Pictures

Life never goes the way it was planned. Her parents had planned on sending their two children to Oxford, but neither had made it, thus far. When she was ten, she had planned on going to St. Augustine’s comprehensive school. Instead, she got a letter from Hogwarts, informing her family that the little ‘accidents’ that happened around her made her part of a secret society that had existed since the twelfth century. She had never planned on befriending the most well-known wizard in the western world, she just wanted to make certain that they didn’t lose house points. She never planned on shagging the one person in school who made her stomach turn, but she did. She never planned on marrying him, certainly not on having his children and most definitely did not plan to fall in love with him.

All her careful planning and well thought out decisions had brought her to where she currently was: seven months pregnant in the nursery her sons would be using any day now and crying her eyes out over a man she had fallen completely in love with. She sat in a chair, folding the tiny baby grows she had received as gifts from her baby shower the previous day. She was placing the items in the dresser drawers of the nursery furniture, arranging them in color. It was very important to her that she do this, for some reason. The ‘What to Expect’ books she’d been leafing through called it ‘nesting’ and it gave her something to take her mind off of Draco.

Yesterday’s baby shower had been pure torture and she had wanted to call it off, but Narcissa Malfoy was not a woman to back down from a party once it was underway. She’d spent almost five hours in front of her friends and family acting as if nothing was wrong between them. Those five hours had been sheer torture because Draco kept his hands on her the whole time and for the first time in almost a month, she had let him. He acted like an attention starved kitten, rubbing his body over and over her own. He nuzzled her neck as he held her from behind, his hands resting on the swollen mound of her pregnant belly as he aligned their bodies and pressed himself fully against her, inhaling her scent like a drug addict falling off the wagon. She equally wanted to throw him off of her or to kick everybody out and just lay there crying in his arms.

She missed him so much and she knew he missed her as well. He walked around the manor with such a long face and she knew she had heard him crying once in the bathroom. There were days that she wanted to completely forget what she had found out, because then she would be happy. She thought several times of doing as he asked and just ignoring it. After all, she missed the talking, the closeness, the way he was the only person in the world that made her feel like she wasn’t a beached whale or an emotional wreck. He’d sent her absolutely everything under the sun he could think of, but she wasn’t about to take material gifts as a form of apology.

He hadn’t apologized and he hadn’t recanted his threat and those thoughts made Hermione cry the hardest. He didn’t love her. He wanted her, was jealous over her, thought about her more than she ever realized, but he apparently didn’t care what she wanted in life and also thought of her as a pawn to be manipulated. How could she love somebody like that? More importantly, did he think so little of her that he didn’t think she might stay if he just came out and asked? She knew that the particulars of their relationship had transpired as more of a business transaction, but did she really seem so callous? What kind of situation was she bringing not one, but three babies into?

She was distracted from her melancholy thoughts by an owl pecking on the window. Getting up, she sighed inwardly when she realized it was just bringing the Daily Prophet. Taking the paper from the bird, she expected it to just fly away, but instead, it perched itself on the edge of one of three cribs in the room. They stared at each other blankly for a moment before she realized that she had to pay the monthly subscription price. Groaning, she lifted herself from her position and waddled into Draco’s study to look for the three sickles it cost to receive the Daily Prophet.

Opening drawers in his large mahogany desk, she shifted through business contracts, acquisitions and stock market portfolios before finally finding a black leather coin pouch. She tried to take it from the desk drawer, but it was caught between the two wood panels both on the side of the drawer and underneath. Pulling the drawer out farther, she looked underneath for the sign of the knot in the purse string. It wasn’t there. Going back to the inside of the drawer she gave a yank on the coin purse and to her surprise, the bottom of the drawer came with it. Cursing at herself for breaking a priceless antique, she pulled the sickles out of the purse and didn’t even watch as the owl took off through the house. She bent down to examine the drawer and try to figure out how to replace it when she saw something white under the piece of wood she’d dislodged. The desk drawer had a false bottom.

Reaching into the draw, she pulled out several large white envelopes with her name written on them. Opening up the one labeled ‘Hogwarts’ she gasped. Instead of finding the graphic pictures of their first night together, she found a group of very well-taken, innocent pictures of herself. The first one showed her sitting on the window seat of their Head’s common room reading large book and twirling her hair around her finger. The morning light illuminated her face. In another, she sat next to the lake, once again reading, but this time she was holding on to an azalea blossom, every so often bringing it to her nose. She remembered that day. It had been springtime at Hogwarts and she’d felt so at peace sitting on the lawn, as if everything were perfect.

Opening another envelope she saw herself in the bath tub of his house in Italy. Her eyes were closed and her steady breathing made her breasts rise and fall, giving the photographer a quick, teasing glance at her nipples before they disappeared from view. It was sexual but not lewd. She was shocked to discover that most of the pictures were taken of her fully clothed and involved in mundane tasks, but she never looked at the camera. The way the pictures were taken, it looked as if the photographer wasn’t apart of the world his subject was. Each picture was like looking at her through a window. The photographer had intimate knowledge of his subject, but she was very much unaware. Looking at the pictures, she was amazed at the level of care conveyed, almost as if each picture were a caress over her. As the pictures became more recent, they became more open, raw, showing the core of her humanity and personality displayed in the picture.

Only a third of them were sexual. She honestly wondered how she couldn’t have noticed. She was supposed to be bright. She’d outwitted death eaters twice her age and with triple the experience but she couldn’t see the emotion that a man she’d been living with for close to three years now had for her. She’d never thought of herself as beautiful or desirable, but the woman in these pictures was. Seeing herself through Draco’s eyes she suddenly understood. She knew he was lonely, insecure and without many social graces, but she never understood until now that she was the focus not only of his photography, but also his world and he felt utterly removed from her.

Finally, she noticed a black envelope with a red wax seal on it. Her heart pounding, she opened it and saw that for the first time since Hogwarts, Draco was in the picture with her and she was actually looking at the camera. The difference between the ones from Hogwarts and the ones that had obviously been taken in their flat was that these were pictures taken by a man in love. She stared at the one in which she knelt in the middle of their bed and motioned him forwards with her finger. The one of the two of them joined and kissing as his eyes drifted towards the lens wasn’t of two people bent on mutual pleasure, it was two people relishing the other one’s touch.

Her head had been swimming since she’d come in the room and tears were falling down her face for the twentieth time that day. Because of this she sensed in him the room, rather than hearing him. Looking up, she met his eyes and held his pained gaze.

“The ones you’re looking for aren’t in there,” he said as he walked behind the desk to the shelf where an ornate box rested and tapping it with his wand, he opened it. “They’re in here.”

Hermione watched him as he pulled out an envelope and went to stand between the desk and the fireplace, which was currently aflame, despite the early spring weather. “I wasn’t looking for them. I reached in to get money to pay the Prophet owl and the drawer bottom came up with the purse string,” she said quietly. Her stomach was twisting itself into knots over the nervousness and she could feel it cramping.

She looked at him a moment and then turned away because she realized how puffy and red her eyes must look. She turned her head back towards him when she heard the flames crackle. He had just thrown in two of the pictures.

“What are you doing?” she asked, confused.

“These are the only copies,” he said as she watched him feed the photographs one by one into the fire. “These are the negatives,” he said, holding up a tiny white envelope after throwing all twenty-five photos into the flames. Without an ounce of hesitation, he threw the negatives into the fire, watching with her as they melted and turned into a puddle of goop. He turned back towards her and said, “I’d like to ask you to leave the others. I definitely won’t be printing them and if they ever did get out, they don’t show anything that the wizarding world doesn’t already think they know.” With that, he sat down in the arm chair in front of the fire and put his head in his hands, not looking at her.

“Where would I take them?” she asked.

“Wherever it is that you were going a month ago when you said you were leaving.” His tone was indifferent and his face impassive, but she knew better.

“I’m not leaving them,” she said, her mind made up. She began stuffing them back in their respective envelopes.

“Why?” he asked, suddenly agitated. “You can have as much of my money as you want, you can take any or all of my houses, you can take my whole family library with you, but you can’t my sons and you can’t those pictures. They’d be the only thing left of when my life had any meaning to it whatsoever,” he finished in an almost pleading tone.

She finished putting the pictures into their envelopes and then stood as she put them back in his desk drawer. “I’m not leaving them,” she said again and walked quickly into their bedroom, grimacing in pain.

He followed her. “Fine, you can take the ones that were taken at Hogwarts, but you have to leave the rest. I’m not giving them up, Hermione!”

“I’m not asking you to,” she said as she thrust an overnight bag into his hands and sat down on the bed, with tears springing to her eyes.

He seemed energized by this. “You can’t leave just yet! You still have to wait until they’re born!” he said gesturing at her stomach. “I have a right to see my children!”

She was through playing. “No, I have to leave right now. Can you help me up, please?” she asked.

‘No! You’ve stayed this long and their nursery is ready here! They’re Malfoys and they will be born with Malfoy Manor as their address!”

“They’re going to be born RIGHT NOW, YOU ARSE!” she fairly bellowed as her water finally broke and ran down her legs. “I had planned on going about this with much more flair and dramatics, but as it is, they want to come out immediately. I’m staying, the boys are staying and the bloody pictures are staying! Right now, though I need to go to St. Mungo’s, immediately, so get up off your ass and bring the overnight bag.” With that, she moved as quickly as she possibly could through the house and flooed to St. Mungo’s with Draco on her heels.


A/N- Here ya go! Thanks to everybody who has stuck with me through this story and through 'Midnight'. You guys are utterly amazing! Also, I'm a review junky, so please send me more of your wonderful, addicting love!