Chapter 1: Happy Birthday to Me
On the morning of his twenty-fifth birthday, Draco Malfoy woke at four with the sheets soaked through and the distinct impression that someone had set fire to his shoulder blades.
He lay in the dark of his flat in Marylebone and assessed the situation the way the Healers had taught him to assess a hangover. Fever: yes. Thirst: catastrophic. Pain: a deep, ridged ache along either side of his spine, as though something there wanted very badly to unfold. He sat up, and the room lit faintly gold, and he looked over his shoulder in the black glass of the window and saw, for the space of a heartbeat, two vast shapes of light lift off his back like sheets in a wind. Then they were gone.
He sat there for a long time.
"No," he said aloud, to nobody. "Absolutely not."
His mother's owl arrived at half six with a birthday card and, folded inside it, a second, thinner letter in her most careful hand. My darling. I had hoped it would skip you. Your great-great-grandmother Isaure was not only French. Please come to the Manor this weekend and do not, under any circumstances, go anywhere near the woman it chooses until we have talked.
Draco read it twice. Then he took a cold shower, drank most of a jug of water, put on his best grey robes as a matter of principle, and went to work.
The Being Division of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures occupied a long, narrow corridor on Level Four that smelled permanently of damp parchment and whatever the Centaur Liaison Office was boiling for lunch. Draco had worked there for three years. For the last eight months, since the Ministry had cut the Department's budget and reassigned offices with the cheerful brutality of a pruning curse, he had shared a room the size of a broom cupboard with Hermione Granger.
There was one window. It was charmed, like all the windows on Level Four, to show whatever weather Magical Maintenance felt like that week. There were two desks, pushed together at right angles in an L, because that was the only way they fitted. There was a line of red tape across the floor that Granger had put down in their second week, after the incident with the coffee and the Kneazle-welfare report, and which neither of them had ever acknowledged out loud.
She was already there when he came in. She was always already there. She had her back to him and a stack of files in front of her and her hair twisted up off her neck with a pencil stuck through the knot, and she said, without turning, "You're late, and you've got my stapler," and Draco walked through the door and into a wall of scent so strong it stopped him dead.
Oranges. Not the smell of an orange. The smell of the peel, the moment you broke it with your thumb, that bright bitter spray. Then ink, iron-gall, the cheap Ministry kind. Then something under both that wasn't anything he had a name for, warm and close and so specific to her that it was as if he'd never smelled her before, as if for three years he'd been standing beside her with a head cold.
The ache in his back flared white.
"Malfoy?"
He realised he was gripping the door frame. He made himself let go of it. "Granger."
"You look awful." She'd turned in her chair. Her eyes went over him with brisk, clinical irritation, the way they went over a badly drafted amendment. Brown eyes. He knew they were brown. He'd been looking at them across that L-shaped desk for eight months, mostly while being told he was wrong. He had not, until this moment, noticed that in the light from the false window there was a ring of something darker around the iris, like the edge of a coin, and that when she frowned at him it narrowed.
"Happy birthday to me," he said.
"Is it your birthday?"
"It's a figure of speech." He crossed the room on legs that didn't seem quite his own, sat down at his half of the L, and put his face in his hands. On the corner of her desk, the potted Mimbulus mimbletonia she'd been failing to keep alive since Christmas gave a sort of shudder and burst, with a soft pop, into flower.
They both looked at it.
"That's never done that," Granger said slowly.
"Well done."
"I didn't do anything."
The fern on the filing cabinet unfurled three new fronds. A sprig of dried lavender in a jar on the windowsill went green from the stem upwards and began, very gently, to scent the room. Draco shut his eyes and concentrated, with every scrap of Occlumency his aunt had ever beaten into him, on being cold, and still, and small. It made the ache in his back worse. It did not make the lavender stop.
When he opened his eyes, Granger had stood up. She'd come around the desk, right up to the line of red tape, and stopped there with her arms folded, and she was looking at him with an expression he had seen on her face exactly once before, three years ago, the day she'd worked out that the Department's goblin translator was mistranslating the Gringotts treaty on purpose.
"Malfoy," she said. "Take off your jacket."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your robes. Take them off. Your back's glowing."
He didn't move. He couldn't. She was standing eighteen inches from him and every nerve in his body had swung towards her like a compass needle, and something in him that was not him, that was older and wilder and had apparently been asleep in his blood for four generations, was saying, very calmly, there you are.
"I'm not undressing for you in the office, Granger. People will talk."
"People already talk. Take them off or I'll Vanish them."
He believed her. He shrugged out of the grey robes and sat there in his shirtsleeves, and she stepped over the red tape for the first time in eight months, came around behind his chair, and he heard her breath catch.
"Oh," she said quietly. "Oh, that's. Draco."
It was the first time she had ever said his given name. It went through him like a hand down his spine.
He felt the light come out of him before he could stop it. He saw it, gold and shifting, reflected in the dark wood of the desk: two great half-formed shapes rising from his back, translucent, edged like feathers, trembling. The Mimbulus on the desk put out three more flowers. Somewhere down the corridor someone yelped as the Centaur Office's pot boiled over.
Granger didn't step back. He'd half expected her to. Instead she came round to the side of his chair, crouched, and looked up into his face with a scholar's terrible fascination.
"You're a Veela," she said.
"I'm a Malfoy."
"Apparently those aren't mutually exclusive." She was already reaching past him for a pad of parchment, scribbling. "Late-onset inheritance. Male line. That's incredibly rare. There are four recorded cases in Britain in the last two hundred years, and one of them was probably a hoax." She glanced up. "Your mother knew?"
"My mother suspected. My mother has invited me to the Manor for a long, uncomfortable talk."
"I'd imagine." She wrote something down, underlined it twice. "You understand that under Section Six of the Veela and Part-Veela Protection Act, you're required to register with this Division within seven days of manifestation."
He stared at her. "You're quoting your own law at me."
"It's a good law."
"It's a good law that requires me to register with the office I work in. Which is this office. Which is you."
"Well," said Granger, and something in the line of her mouth suggested, unbelievably, that she was trying not to laugh, "you'd better be nice to me, then."
He looked at her. Crouched beside his chair with her pencil and her pad, hair coming loose from its knot, a smear of ink on her cheekbone where she'd pushed a curl away. Close enough to touch. Close enough that he could see her pulse beating in the side of her throat, quick and steady, and the creature in him leaned towards it with such sudden, total hunger that he gripped the arms of the chair until the wood creaked.
She noticed. Of course she noticed. She noticed everything.
"Malfoy." Her voice had changed. "Section Six also requires you to declare whether the inheritance has selected a mate."
"I'm aware."
"Has it?"
He said nothing.
"Because if it has," she went on, carefully, as if she were stepping out onto ice, "I need to tell you that the Act is very clear. The bond is a proposal, not a command. The chosen person is under no obligation. They can refuse. The Veela can survive refusal. It's painful, it's a sort of grief, but it isn't fatal, whatever the old books say. I made sure of that. I went through every case in the Department of Mysteries archive. Nobody can make anybody do anything." She took a breath. "So if there's someone, you can tell me. I'll handle it discreetly. I'll go and talk to them myself, if you like. Explain."
He looked at her for a very long time.
"You'd go and talk to them," he said.
"Yes."
"Explain it to them. That some half-feral Malfoy has latched onto them by blood, against everybody's wishes, and would they mind awfully if he followed them around like a lost Crup until one of them dies."
"I'd phrase it better."
"I'm sure you would." He laughed. It came out wrong. "You always do."
She frowned. Then, slowly, her eyes dropped from his face to his hands, still clenched white on the arms of the chair. To the Mimbulus, now so heavy with flowers its pot had tipped. To the lavender, green and blooming on the windowsill, which was the side of the room she sat on. She looked down at her own desk, at the dead quills and the chipped mug and the dried-out ink pot, and watched, as he did, as a thin green shoot came up out of the cracked soil of a pot she'd forgotten she owned, and opened, there in front of her, into one small, perfect, white flower.
The room was very quiet.
Hermione Granger lifted her head and looked at him, and he watched it arrive in her face all at once: understanding, then disbelief, then something sharper and stranger that made his heart slam once against his ribs.
"Draco," she said, very softly. "Is it me?"