Work Text:
Spring cleaning. That's what Pansy is calling it as we tear our way through every room in Malfoy Manor, unrooting every old-fashioned, brocade furnishing, and each of the gilded ornaments adorning every surface.
I think the term is applied loosely here. I don't typically associate 'Spring cleaning' with emptying your family home on the account of your mother's untimely demise, or with your father's life sentence in prison owing to an event that Malfoy Senior had only ever described as a 'terrible coincidence'. Personally, I also wouldn't put 'coincidence' in the same basket as bribery and corruption on every level of government that a person has access to - especially when that person is decidedly not a government official.
It is not exactly a cruel statement of fate that he was discovered; it was more of a delightful turn of events that has only led to a brighter path for me. My mother could finally spend a few years without being under my father's firm thumb.
With Mother gone now, taken by a rapid cancer that spread faster than gossip in the halls of a secondary school, I decided that I will not live in the house anymore. I certainly don't want any of the gaudy furniture that has decorated my life for as long as I can remember. Instead, I am going to fill it with plain furniture, strip back the heavy curtains, and rent it out until I can decide on a certain action - like selling.
The house has an odd feeling these days anyway. I can hardly bear to be here, even surrounded by other people. It's as though the walls themselves are lonely.
0-0
"What are you going to do with all of this, Draco?" Pansy asks, picking through a box of magazines. They were a variety of fashion ones that Mother had been keeping since she was a child - Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and the like. She rarely thumbed through them, save for a few special ones. Once every few weeks she would summon me to look at a certain style that she had worn in her teenage years, or something Grandmother had loved at the time.
"Those, specifically, will be donated to the homeless shelter down the road," I reply, trying to seem nonplussed. "You can keep any you want, though."
It might be easier if Pansy kept all of them. I could look for my mother in those photos again, then.
"And this?"
Pansy stands beside a mahogany dining table, tracing her fingers over the engravings, where many years ago a wood carver had painstakingly cut trees and leaves into the edges of the table. I hate to admit it, but I have always loved that table. It has been the centrepiece of my family for as long as I have known it; it has been the fourth member at every meal, every argument, and every confession of yet another Malfoy sin. It was where my father explained to us the crime he had committed. It was where I told my parents about cheating on my fourth year chemistry assignment on magnesium's reaction to oxygen. It was where my mother first told me about her sickness, and that she likely wasn't going to spend more than another hundred more meals at that table. Looking at it now, I feel a bit ill - whether sick with the guilt of letting it go, or some other poisonous feeling. But perhaps it will go to a good home - a better home.
There will be someone who can care for it more, and the oak veneer that replaces it won't remind me of my criminal father, my dead mother, and my horrible, sad life.
"That's going to Dumbledore's Army," I murmur, looking away from the table. It deserves a better fate than my family name.
Pansy gives me a searching look, frowning. "Draco, are you sure…"
"Yes."
She nods. "Okay, okay. Well, which one are you taking it to, then? By the park, or the one on Vine Road?"
"Vine Road," I reply instinctively, knowing I will need to confirm that later. I've exchanged a few emails with the man who runs the shop, so hopefully I've got the details of the location somewhere.
0-0
Blaise arrived this morning with his uncle's van and a variety of gloves and winches, pulling into the drive of Malfoy Manor with the air of a much larger man. We spend the next ten minutes trying to get the table out of the house, gasping for breath with it on our backs, in our hands, and then wedged against a wall while we take a moment to rest. Between us, we finally manage to get the thing into the van, and then make our way to the shop.
"Vine Road?" Blaise confirms. I nod, and then utter a short yes. "It'll go to a good home. Look at it - it's glorious. It'll have to."
"Yeah," I say, my voice ragged.
Blaise is silent for a moment and we pause at a set of complex traffic lights. His eyes dart across the roads, back to the lights, to the shops at the side of the pavement, and back to the lights. They turn green and he puts his foot gently on the gas, almost breathing a sigh of relief when the table doesn't shift too much behind us, strapped in as much as possible.
"You don't have to sell it, you know," he says quietly. "I can keep it at my place until you're ready."
"Ready?" I ask. "For what?"
Blaise sighs as though this is a conversation we've had a thousand times. It is not.
"Mate, I know you don't want to get rid of it," he says. "I know you want to keep it, but you can't stand to look at it. And after all the shit you've been through, I get it - I really do. But you don't have to give it away. I mean, how long has this been in your family? Forever, right? It's a piece of your -"
"I haven't got a family anymore, Blaise. I have no need for a fucking family table."
Blaise's following silence is like a knife in my chest. Some time later, he says, "Alright," and just keeps driving.
0-0
I've never believed in a higher power. How could I, with the cracked and broken family I had? Fate has been unkind to me my whole life. God has never looked down on me, as far as I am aware. And as for the stars above - all they do is wink at my misfortune.
And yet… When we pull up to park on the single-yellow lines outside of the Vine Road charity shop, my stomach plummets and my heart starts to sing a symphony of soundtracks to every movie I've ever watched, and every love song I ever heard. Through the window, standing by a large and monstrously ugly lamp is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Average build, average curly brown hair, but a face surely carved in the image of some deity I have never heard of.
I blink, terrified that she is a mirage cast from my grief, but she doesn't disappear.
"Mate, are you alright?" Blaise asks from beside me. His eyes follow mine, into the shop window. He chuckles. "Table first, girl later. Deal?"
"Deal," I reply, not really meaning it.
0-0
"-and I told him I had to go. It's been months of arguing. We're not even dating and he treats me like - well, like his degenerative girlfriend. There would never be a commitment. I don't feel that way about him, and he never asks. And he still asked me over for dinner with his family. I know I don't have much of a family, but it's - oh, sorry!"
The girl drops her phone upon colliding into me. A voice on the other end of the call is shouting at her, unintelligible even to the last syllable.
"I wasn't looking," the girl babbles. "I'm so sorry -"
"It's fine," I reply. I pick up the phone and hand it back to her, steadying myself. Table first. Blaise is already halfway to the bespectacled gentleman at the counter, swinging the van keys in his right hand, idly admiring the chattels and dressings that drape over the various corners of the shop.
"I've got to go, Gin," the girl whispers into her phone, and hangs up on her friend as another tirade of comments come through the speaker. The silence is deafening.
I swallow, nod my head, and turn towards Blaise, making a beeline for the front counter and trying to stop the flurry of thoughts coursing through me about who she was talking about, who she was talking to, and just about everything in between.
"Here's the man himself," Blaise says as I approach.
"Draco Malfoy," I say, holding out my hand, all too aware of its stickiness and my sweaty brow. The man behind the counter adjusts his half-moon spectacles and scrutinises me for a moment, reaching out his own hand. It's wrinkled, dry, and very weak. I squeeze it once and shake up and down before breaking the handshake. The wind is knocked out of me for a second, thinking of every time I have seen my father shake hands with someone important, and far more non-important people. I shake my head, looking at the elderly man before me. I gesture to the door, the table blocking some view to the outside world, turned on its head in the window. "I have a table for you. We spoke via email."
"Did we now?" the man asks, his piercing blue eyes seeing through my every fibre. "What was our agreed-upon date?"
My heart sinks. Damn. "I -"
"Draco?" Blaise asks. "Did you not agree on a date?"
Screw fate and her worthless pile of emotions, stringing me along to believe my luck could ever change.
I turn to my friend, my world crashing. "I didn't even think - with Mum, and Dad's appeal on the doorstep yesterday, and then Pansy telling me all about her date with Peter, and - I didn't think, Blaise! I just - this is a charity shop, right? I assumed you would have the space, and that it would be fine. Is it not fine?"
"This is a highly popular shop," the elderly man says, frustrated. "You cannot just turn up. There is a procedure for a reason. For instance, we may have space now, but in two hours time Mariana Figg is going to drop off her nephew's pool table. You shall have to bring back your table another day."
Blaise is already turning to the door, giving up. For some unknown reason, my feet are planted firmly on the floor. I have come all this way - sure, only a ten minute drive, but more emotionally than physically - and I am not leaving with the table. I don't think I can. Even with Blaise nudging my side, I am not swayed to do anything but stare, unthinking, at the endless ocean of wrong choices currently that face me.
"Mr. Malfoy, I do insist. You may not leave it here today –"
"I'll take it."
My heart rate increases, thumping too loudly above the din of the shop - the awkward elevator music, the clinking of someone rummaging through crockery in the next room, and the pattering of feet upstairs. She spoke. She spoke. Her voice is soft, determined, and her eyes are fierce.
"Sorry?" I say, and the sound is awful – paint-chipped and peeling, dry, overwrought.
The woman chuckles and pushes a stray curl out of her face. "It's like divine providence. I really, really need a table. I'm actually - I'm having a dinner party tonight. New place, and all that malarkey. Chairs, I have. But I do not have a table. It's beautiful. Antique?"
I nod, my mouth opening and closing but no words slipping through. Blaise says yes as though puppeteering me.
"It's a family heirloom," I choke out.
The woman is perplexed, staring at me. "Are you sure you want to be rid of it?"
"No," I reply honestly. "I just… My mother loved this table. She died. I don't know why I'm telling you this." I scratch the back of my head, my skin prickling with nerves there, an indicator to my emotional insecurities bubbling to the forefront of my mind.
"Well," she says, watching my expression - without judgement. "I will need someone to tell me how to treat it, and some help moving it to my apartment. I'm not inviting you in, if it's all the same to you, but… I'm just saying you should come and see where it's being stored. And when I no longer have need for it, perhaps you may want it back, if you have a need for it at that time."
"That is… extraordinarily generous of you," I say, blowing a breath of air from my lungs. "Thank you."
"We ought to get to know each other first, though," she says. "I should know who I am buying this table from."
"Coffee?"
"Sure." She smiles, and my heart splits like a rock with a fossil inside of it.
"Might need to introduce yourself first," Blaise mutters. My body jolts awake.
"Draco," I say, all too quickly.
"Hermione," the girl replies, holding out her hand.
A breath of fresh air. What a beautiful name. What a great start to what could have been an unbelievably bad day. I shake her hand, and the world splits open into more than an ocean - it is a universe of possibilities. And, at last, fate has given me a shot at something good. Fate has opened her steely heart to me.