Parade of the Sun - Dramione

PART TWENTY.

July 27; 2:21pm

They had only spoken twice since they left the house. The first hadn't really been speaking so much as it had been screaming, angry hand gestures, and a lot of words formed together to make the most pointedly painful sentences they could manage. Malfoy had admitted that they were nice people, but still held firm that they freaked him out. He didn't budge on the idea that the wizarding and Muggle worlds shouldn't be separated, and he adamantly insisted that he had much better taste in wine. Hermione refused to believe that combining the two worlds wouldn't amount to chaos, sort of apologized for suggesting he wanted to replace house-elves with Muggles for slaves, and refused to believe he had better taste than someone with their tongue chopped off. They had both made disparaging remarks about the other's parents, their choice of dress, the least admirable aspects of their personality, and the way they ate food.

The only thing it had truly accomplished was venting some anger. The rage between them simmered down into a stony silence, which was only interrupted this morning, and marked the second time they had spoken. Edible?, he had asked about a bush of berries, and no had been her response. She hadn't been sure, but saying no was better than being poisoned.

She was waiting for something to break through the uncomfortable silence around them, and she was betting it would have to be her. Sometimes she got too caught up in her thoughts to notice the tension, and other times she wasn't sure if she was just imagining it being there. She was pretty sure it was, though, especially since every time she drew up or back to walk beside him, he would send her these quick little side looks. Like he was waiting for her to say something or attack him, and then the silence grew really heavy. She would catch herself making a constipated expression or feel like she was breathing too loudly, and he would start making little clicking noises in his throat.

She didn't think he was aware of when he was doing that. Like how he would scratch his nose, and every time he would run the tip of his finger down the line of it to make sure it was straight or something. She wondered if someone told him it was crooked when he was younger and it made him have that self-conscious tic. Someone told her aunt that she had manly hands when she was little, and now her aunt always wore gloves or shoved her hands under the table - thirty-some years later. The same aunt once told Hermione she had ugly knees, but it worked a little differently on her, because she was still proud of them. Youth-wrecked with scars, but they made her feel tough in a dress if she had to be.

She thought she was watching him a little too closely when she started noticing these things, but then she realized that a person cannot spend every day and night with another person for two months and not pick up on them. From the way he would cut the banana skin off instead of peeling it, to having to look at whatever he was drinking as he drank it, to the way he had to straighten out his clothes before lying down to sleep.

He noticed hers, too. She hadn't realized how often she put her hands on her hips or bit her lip until his eyes tracked the movement. He watched her when she retied her laces in the morning because she liked them tight, and how she would have to hop twice to make sure they were staying that way. Whenever they were going to stop for the night, she would always knock twice on one of the trees, some strange subconscious action from when she did it as a child, marking it as home in the games she played - and last week, in the dark, he had done it to let her know he was stopping. She thought he had busted her rolling her eyes around in the morning like a possessed doll as well, but she liked to make sure her eyeballs were completely lubricated and stretched, even if it didn't make sense.

She thought they both might be a little strange.

"I wish we had a mule." She hadn't really meant to say that out loud, but at least it hadn't come out of nowhere. They were following a mule path around the mountain until they moved on to the next one, so she wasn't being completely random.