BANALITY : Draco Malfoy

72

After Draco hands Harry Blaise's wand, Draco and I struggle up the stairs. He leads me through Blaise's manor. Our feet drag through dust. I can see two other steps of footprints, which I assume belong to Draco and Harry. There are cobwebs along the sconces on the walls. Perhaps the last people to sleep here were Blaise and me during the time of the war. Draco's hand is so tight around my wrist that I'm sure I will bruise. We finally stop in a sitting room, with tarps drawn over the furniture but an open fireplace. Draco walks up next to it and grabs a bag of floo powder.

"I'm going through first, but do not wait longer than three seconds," he says, one hand still clinging to me and his bloodshot eyes staring deep into me. "I want you directly behind me, okay?"

"Okay," he looks destroyed, and I try to see him beneath all the ache on his face. He's handsome, somewhere deep down.

I pull him and kiss him. He has a hand at the base of my neck. I take it, putting it in my hair before I reach back for him. He deepens the kiss. I can hear myself breathing heavily between each kiss. I pull at him and pull at him. Blaise's hands in my hair are an echo that I am trying to push away. I need Draco.

He pulls back while I am still tugging at him.

"We need to hurry before Potter gets help," Draco says. He pours a bit of the floo powder into my hand, and then his.

"We're going to Malfoy Manor, okay?" he says. "It's in Wiltshire. All right?"

I nod my head.

Draco pulls away from me. With his free hand, he uses his wand to start a fire. He steps into the flames, "Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire."

In a bang and a flash of green smoke, he is gone. I follow him quickly. My feet step in, and I throw the powder down onto the ground, "Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire."

I feel myself sucked through the floo. This time, the journey is shorter, and it has been quite some time since Blaise forced me to apparate, so I manage to keep myself together. My body tumbles out of the other side, slamming into the floor.

Draco is there, standing. He takes my hand and helps me stand up.

I recognize this room. The colour of the walls is hard to see, some sort of off-white, just as I remember. Now, the floor is dusty, and there is a long and dark table over to one side. Beside a spiral staircase, there are small windows. I can see that the sun is rising. The room looked darker on the night that I remember. Hermione's brown hair was sprawled above her on the floor, and without much light in the room, she looked mostly grey. It could have been this place that sucked the rose out of her cheeks and not the darkness. I feel myself swallow.

Her voice echoed enough that Ron heard her in the cellar.

"We should get going," Draco says.

He grabs me by the wrist and leads me up the spiral staircase. I trail after him, trying not to look at the walls around us. I've been here, and perhaps only once, but it is one of the few memories that I actually have. The halls of the manor are strange, but I am sure that I've seen some part of them, somewhere.

"Hurry," he whispers, but I am moving just as fast as him, if not faster. I duck my head.

"Who's here?" I keep my voice even quieter. Keeping up this pace after travelling is making me a bit nauseous.

"Hopefully no one," Draco answers.

There is a crack behind us. Draco stops moving, and I nearly bump into him.