||Black Scarves and Careless Hearts|| A Dramione Fanfic

51. Lucy

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"Absence either makes the heart grow fonder, or makes the heart grow the fuck up."
~unknown
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"Know anyone else who looks like me, Granger?" 

To himself, he sounded like a nervous teenager. Hearing her voice had positively deprived him of the ability to draw in full breaths. His eyes began filling up again. 

"Lu, w-why don't you go set the oven?" Hermione said, and Draco didn't miss the tremble in her words, "I'll be back in a moment, okay?"

The girl nodded, threw a suspicious look at Draco, and skipped back the way Hermione had come. 

Hermione swiped at her eyes, "Come in, don't stand on the doorstep."

Draco swallowed nervously. She had a daughter...she had a daughter? When? What?

His ears were filled with a buzzing, but he stepped inside the warm house anyways. 

There was the bookshelf by the window, with the replica bust of Aristotle, all the books he had read at some point of time, all the ruddy plants were still everywhere, the painting was above the couch. 

Hermione was hastily putting away some crayons and paper, "Sit down, if you want…"

Draco watched her frenzied actions. Her fingers fluttered clumsily over the mess of papers bearing crayon drawings on the centre table, "I'll get the tea...we were making cookies…"

Draco's heart sank to the deepest, darkest depths of himself. 

"I'm sorry about the mess-" her voice cracked, and she put the papers higgledy piggledy on top of the bookshelf. 

"Granger-"

"I've asked her to clean up so many times, but she said she wanted to get back to it later-"

"Granger." he grabbed her arm when she walked past him for the umpteenth time. 

"What?" She asked, looking up at him blearily. 

Draco sighed, "Why...why didn't you write?"

Hermione shook her head, "I'll tell you later."

Something inside Draco snapped. 

"Later?" He said, careful not to raise his voice lest her daughter should think something, "Granger, it's been two fucking years!"

Hermione pursed her lips to keep them from trembling.

"Do you even know what everyone back home went through?" Draco said, clenching and unclenching his hands repeatedly, a nervous habit he had picked up some time back, "Do you? We thought you were ill, maybe something very bad had happened. For an entire year, I waited, to hear something from you, a note, a single word. Everyday I thought I'd open the Prophet to see your face plastered across it, saying you had died, or that there had been an accident. Every fucking day, do you even know how that felt?"

Hermione had backed away from him, so that she was pressed up against the wall. 

"Ginny wouldn't write to you," Draco went on, forgetting that he wasn't supposed to raise his voice, "Harry and Ron were so fucking worried, do you even know? Pansy and Blaise wanted you to meet their son, we all wanted you back for Christmas, for New Year, even if it would have been for a little while."

Hermione was looking at him with her eyes full of apologies, and Draco knew that she would verbalise all of them the moment she got the chance. 

"You didn't fucking care about any of us!" Draco went on, flailing his arms, "You were selfish, and you were careless, and you-"