The Disappearances of Draco Malfoy

Chapter 17: The First Annual Christmas Gala for the Celebration of Magical Unity

"So," said Harry, as Leo Clifton led Hermione into the back room.

Draco practically jumped. He'd been watching Hermione smiling at Clifton, making polite conversation, the way her profile caught the bright lights of the studio.

Now he looked over at Potter, who was leaning on one of the displays of brushes and powders.

"So... what?" Draco said.

Potter raised his eyebrows. "So, you two have made up, have you?"

Draco looked away, cheeks warm, back at a poster of a giant alligator. "I suppose you noticed she was speaking to me in full sentences again. That Seeker's eye doesn't miss a thing, does it?"

"I noticed more than that," Potter muttered.

Draco stole a mortified glance back at Potter, who'd also gone rather red now. Why had he brought it up if it was just going to embarrass them both? For Merlin's sake.

Of course, Draco supposed, it would have been hard to miss the way he and Hermione had looked at breakfast. She'd come in to find him making breakfast before Harry had woken up. Fifteen minutes later, everything had been mysteriously burnt.

"I can't take anything you say seriously," Draco said, "when you look like that."

"Oh, like you look any better?" Potter said.

As one, they glanced into the mirror behind the counter and snorted. Draco wouldn't have recognised himself if he'd seen the face in a picture. In the end, Clifton had opted for a wig rather than dye to achieve the proper texture: a nest of black curls like a thunderstorm, which matched the facial hair that had been glued and gummed to the lower half of his face. Using cold, slimy putty and rubber fixtures, he'd given Draco a snub nose and full cheeks, then swabbed his eyebrows with black paint.

"You look like a sea captain," Potter chortled.

"You look like a Viking," said Draco. Potter's shiny bald head glinted in the studio lights, and the film that Clifton had applied to both their faces aged Potter to his late thirties at least, several prominent wrinkles in his brow, deep crow's feet in the corners of his eyes. Potter, too, had a beard; his was shaggy and dark blond, ending in a small braid.

Clifton had also, to Draco's horror, applied something to their eyeballs called 'contact lenses.' Draco would happily have gone his whole life without reliving the process, but he had to admit they were effective. Potter's eyes were now as dark as Snape's, and Draco's were a vivid blue.

"Let's get some lunch," Potter suggested, checking his watch. "He said it'd take an hour or two to get through her hair."

Draco agreed, and they went for curry in a nearby Indian shop that was ten degrees too warm. Draco asked occasional questions about the paintings on the wall, and the various machines the Muggles were using, which Potter answered without laughing. Mostly.

Muggle London felt a bit less overwhelming today, but maybe that was because Draco was so distracted. Every few seconds, mid-conversation, even mid-sentence, he'd think of Hermione and what they were doing, what they'd chosen to do. What he'd chosen. He thought of the way she tasted, like mild lip balm and something salty, and the way she'd looked at him that morning—like the sight of him made her happy, nervous, excited. It all washed over him again and again like an insistent tide.

His mind hadn't fixated this way since... well, since he'd had to think about the Vanishing Cabinet every waking second. But those thoughts had been all terror and stress. He hadn't known it was possible to be equally fixated on something that made him feel like this. He hadn't known it was possible to feel this way at all. It wasn't the smooth, smug satisfaction he'd felt in the days after he and Pansy had gotten together. When he thought about Hermione—when he thought of her melting into him in the dining room, the hesitance and then the heat, the way she'd angled him against the kitchen counter that morning—his heart seemed to stutter, and he felt disoriented, and then a delirious squeeze of disbelief followed, seeming to saturate everything around him with color.