An End

Finishing my last year at Hogwarts was not easy. But who was I to not continuing my education over some silly fleeting fling. That was the only mantra to get me through each day. To believe it was mere fling, what I had with Draco. I finally had a job as a journalist, and in a year, I got promoted to Junior Editor at Daily Prophet. I buried myself in my work. No time for love...or not making time for love, I wasn't sure. One day I was so busy I almost missed lunch time and I hurriedly stepped out to get something to eat. I disapparated to London street as I craved for muggle food that day. The line was not long and I got a nice burger to-go. "s**t", I forgot my muggle money. I only bring my Galleons with me. I searched for a hope that I had at least 5 pounds in the pockets of my jacket. Nothing. A crumpled receipt, a spare quill, and the wrapper of a chocolate frog I ate two days ago. "Miss, there's a queue," the cashier said, drumming his fingers on the counter. "I know, I'm sorry, just give me a second, I swear I have—" A hand came over my shoulder and put a ten pound note on the counter. "Keep the change." I knew that voice. I knew it the way you know your own name, or the sound of your own front door at night. I didn't turn around. I couldn't. My hand was still buried in my pocket, closed around nothing at all. "(Y/n)." I turned around. Draco Malfoy was standing behind me in a grey muggle coat, holding a paper cup of coffee, looking as if he had been standing there for years just waiting for me to finally notice. Thinner. Older. His hair was shorter now. "You're blocking the queue," he said. "You—" "Outside. Please." I took my burger and walked out, and he followed me, and neither of us said a word until we were standing on the pavement with the traffic going past us like nothing at all had happened. Then I hit him. On the arm, hard, with the hand that wasn't holding my lunch. "Ow—" "Three years!" "(Y/n)—" "Three years, Draco!" "I know." "You let me go. You wrote me all those letters and you let me go and then you just—" my voice cracked somewhere in the middle, and I hated it, I hated that it still did that after all this time. "I thought you were dead. Do you understand that? For about a year I read the obituaries first. Before the news. Before my own bloody articles." He didn't say anything. He just stood there and took it, the way he never used to take anything from anyone. That was worse. "Say something." "I've read them," he said. "What?" "Your articles. All of them. Even the one about cauldron thickness regulations, which was, if I'm being honest, dreadful." I laughed. It came out wrong, half a sob, and I covered my mouth with the back of my wrist. "Why are you here?" I asked, when I could speak again. "Here. In London. On this street." "I live four streets away." The burger nearly fell out of my hand. "You live—" "Since March." He looked into his coffee instead of at me. "No magic. A flat, a lease, and a job in a bookshop that pays almost nothing. My mother knows. Nobody else does." "A bookshop." "You always said muggle books were better." I didn't know what to do with my face. I looked at the road, at a red bus, at anything. "They wouldn't let me near the wizarding world for two years," he went on, quieter. "Ministry conditions. And after that, when they finally would, I—" he stopped. Started again. "Your name was doing well in that paper. Mine was in a different kind of column. I wasn't going to put them next to each other." "That wasn't your decision to make." "No," he agreed. "It wasn't." He looked up then, and his eyes stopped somewhere near my ear, and stayed. "You still wear them." My hand went up to the pearls before I could stop it. I had worn them every single day since the war ended and I had stopped noticing years ago. "Habit," I lied. "Right." My watch buzzed against my wrist. The two o'clock meeting. Bloxham would be pacing the corridor already, holding the front page and a grievance. "I have to go back," I said. "I'm an editor now. There are people who wait for me." "I know. Junior Editor. Third floor." He said it like a man admitting to something. "I've walked past that building more times than I'm going to tell you." "Draco." "Tomorrow," he said. "The same place. One o'clock. You don't have to say yes now. Just—don't say no now." I stood there on a loud muggle street holding a cold burger, three years too late for every word I had rehearsed. "I'm not promising anything," I said. "I'm not asking you to." I disapparated from the alley behind the shop, and for the first time in three years I had absolutely no idea what would happen next. I hated that. Not quite the same way I used to, though.