And Everything Nice

Chapter 7

"Erm, Hermione? Love?"
Words on the parchment blurred, no more legible than scribbles as she stared resolutely at the page in front of her. "What?"
She heard the snick of the door shutting followed by footsteps, two sets of them. Someone cleared their throat, the sound thick and stilted as it pierced the silence.
"Do you happen, by chance, to know why my mother is crying over her wedding magazines in the sitting room?" Draco asked.
"She what?" She spun in her chair. Theo and Draco were both staring at her, eyes wary.
Without a doubt, her conversation with Narcissa had gone poorly. Understatement, truly. Still, she hadn't thought it bad enough to drive Narcissa to tears. Her, maybe, but Draco's mother?
She'd caught Hermione on a bad day, the worst day.
Her period had come early. Not uncommon as she'd never been perfectly regular. More like downright irregular, especially after they'd disappeared altogether during her months spent surviving on scraps while hunting horcruxes in the wilderness. Tracking them now was rather futile and her inability to accurately pinpoint when she'd start occasionally led to unfortunate surprises.
The sky had been a hazy shade of navy with the barest hint of purple near the horizon when she'd stirred, waking up with a cramp rolling through her abdomen, thighs sticky, and sheets ruined. It wasn't as if it were the first time she'd ever bled through her knickers and pajamas, but it was the first time it had ever happened when sharing a bed with someone else, with Theo and Draco.
Absolutely dizzy with humiliation, she'd had to wake them up so she could strip the sheets. At some point, Theo must've been curled up next to her because his leg was smeared with blood and—Gods, awful didn't do her mortification justice.
Of course, they'd been quick to assure her it was fine, that it was nothing to be embarrassed about, which yes, she knew it was natural but it didn't mean she wanted them that familiar
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with her body's functions no matter how normal they were. Theo had gently shooed her off to the bathroom to clean up while he and Draco started on the bedding and—Draco had gone pale, his face grim as he stared at the bloody sheets. It wasn't disgust, but rather horror that had passed over his face before he swallowed tightly and tugged the fitted sheet off the corner of the mattress.
By the time she'd finished in the bathroom, they had remade the bed and had kept a spot open between them. When she'd crawled in, Draco had wrapped himself around her, holding her tight. She hadn't been able to fall back asleep, and from the way his breath had never gone even against her back, she had a feeling neither had he.
So, she was tired. And a little irritable. And still a bit horrified, not to mention worried she'd scarred Draco into some sort of flashback at the sight of all that blood. Both were gone to Andromeda's to visit with her and Teddy the next morning when Hermione awoke, though someone had left a tray with tea, a pain potion, and a chocolate chip muffin on the nightstand for her to enjoy at her leisure. Only, before she'd gotten to so much as take a sip of tea, the post had arrived.
Delivered by a generic barn owl, the sort the Ministry used to re-route letters sent to magical individuals—who often had no official address—by non-magical individuals who didn't own or have access to an owl, the letter was sealed inside a Muggle envelope, the sort with the sticky flap you needed to lick. It was addressed to her, in her father's handwriting.
Hands trembling, she'd unfolded the paper and taken a deep breath.
Hermione,
Your mother and I have decided it's time to sell the house.
Despite the logical part of her brain screaming at her that it was foolish to get her hopes up before having all the facts, her heart had leaped into her throat, her eyes widening.
We've already contacted a realtor, and the house will be going on the market within the next week.
That soon? She'd clutched the letter between her fingers and scrunched her eyes shut, giddiness nearly making her dance in her seat.
We've been advised that, given the current market, the house is likely to sell quickly.
They'd be back. Her parents would be moving back and—soon. It would be soon.
As such, we thought it best to give you a proper amount of time to gather any and all belongings you might have left behind. Also, if you could leave your key—
The words on the page had started to swim by the time she had shut her eyes. They weren't coming back. Not now, not ever, not if they were selling the house. Not the house in Australia, no, but the one in Hampstead. The one she'd grown up in. The one she had formed the majority of her memories of her parents inside.

She'd crumpled the letter in her fist before silently incinerating it on the spot so she couldn't torture herself by reading it over again.
Only just having pulled herself together, cleansing the tears from her face with a frustrated flick of her wand, Hermione had barely been hanging on by a thread when Narcissa had found her. What had started off as an innocuous, though perhaps one-sided conversation about how her birthday was only two weeks away took a turn for the worse when Narcissa had suggested—no, pushed—that it was time to set a date for the wedding.
She hadn't meant to snap. Really. Her raw nerves and tender heart could only handle so much and this was just too much. Too much pushing, too much decision making, too much—just, too much. Narcissa gets what Narcissa wants, Draco and Theo had joked, but what about what Hermione wanted? Could she have been kinder? Well, yes. But she'd reached the end of her rope, an end she hadn't known existed, as if the length of that rope had frayed and split, running up the middle until, too weak, the whole thing had snapped and left her holding something shorter than she'd bargained for. Not her shining moment, but she'd told Narcissa to—she winced, thinking about it now—to pick any sodding date she wanted because she couldn't care less.
Oh, Gods. She'd really stepped in it. Hermione's chin trembled, her vision blurring. Through the haze, Theo shot Draco an unmistakably terrified look, all flared nostrils and heavy brows over wide and wary eyes. It was a look Draco returned, and then some.
No, no this was bad, this was—expressly what she hadn't wanted. Before she could even take a stuttered breath in, she burst into tears. "I'm—Gods, I'm so sorry."
Theo swore, but it was Draco who got to her first, hauling her out of the chair and into his arms before settling her into his lap, right there on the rug. He made incoherent soothing noises, hushing her gently, his hand smoothing patterns against her back as if she were a child needing comfort. Gods. "You're okay. Shh, it's fine. Everything's fine. Just—please stop crying."
"No, it's not." She hiccoughed. "It's not fine. I made your mother cry."
There was a sharp click shortly followed by the sound of Theo dragging in a deep breath before releasing it, the smell of cloves drifting across the short distance between them. "Why don't you tell us what happened?"
That would be the logical thing to do, wouldn't it? Use her words? Only she wasn't feeling so logical and she didn't want to discuss it. But that was petulant, and the time for holding her tongue had passed. Perhaps had she not bottled everything up to begin with, she wouldn't be in this position, cradled in Draco's lap on the bloody floor with a sticky damp face and a nose so stuffed her could scarcely breathe while Draco and Theo stared at her as if she'd gone and lost the plot.
She took a breath in and held it, pulling herself together bit by bit until she was no longer hiccoughing pitifully. "I wasn't very nice," she confessed.

She chanced a look at Draco's face. The tension around his mouth made it look as if he didn't know whether to be concerned or laugh. "You? Not nice?"
She made a noise, a sound intended to be a scoff but all the phlegm in her throat and snot plugging her nose twisted it into something like a honking horn. "Yes."
Theo's lips quirked around his cigarette. He released a cloud of clove-scented smoke from the corner of his mouth and let the cigarette dangle from between two fingers. "Are you sure there wasn't just some sort of misunderstanding?"
She twisted the engagement ring on her finger and stared down at the ink splotches staining her skin. If she stared hard enough, she'd no doubt start to see shapes like some sort of impromptu Rorschach test. She didn't want to analyze her subconscious thoughts, not right now. Her stomach hurt and not just from cramps. "I told her to pick any sodding date she wanted for the wedding because"—she swallowed what felt like a rock, no, a boulder— "I couldn't care less."
Draco's hand twitched against her back, but neither he nor Theo said anything for a long, painful moment that almost had her crying all over again.
"I feel like I'm missing something," Theo muttered. Draco hummed in agreement.
"Your mother, she keeps pushing me to set the date and I'm not—she's insistent, Draco. Insistent we have the wedding in December. A Christmas wedding. What happened to—to there's magic and then there are miracles when we talked about planning a wedding in under a year? I thought—" She cut herself off with a huff. She didn't know what she thought anymore. "I know June is out. I just don't understand why it has to be December. Why can't it be May?"
Still standing, Theo held up his hands. "Just playing devil's advocate here, but if she can pull it off, why not December?"
"It's—it's soon. It's...too soon."
Draco and Theo shared a look, something silent and weighty passing between them before Draco took a tremulous breath in as if steeling himself. "You're not having second thoughts, are you?"
"No!" She cried. Her stupid tear ducts decided to unleash another unholy flood and her nose decided she didn't really need to be able to breathe through it. No, she could just gasp through her mouth, instead.
"Oh shit," Theo muttered, and Draco resumed his shushing and back rubbing that somehow raised her hackles and also made her want to curl up into a ball because it felt really nice being taken care of.

This. She'd been afraid of this, of them not understanding, of jumping to the wrong conclusion, thinking she wasn't all in when she was. She was all in and then some. Wasn't it obvious? Apparently not based on how Draco had had to steel himself to ask the question and that it had even been a question that crossed his mind in the first place. It was like he was still waiting for her to reject him and that made bile churn in her stomach. The last thing she wanted was to throw up when she'd already bled all over the place.
Conversations like these should not take place when her nerves were shot and emotions raw, when her uterus was bloody well punishing her, and her hormones decided to reduce her to a sniveling mess. Gods, why today? That tiny, much-too-logical voice in the back of her head whispered the reminder that it was happening today because she'd put it off, hadn't talked about it until now. A poor choice, but she'd made her bed.
She bit the inside of her cheek until the pain triumphed and she could breathe again, albeit thin, shallow breaths. "That's not it at all. I can't believe you'd think that."
Theo crossed over to where they were sitting and dropped to his knees. He frowned at his cigarette before quickly vanishing it, and reached out, thumbs swiping tears from beneath her eyes. "Just a question, love." He glanced at Draco. "We're just trying to understand."
"It's—"
She hadn't wanted to tell them about her parents, about the card, about how frustrated she was because there wasn't anything they could do about it. But could she explain where she was coming from if she didn't? That was crucial to her frustration and, in all likelihood, Theo and Draco were already feeling useless watching her sob herself silly.
"My parents," she choked out before she could talk herself out of it. "They're not coming." Draco frowned. "Can they not—"
She shook her head. "No, they could but they're not going to. They're not—" She licked her lips. "They might say they forgive me, but they don't."
A look of unadulterated rage passed over Draco's features before he schooled his expression into something cold. His eyes continued to tell a different story. "They're fools."
Any other day, she might've taken offense to that, but not now. She couldn't muster anything more than a shrug, a weak one at that.
"I sent them a letter, a long letter, letting them know we're engaged and they sent a Hallmark card." When Theo and Draco looked confused, she explained. "A generic congratulations. Nothing personal. Best wishes and a formulaic one at that." She swallowed. "I thought, maybe if we had the wedding in May, I could've smoothed things over by then. Only, I got a letter this morning that they're selling the house in Hampstead. They're not coming back. Not ever." She shook her head. Fresh tears slipped steadily, almost lazily down her cheeks. "Your mother caught me at a bad time and I know she means well but she keeps pushing me to pick a date and each time it's been a reminder and I—I snapped."

"Why didn't you say something?" Theo frowned.
She swiped a hand under her nose. "You couldn't do anything. And I know if one of you had
told me something like this and there was nothing I could do to fix it, I'd feel awful." "You'd just expect us to suffer in silence, then?" Theo asked, jaw clenched.
She scoffed. "No. Of course not. That's not—that's not what I meant."
"Then why in Merlin's name would you expect to need to?" Theo demanded.
She shrugged.
"Hermione." Draco frowned sharply.
Room, she needed room, needed space to breathe, distance so she wouldn't have to feel the censure all but radiating from them. Hearing it in their words, in the way Draco said her name was bad enough. Freeing herself, Hermione stood and swiped a hand roughly over her face before crossing her arms. "It's different."
Theo stood from his crouch and Draco quickly followed suit until they were engaged in stare- off, two against one. Feeling for a moment as if she were being ganged up on, she turned her head, staring resolutely, if not unseeingly, at the bookshelf. Avoiding eye contact did nothing to quell the slick, sick feeling in her stomach as if she'd swallowed something rotten.
"How is it different?" Theo demanded.
She squared her shoulders. "I made a choice to tamper with my parents' memories and whining about the repercussion of my actions isn't going to do anything about it, so why bother?"
When, after a moment, neither spoke, Hermione turned. Draco stared resolutely at the floor, jaw clenched. Eyes wide and lips parted over a grimace, Theo shook his head slowly.
Bugger. She shut her eyes and swallowed over the lump in her throat. She hadn't meant... "Draco, I didn't mean—it's not the same. It's—"
"Isn't it?" Draco cut her off. "Not in all the ways, obviously, but you and I both made choices during the war, choices to protect ourselves and our families. Your choices, arguably more altruistic than mine, and braver to boot. Do you think I'm simply whining when I talk about how difficult it is to overcome the past? Have you been, what, humoring me? Poor, whining Draco."
She huffed, barely tamping down the urge to throw her hands up in the air because his insinuation was ridiculous. "Of course not. But your problems matter more than me being upset because my parents are behaving distantly."
Eyes narrowed, Draco glared down his nose. "Merlin help me, if it's something you care about, it matters."

The fight drained from her as quickly as it had come. She swallowed thickly. There was nothing she could say that would be adequate.
"No one likes a martyr, Hermione. Or a hypocrite," Theo said.
She wasn't acting like a—was she? She'd only wanted to prevent Draco and Theo from feeling powerless in their ability to fix the situation, but she'd have been upset had they done the same in reverse. Upset and frustrated, and quite honestly, a little cross. And—the air fled her lungs in a punched-out sigh that curled her shoulders—hurt. She'd have been hurt that they'd kept something from her. Why was she any different? He was right. That made her a hypocrite. At least, she'd behaved like one.
She stared at the floor, lips trembling.
Theo grabbed her chin, lifting her head and forcing her to meet his eyes. Eyes that were dark and hard. "I can't take care of you, if I don't know what's wrong."
A quiet confession, the softness of his voice belying the power behind his words. Her throat hurt when she swallowed. "Are you actually mad at me?"
Theo paused, lashes fluttering as he blinked down at her. He dipped his chin, just a curt nod that made her chest clench and her heart seize. "Yeah. I am."
Draco said nothing, but he wouldn't look at her, wouldn't meet her eye. Something about that hurt worse than if he'd shouted, if either of them had. They were angry but they weren't yelling, weren't even raising their voices, this—this fight existing as frustration and disappointment, not the sort of seething fury that burned bright and fast before fizzling. Her stomach crawled into her throat, simultaneously heavy. There was no telling how long this would last, or what it would take for her to fix it.
Sniffing hard, she pressed her lips together and shut her eyes against the urge to cry all over again.
This day was awful.
"Come on," Theo said after a moment. "Let's just—you should lie down."
Her stupid lip wobbled so she bit down on it. It was probably asking too much, more than she deserved at any rate, but... "You, too?"
A pause, a lengthy one, followed and made her want to press rewind, swallow the question so she wouldn't have to face the answer, one she might not like hearing. Rejection.
"Yeah," Theo murmured, and her shoulders relaxed minutely. "Us, too."
Theo drew back the covers. He kicked off his shoes and crawled in first, rolling on to his back and staring up at the ceiling as she joined him, followed by Draco.
The bed was large, yes, but the space between their bodies felt infinite.

Between the stress and the crying jags, she was asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.