novelraw Chapter 206 206: Young and Passionate Love
Chapter 206 206: Young and Passionate Love
"...This is the oldest surviving theatre festival in France, and it is considered one of the three greatest theatre festivals in the world, alongside the Edinburgh Festival in the United Kingdom and the Berlin Festival in Germany," a black-haired Muggle tour guide said to the group trailing behind him.
As he spoke, he waved a small flag to keep them together. "This way — that's the Papal Palace. In the Court of Honour, they're currently staging classic plays funded and commissioned by the French government —"
In late July, the month-long Avignon Theatre Festival was in full swing, and the passion of theatre-lovers had made this small town impossibly charming.
The city was no longer merely a city. It had become an open-air forum.
Art flowed freely here, and culture burned like an inexhaustible flame.
Posters emblazoned with "LE FESTIVAL D'AVIGNON" wound through the streets like vines through a forest after heavy rain; actors dressed as iconic theatrical characters roamed the cobblestones, drawing the eyes of every passer-by; and lovingly designed brochures had been transformed into colourful flags, fluttering from every wall and line strung between buildings, each one straining to catch the eye of some wandering theatre enthusiast and guide them to their perfect performance.
Hermione was sipping her Earl Grey tea at a small outdoor table, quite at her leisure.
When it came to black tea, her true favourite was actually Keemun — the kind Draco so often prepared for her. But it was impossible to find one's favourite cup of tea everywhere one happened to be. And perhaps that was just as well. If happiness came too easily, the appreciation for what one loved most would inevitably be dulled.
She turned these seemingly plausible little philosophies over in her mind with mild melancholy, took another sip — better than nothing — and let her gaze drift toward the lively street before her.
The celebratory procession was setting off from the square in front of the Papal Palace, surging forward in dense, ebullient waves. Theatre enthusiasts poured from every alley and side street, merging into the flow of the crowd like tributaries joining a river.
It was a river anything but bland — vivid, diverse, and gloriously alive.
Young men and women in gorgeous, retro medieval costume had painted their faces ghost-pale or vivid green without a moment's self-consciousness. Shirtless men in high spirits blew horns or beat drums slung at their waists as they walked, releasing their joy into the warm air. A pair of ascetics sidled after a group of beautiful Romani women, while several little angels in pure white peeked through their fingers at the small devils with black wings parading alongside them.
A female knight in a silver helmet strolled past Hermione, hand-in-hand with a vampire baring magnificent painted fangs, calling out to the crowd as they went.
"What a fascinatingly strange mixture..." she murmured to the ring on her finger, feeling a curious sense of smallness amid all the noise and colour.
I miss you again. And you don't even know.
The snake-shaped ring clung silently to her finger, its tiny ruby eyes staring up at her. It was absolutely still — stubborn and unresponsive, no more than a gleaming silver stone.
The Granger family had been in Avignon for several days now, and — needless to say — they had fallen completely into the enchanting trap the city had so carefully set for them.
"I must say, I am entirely captivated by all of this!" Mr. Granger waved his arm with a theatrical flourish — rather like the leading man he had so admired yesterday — the stack of flyers in his hand cutting through the air with a satisfying whoosh. "I absolutely must get there on time for the Hamlet reading today!"
"Why the rush?" Hermione asked, watching his gestures with interest — he really did look rather as though he was casting a spell. "Dad, you can always go in and find a seat."
"I need to get there early for a front-row spot — I want to be close enough to interact with the people on stage! They might even let me stand up and read a passage —" Mr. Granger said, nearly vibrating with excitement. "Any passage at all! I'll recite it from memory and give them the surprise of their lives!"
"Go on then, Dad — memorise as much as you can and astound them!" Hermione said warmly.
Mr. Granger drew himself up with great confidence. "I'll drop every jaw in the room — and then I'll tell you all about it!"
Hermione laughed.
"Little Peanut, have you decided what to see?" Mrs. Granger asked.
"Not yet — I want to look through everything properly first." Hermione shook the programme booklet in her hand. "Besides, I haven't finished my tea."
"Then we'll have to head off." Mrs. Granger glanced at a message on her phone. "My friends from the medieval costume seminar are asking where I am. Will you be all right on your own?"
"Perfectly fine, Mum — it's not as though we've never split up before!" Hermione said airily. "You two go ahead!"
"All right then, Peanut." Mrs. Granger pressed a cheerful kiss to her daughter's forehead. "Ring us if you need anything — see you tonight!"
Hermione waved them off as usual, watching them hurry away.
During their time in Avignon, the Grangers sometimes travelled together and sometimes, when they were confident it was safe, went their separate ways to follow their own interests. This had taken some getting used to.
Hermione remembered asking her mother, rather perplexed, "Isn't doing things together the whole point of a family trip?"
She had thought of the Weasleys — that enormous, boisterous family, always gathered at the table for meals at exactly the right time, always trooping together to Quidditch matches, always somehow managing to turn everything into a cheerful occasion.
"Of course I wouldn't turn down family activities. Like yesterday — we saw that wonderful Macbeth performance together, and your father cried, and that was marvellous," Mrs. Granger had said with a smile. "But you have to understand that people are different, even within a family. Being a family doesn't mean becoming identical, or having to love exactly the same things."
"But we all love art — that's why we came here," Hermione had insisted.
"True. But even between people who all love art, there will be different preferences for different forms of it," Mrs. Granger had said patiently. "In that case, isn't it better to respect each other's individual tastes?"
"If our interests happen to pull us in different directions, why shouldn't we each go to whichever play or reading or exhibition excites us most, rather than one of us always accommodating the others?" Mr. Granger had added, with the self-satisfied air of someone advancing an argument he has already won. "None of you will think less of me simply because I'd rather attend a dramatic reading than a fashion seminar!"
"Never, Dad!" Hermione had said at once, smiling.
Mrs. Granger had shrugged agreeably, as if to indicate she had no strong opinion either way.
"And then at dinner," Mr. Granger had concluded cheerfully, "we'll all have something different to talk about! Everyone shares what they discovered — that's the plan!"
"You're on, Dad — I'm going to find the most interesting thing in the whole festival today!" Hermione had declared.
"I wouldn't dare underestimate you!" Mr. Granger had said. "Only — do keep an eye on your phone and your wallet. That's my one concern."
Thinking back on this now, Hermione set down her teacup, patted the phone and wallet safely stowed inside her beaded pouch, and exhaled contentedly.
When you had a bag that was deceptively small on the outside but held practically everything inside, you really didn't need to worry much about anything. You could pull out whatever you needed at a moment's notice — including the Invisibility Cloak your boyfriend had thoughtfully provided, should you ever feel the need to disappear. And as for pickpockets — no Muggle's hand could get into a beaded bag with a proper anti-theft charm on it, and even a wizard would have found it a challenge.
Draco had thought of everything when he gave it to her, hadn't he?
Hermione thought of him, smiled a little, and took a slow breath of the warm Avignon air — that particular scent the city had, free and sun-warmed and faintly of lavender.
May everything be going smoothly for him.
The only thing that genuinely troubled her was the silence from Draco's end.
Since she had flown to France, they had lost contact entirely — like two fish swept into separate branches of a forking river, suddenly living in wholly different worlds. The one reliable line between them — the rings on their hands — had also ceased to function over such a distance.
At this moment, she didn't know where he was, only that he had gone somewhere far away with his grandfather. She didn't know what he was feeling; only that missing him left her feeling strangely unmoored.
A low-lying melancholy, combined with the gradually intensifying summer heat, settled over Hermione's heart like a dry spell.
This place was undeniably beautiful, and she was genuinely trying her best to enjoy the holiday she had worked hard to deserve — but something was still missing. She felt like a firework that had failed to ignite: full of expectation, poised to streak upward and burst into colour, only for the fuse to sputter out at the very last moment.
The absence of any word from Draco left a quiet, persistent tension underneath everything else.
In order not to squander what he had helped make possible, she was going to try her best to enjoy it.
Just as her father often did, Hermione said to herself in her fractured French:
"Regardez, cette vie en rose." Behold, this life in roses.
She looked around.
At the table beside her, a couple who had just finished their coffee were kissing with complete indifference to the world around them. Two tables further along, a child of three or four was playing with a golden retriever, filling the air with laughter that was purely, unreservedly delightful. Hermione watched the little dog wag its tail for a while, admiring its beautiful golden fur. The procession grew longer and louder, every face in it alight with a joy so unguarded it was almost startling.
She turned back to the stack of theatre schedules beside her, lazily turning them over. Dante or Mistral today? A deep plunge into the long history of the Roman Catholic Church, or an afternoon spent marvelling at the extravagant world of the French kings?
"I'd far rather kiss you than watch any play," she said softly to the ring, quite as though she were perfectly sane and not talking to a piece of silver jewellery in a crowded French street.
Talking to the ring had become something of a new habit since it had stopped working. It had its advantages, she supposed — all those sweet things she could never quite say out loud, the ones that made her go pink, could be said freely now without any risk of making him insufferably smug about it.
"Maybe Dante, then. Since we can't kiss." She held up a brochure for an upcoming performance, making a last attempt at a decision.
The ring went warm.
She glanced down at it, distracted, not yet fully registering what that meant.
"What about Shakespeare and two proper kisses?"
The words appeared slowly, burning brightly — more intensely than the fiercest midsummer sun.
It couldn't be. It was impossible —
The brochure slipped from her fingers onto the table. Hermione stared at her hand, turning it over, examining it as though she had never seen it before.
Then her gaze fixed on the ring. Her hand trembled, just slightly. Her throat tightened.
In an instant, those small, elegant words became the most important thing she had ever read.
"Draco?" she asked the ring, barely above a whisper. She was startled to find her voice was unsteady.
"Yes," came the reply, slow and deliberate. "I'm here. I promised, didn't I?"
"Oh my God —" She was on her feet before she knew it, very nearly sending the entire stack of brochures and programmes flying, and making rather more noise than she had intended.
The couple beside her broke apart and looked round in surprise. She barely noticed.
She stepped away from the table and moved to the edge of the street.
The procession rolled on around her. Court ladies in elaborate costumes drifted past, faces half-hidden behind painted fans; clowns darted along the edges of the crowd, thrusting their round red noses at bystanders with theatrical glee; a majestic king held his position at the centre of it all, chin raised, projecting an air of absolute, inviolable sovereignty.
A dozen different languages swirled around her all at once.
Those characters — joyful, solemn, passionate, absurd — passed by her as she stood there like someone who had just been struck by lightning: stunned, scattered, completely at a loss.
"Draco..." Hermione murmured, her eyes, dull a moment ago, suddenly coming alive as she began to search.
The sunlight overhead was almost dizzying in its brightness.
This was the height of the procession, and a great fanfare of trumpets rang out and swallowed her voice whole. The watching tourists erupted in cheering and applause.
In all that noise, she was full of an almost unbearable anticipation, blinking her suddenly stinging eyes as she tried to make out every face around her.
"Draco?" she called, but she couldn't even hear herself.
Had he really come? Could that actually be true? she thought, half-wild with hoping.
— No. It wasn't possible. This was surely some kind of prank.
— Perhaps the ring had simply malfunctioned.
She searched. She doubted herself. She proposed a theory and immediately tore it down. Those competing thoughts wobbled up and down in her mind like a roly-poly toy that refused to stay fallen.
She didn't have to search for long.
In a flash, she caught him — out of the corner of her eye — the way you catch something that simply cannot be ignored.
Like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky, the sight of him struck through her.
Between the black-robed monks and the white-clad fairies, he stood quietly across the street, looking out over the noisy world around him with that particular expression of his — perfect, aloof, sharply defined. He turned his head — and his gaze, sweeping the crowd almost absently, found her.
So he stood there, in a grey shirt, one hand in his pocket, looking directly at her.
His platinum blond hair gleamed in the afternoon light, and with his bright, pale face and the stark colour of his lips, he looked like something out of a sudden, vivid dream.
At that exact moment, a French drummer in the procession struck her drums with gathering force — each beat heavier and louder than the last, booming and reverberating in the summer air exactly like a heartbeat.
A heartbeat that had stopped, and was now pounding too fast.
Dilated pupils. A girl rooted to the spot, completely unable to move.
Across the street: Draco Malfoy.
He stood there quietly and looked at her. A gentle breeze lifted the hair at his temples, revealing his grey eyes in full — clear and unwavering, fixed entirely on her.
In the moment their eyes met, she found she couldn't move at all.
Then he smiled. A slight curve of the lips, at first. Then, as she stood there frozen, the smile grew.
He was as beautiful as something that had no business being real.
Lazily, cheerfully, the boy raised his hand in greeting. A glint of silver caught between his fingers.
She waved back — hesitant, clumsy, still barely believing — and the silver light in her own hand flashed back toward him, catching in his eyes.
So he began walking. He crossed the street.
His expression was one of complete, unhurried determination — as though not even another second of looking at her from a distance was something he was willing to tolerate, as though the procession rolling between them was merely an inconvenience to be dealt with.
He walked directly through the parade, past the strange and marvellous Muggle performers — even the imperious king, startled, stepped aside for him — and made his way straight toward the girl standing there with her eyes gone wide and all words deserting her.
Hermione couldn't speak.
She couldn't move, either. She felt as though he had fixed her in place from across the street and only he had the power to release her — and she was afraid that if she so much as breathed wrong, this would turn out to be a dream, and she would watch it shatter.
"Oh my God," she whispered.
All the restless, nameless, swelling feelings that had been accumulating since the start of the holiday — every muted colour, every half-formed longing — broke apart in front of her eyes and came back together in a single, blazing beam of platinum light.
And then the light was close. And then he was close.
While she was still in a daze, he had crossed the crowd and stopped a short distance in front of her.
Draco looked at her with easy nonchalance, tilting his head slightly, and said, without apparent concern: "Well? Shakespeare?"
His girl's expression was something between astonishment and pure, unguarded delight — the look of a child discovering they are standing inside an actual house made of sweets.
She was wearing an orange-pink chiffon dress, trembling very slightly in front of him like a rosebud on the edge of opening. A sweet scent drifted toward him on the warm breeze, and he had the sudden, entirely unreasonable urge to press his lips to every inch of her.
Hermione was still silent. She still couldn't quite believe it.
All of it had happened so quickly, and taken such an unexpected turn, that she couldn't quite catch up.
She hesitated, then reached out, and tentatively touched his face — very slowly, very gently, as though testing the surface of a soap bubble with an iridescent sheen, afraid of what too much pressure might do.
It was him. It was really him.
He didn't dissolve into mist when she touched him.
A perfectly real Draco Malfoy.
With a hint of roguishness and no shortage of smugness, Draco spread his arms in a leisurely invitation, raised an eyebrow, and said, without a shred of humility: "What are you waiting for, Hermione Granger? Come here."
It was like a switch being thrown.
Like a lost bird finally finding its way home, she let out a small sound that was almost a squeak and threw herself into his arms.
The embrace of Draco Malfoy — warm and solid and unmistakably real.
She held on completely, the way a koala clings to its favourite tree, and for the first time in weeks, Hermione Granger's world felt entirely whole again.
She could feel his breath against her face. She could see, just at the edge of her vision, his platinum blond hair tangled with her brown curls, stirring gently in the breeze.
Draco exhaled — long and deeply content.
A warm, solid, close embrace made him feel like himself again.
All the arguments and weariness seemed insignificant in this moment. Every quarrel with his parents, every sleepless night, every painfully managed day — all of it was made worth something by this single hug.
It revived the part of him that his father's relentless pressure had nearly worn away, and softened the memory of those disappointed, unyielding faces that had occupied his thoughts for so long.
Getting to hold her again made all of it worthwhile.
Draco Malfoy laughed quietly against her hair.
He let her smooth arms drape around the back of his neck, and held her securely — carefully, as though afraid of letting go — and buried his face in her curls to breathe in the familiar scent of her.
"Finally —" His voice came out low and clear, the way water sounds moving over stone. He pressed his cheek to hers and murmured into her ear, quietly pleased: "I've finally found you, Hermione Granger."
The moment her cheek met his, she was certain. One hundred percent, without any question at all.
She turned her face slightly and spoke softly toward the little mole just in front of his ear, the way she always did: "Oh, Draco — Draco —"
Her lips moved as if there were a thousand things she needed to say. She wanted to tell him exactly how much she had missed him.
But when he was holding her, something in her went quiet. All the words vanished. She could only say his name, again and again, completely undone by the simple fact of him being there.
Draco was experiencing something very similar.
He had spent weeks imagining this moment in a hundred different forms, dreaming up elaborate scenes whenever he managed to sleep. But the instant he actually saw her, every elaborate scenario dissolved, and all that remained was the single, uncomplicated need to hold her.
A hug was enough. Her warmth against him, and his arms around her — like two ropes knotted together, neither one going anywhere.
The couple at the table beside them shouted at them with enthusiastic goodwill:
"Hey, girl — kiss him!"
"Go on, man — kiss her!"
Draco had half a mind to look up and silence them with a look. Outrageous, these Frenchmen. How could anyone encourage that sort of thing in broad daylight, in a crowded street —
He was still composing this objection, faintly pink at the ears, when Hermione beat him to it entirely.
Her hand cradled the back of his head with characteristic decisiveness. And there, in public, in the middle of a packed street in Avignon, overwhelmed by weeks of longing, she kissed him.
Properly.
This audacious girl.
She bore very little resemblance, at this moment, to the Hermione Granger who went shy in public but caused all manner of trouble in private. Perhaps it was the effect of France — the particular recklessness that this country seemed to produce in people.
Not that Draco had any intention of stopping her.
She was captivating. She was warm. She was determined. She tasted faintly of black tea, and she kissed him as though she'd been waiting for it for a long time, which — he was increasingly certain — she had.
He kissed her back. Unhurried, thorough, doing full justice to the promise he'd made.
Admittedly, the location was not quite what he'd had in mind for "two deep kisses" — but he would deal with that later.
When they finally surfaced, Hermione was flushed and slightly unsteady. A few strands of brown hair had fallen across his cheek, and he was quite sure his composure was not entirely where he had left it.
Scattered applause from the surrounding Frenchmen drifted toward them, warm and faintly teasing.
"Draco — put me down, there are far too many people watching —" Hermione whispered urgently against his ear, going pinker by the second.
Draco opened his eyes, looked at her, and took a moment to locate his better judgment. It took longer than usual.
When her cheek was that close to his, when he could feel her breath against his face and see her bright brown eyes looking straight at him — everything she said sounded perfectly reasonable.
"Yes," he said, slightly hoarsely, and set her carefully back on her feet — though he kept his arms around her.
Around them, the applause and cheerful exclamations of the Avignon crowd continued: "Jeune et ardent amour!" — young and passionate love.
Draco ducked his head, his ears burning red, and hid his face in her hair.
He was smiling. He couldn't stop smiling, in fact, and he was deeply grateful that no one he knew was there to see it.