilt of my mother’s death, coupled with the indignity of her life leading up to said death—and apparently proceeding it—that truly motivated him. It doesn’t matter, though, not really. I’ve more important things to worry about.
Like coming to terms with my life, such as it is. An orphan, though hardly young enough to qualify, but I do love the weight of it. Helps add to my snobbery, my arrogance. Pansy says it makes me tragic in that alluring way. She’d know I suppose. Regardless, things are a far cry short of the way they were just over a year ago.
Even though I’ve been impressed upon otherwise, I do blame myself for my mother’s death. It was my carelessness, my desperation to run, that got us caught in the end. The serrated memories of our time in the dungeons of our own home, at the hands of my deranged aunt, were particularly grueling to get through. It’s no wonder Snape Obliviated me of them before handing me off to the Order. In the state I was in, I’d have found any means necessary to forget.
Ironic, of course, that in remembering the only good thing in my life, I also remember the worst.
The front door is shut and I remember the rush of fear that ran through me when fucking Weasley knocked on it on those months ago. That was the first time I held her hand, I think. Incredible, the detail to memory. Even more incredible is the absence of it. Why were we even in the front room in the first place? What did the Weasel even want? I cannot say, though not for lack of trying.
I peer through the skewed curtain, to the stillness of the living room beyond. It is empty, silent, like a monument to better, if less stable, days. Maybe I’m too early. Maybe I’m too late.
In the end, it was the memories of my time here, in this fucking dreadful cottage by the sea, that were the hardest to reclaim. Bit by bit, often day by day, I had to sit in that haphazard ruin of a mental palace and stitch the history of us back together. Fuck me, but I loved her so much sooner than I was willing to admit. Perhaps if I had been less of a coward we could have had more time together, to be something more than the almost and the maybe that we were.
The door is unlocked and I take it as a good sign. As far as meeting places go, it felt the most apt. It’s not like we know who we are together outside of these salt-soaked walls. I never gave her the chance, I never gave myself the grace. Mistakes, like sand, coating the edges of everything. At least I got this right. At least this.
Snape wouldn’t let me write to her, let alone see her, until he felt that my recovery was complete. The depth of my attachment to her was the throughline of every lost memory and he was worried that it would destroy my fragile house of cards before it was done being rebuilt. He was probably right, but I cursed at him viciously for it all the same. My last moment with her before everything unraveled and Snape spirited me away to some rancid shack of a house in the hills of Ireland for four months of mental anguish, was a painful one. The look of heartbreak in her eyes, the way she struggled not to let me see it. If I wasn’t overwrought with reasons to hate myself, that alone would be cause enough.
The scent of parchment and earthy, herbaceous plant life washes over me as I walk inside, transporting me back to a life I want desperately to reclaim. Scent is, of course, most closely tied to memory. Perhaps that was my logic in picking ‘strawberry’ as a command word. Fucking stupid, really. It’s hardly uncommon. Imagine if I’d been in public somewhere and heard it? I probably would have died. Snape spent the better part of a week scolding me for it but who is he to talk, really? A doe Patronus? Honestly. Talk about lovesick.
With each careful step forward, I move through time. So many horrid books, bland meals, miserable rainstorms. A veritable dragon’s hoard of itchy, ill-fitting wool sweaters. I run my fingers along the seam of my cuff, letting the intricacies of the knitting catch against every imperfection in my skin. It’s dark blue, darker than I remember it being. Pansy—really, Pansy of all people—tossed it to me when she found out I’d been set free, said it had been among my things she’d taken from the Longbottom Estate. Even though I never told her, even though I never said a fucking word, she knew what I wanted, she knew where I’d go, to whom I would run. I don’t deserve her loyalty. I never could.
I round the small doorway into the kitchen, stopping at the ancient wooden table bathed now in the gray afternoon light. Every scuff mark is familiar to me, every dent and divot. So many meals, so many memories. I think the first time I ever wished to kiss her was right here, in this dreary little excuse of a room. It was my birthday, and she was baking. I loved her so much, it was like something had bloomed within my chest cavity, and struggled to be seen. I never thought she would see me, though, and I certainly never thought that she would love me.
Through the open window, there is the sea. It is angry, roaring in its ceaseless bombardment against the jagged black rocks. I stare at it fondly for a moment, like the arrival of an old friend. I’ve missed it, impossible though it may seem. That background cacophony, that persistent presence of it in every moment spent here ties it irrevocably into the fabric of the person I am now.
From the sea, I focus inward, to the porch, to the figure illuminated in diffused sunlight. Even though she said she’d be here, there was still that lingering doubt that she would not. At the sight of her, my breath catches, and for a second I feel the panic creeping in. It’s been four months. Four months of no contact, not a word, not even a glance. I couldn’t even say goodbye to her, so swiftly was I ushered off with Snape. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have been able to but it bothers me all the same. My momentum is arrested at the thought of her expression when she sees me. Doubt follows panic like a faithful companion, gnawing at my recently healed edges.
I wrote her a dozen letters, and burned every one.
She shifts, looking to the left, down the porch at the gate as though she is expecting me to come from that direction. It calms me slightly to see the anticipation in the tension of her shoulders. Perhaps she is as nervous as I. Perhaps we are still tethered in some as of yet unknown way. A shuddering breath or two work their way through me and I walk out the back door.
“Granger,” I say, letting the word hang in the air between us. It’s not a hello, but it’s not not one either. She springs to her feet, and looks at me and fuck, it is damned annoying how right every bloody cliche seems to be. Time stops, just for a second, and even the sea holds its breath. I search her expression for something to cling to, some harbor in a storm to hold fast within.
“Malfoy,” she responds, tone deliberately, delicately neutral. “You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“How are you?”
“Well.” It’s like reading a script, a poorly written play about how this is supposed to go. It feels forced, it feels fake. I shake my head. “That’s a lie, I’m terrible.”
She frowns, brow furrowing. “What’s wrong?”
I laugh, a brittle thing. “Oh you know, just all of it.” My empty sleeve waves uselessly as I gesture at the ocean. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Of course I’d come. You asked me to and it was the first time I’d heard from you in four months—”
“Four months, two days, and,” I squint up at the sky, “fifteenish hours, by my estimation.” Despite the nerves, I grin. “If one wished to be specific.”
“You’re wrong.” She takes a step forward and my body reacts far before I ever could. Soon we are but an arm’s length apart.
“I am?”
“It’s seventeen hours.”
“Hmm,” I hum. “If you say so.”
“I do.” There are snapshots of normalcy woven into the moment, but they are far outweighed by the awkwardness of it, of the aborted expectation. Of the fucking maybe’s. “How is your…” she trails off, gesturing at my head.
“Just as loathsome as ever,” I say with a smile. The wind shifts, and cheap strawberry scented body wash rushes over me. It makes my heart wrench, like a teenager asking the girl he fancies to the Yule fucking Ball.
“But you do remember everything, don’t you?” There is such hesitation in her tone, it wounds me. “You remember me? You remember…us?”
Shaking, because I am terrible at playing it cool in situations as dire as these, I raise my hand to tug lightly on an errant brown curl. “I remember a lot of things. I remember I made you promise me something.”
She chews her lip to keep from smiling. “You did.”
“What was that again?” We look at each other properly then, drinking in the relief of one another’s presence. Just the way she occupies the space around me is like every good thing I could ever hope to have wrapped up into one tiny, human shaped package. Her face is the same, her features as familiar as I know them to be. That faded scar that runs the length of her jaw, the divot in her cheek when she tries not to grin. Her hair, impossible and wild and perfect. I love her. I’ll die loving her, though I would much prefer to live.
“That I would wait to say it.”
“Ahh yes, of course.” Even in the sincere relief of our reunion, there is doubt still, because I am still the man I’ve always been, no matter the bruising and the breaking. “Do you…still wish to say it?”
I watch the mirrored reflection of my insecurity flash in her expression. “Only if you still wish to hear it.”
“I do.” And I do and I do, over and over again, until it is only the sea that remains.