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The train lets out its pitched whistle, a pronounced break in the stillness of a cold winter morning, then lazily rolls out of the station. In its wake, the platform is empty, save for a solitary figure sitting on the bench.
The wind is a soft breath tussling brown strands lightly in a single exhale. A sparse handful brushes her cheek, and Hermione absently brushes the sensation away. Far too late after the fact, she recognizes the singular idiocy in forgetting her gloves this morning. She shoves both hands deeper into her coat and hunches into the seat, staring hard at nothing.
Uninvited, a second body lowers itself onto the bench, admittedly a respectful distance away. Hermione blinks, twice.
“Would you like me to vacate your presence?” she asks, without any true agitation on her tongue.
“I think we’re a little old for the same dry barbs, don’t you?” his tone sounds as hollow as hers. After five years living life beyond the obscure isolation and common ground of school, now only seeing each other in passing – a shared glimpse made possible only by recognizing one face in a crowd of strangers – while creating separate lives, Hermione finds she almost misses the brash and crude barbs.
Almost.
“What are you doing here, Draco?” whether she actually has the right to address him so informally is barely a registered thought; rather, it passes along her conscious like a single ripple on the glassy surface of a lake: so quiet, so insignificant, that she forgets it as soon as it passes. The rules have changed, here and now.
“Sitting on a bench, staring at nothing and thinking about everything.” In the peripheral, she sees his posture slump in a way which does not befit his upbringing. “I would have thought you’d be on that train: a one-way ticket to the usual family affairs with the old crowd.”
“I didn’t mean to miss it.” The attempted defensive tone fails her completely. She doesn’t even sound like she halfway believes what’s coming out of her mouth.
“You’ve been sitting here for an hour.” Draco answers in the same tone, “You missed that train on purpose.”
“What’s it to you?” she ignores the expressed fact that he’s been here as long as she, if not longer, that he would notice such a thing.
“Nothing. Just felt like stating the obvious, since you obviously won’t.” he toes at a small pebble first, then kicks it with more intent. They sit there in silence, watching the pebble skip and roll across the platform, then fall onto the tracks with barely a sound.
Silence, a moment more. Then Draco heaves a sigh with more dramatics than she’s known him to make. Then again, five years…separate lives. It is quite presumptuous to think she knows him as well as she once did.
It is presumptuous to think she knew him at all.
“There’s a pub, not too far from here.” He says conversationally, so much so that she starts to wonder if he’s talking to someone else. She waits for him to continue, but he doesn’t. It falls between them as a casual statement of fact, nothing more attached, and yet she hears the unsaid.
“It’s Christmas Eve.” Hermione answers to the question he didn’t ask, “It’s probably closed.”
“He’ll keep it open if I ask nicely.”
“And how often do you ask nicely?”
“Enough that he’s used to it by now.”
The implication of his words brings her eyebrows together and her mouth in a puckered frown. Unbidden, images of Draco Malfoy – prince of the Wizarding World – sitting hunched over a drink, the sole patron in a pub on Christmas Eve filter across an imagination which already sees far too much activity on a regular basis. She certainly doesn’t need any additional images stealing a good night’s sleep, but her subconscious isn’t on board with such an opinion.
“Do you suppose he will mind if you have company this year?” she finally asks. The wind brushes hair across her cheek again. This time, she ignores it, and if she looks ridiculous, so be it. She’s sitting next to a man who was once a boy who once watches her teeth grow at an alarming rate until her visage was indescribable.
“No.”
“Would you?”
Draco doesn’t answer. Instead, she feels fingers, wrapped in black leather, reach over and close around her naked digits. She isn’t sure when her hands left the warm folds of her coat. Cold and numb, there isn’t enough feeling left in the captured hand to perform any hint of physical resistance.
She can blame the cold for why she doesn’t pull her hand away. She doesn’t have an immediate excuse for slipping her hand deeper into his gloved palm.
Neither of them really has an answer for why their hands remain entwined as they sit at an empty bar with a pair of untouched drinks on Christmas Eve.
Fortunately, neither one asks.