Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

January 1996

The Villa Straylight

St. Tropez

The next days passed in a haze. There was nothing Marie-France would not do to him, or with him, or permit him to do to her. She missed no voluptuous trick, no sensual artifice. Every dream that had ever passed through his head in his narrow bed in the Slytherin dormitory came to fruition, and many that he had never even imagined.

Control was the very first lesson that she ever taught to him, that very night. Lovemaking was an experience to be savored and prolonged, she told him, with the patience of a professor tutoring a favorite pupil. He found that he agreed most wholeheartedly. Then, too, it was a lesson that Draco had desperately wanted to learn. It began as a matter of pride. A Malfoy did not fail in private matters any more than in public ones; whether there was an audience of one or one hundred, a Malfoy set the standard of behavior, and that did not include coming in a minute or less. So he learned quickly to bring about her pleasure by delaying his own, although she had a habit of throwing in new tricks, mischievously, that would cause him to come swiftly, with a startled groan.

"You may run into these," she would say casually.

"Not like that," he would answer, once he could speak again.

The anxiety left him when he found that control wasn't such a difficult trick after all; there were a dozen different ways to press back that seething edge of pleasure when it wasn't yet appropriate to let it loose. And then it became a lesson of delight. He discovered how exquisite the long hours of lovemaking were when he didn't have to worry about the entire thing ending at any second, and how much he loved hearing and seeing and feeling her pleasure, slowly aroused, slowly satisfied, adding a far sharper edge to his own. The first time he felt her shudder around him, gasping, clutching onto his arms as ecstasy seized her, Draco was filled with an exultation he never would have believed it possible for him to feel. In a way he could never have explained, it was even more satisfying than his own release a few moments later. I did that, he thought, panting above her. I made her feel that. I gave that to Marie-France, and nobody can ever take that victory away from me... not ever... And, loving that feeling of triumph, he gave her the gift of pleasure again and again, even as she gave it to him.

Touch was the second lesson, and he took to it as naturally as a bird to flight. It reminded him of flying, actually, that glorious lifting sensation he always had on a broom in the air. "Always begin gently, Draco," she whispered to him. "Touch me, so. Run your hands along my breasts. Then the curve of my waist, and my hips. Don't be so eager or so quick. Tease me. Tantalize me. Now, oh yes, cheri, now... ahhhh..." And over and over, she would shudder with the pleasure he gave her.

After that, the lessons blurred together, no beginning, no end, and always, always, more to learn. Draco learned a hundred different ways to please her, and found that he had an almost eidetic memory for their details. He loved lying back and letting her ride him, playing with her breasts as she threw her head back and moaned, his own pleasure a little softer, a little more prolonged, seemingly rising not only from his loins but from all of him. He enjoyed lifting her against a shelf in the little breakfast nook, his hands gripping her round smooth buttocks, pushing, pulling, molding her flesh to his, collapsing to the floor when the tremors of delight hit them both, taking her with him. They made love in her rose-shaded room in the tower, on the veranda to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore, on the sand with a Warming charm spread around them both and the cool water lapping at Draco's toes, in the sunroom, on the kitchen table, behind the garden shed. And still he continued to feel as if he had only scratched the surface of all there was to know. So the lessons continued, and stretched all through the endless winter nights. As the days went by, he learned French phrases of love and lust from her, haltingly. Although he could rub along in the language fairly well, these were ways of shaping words that he had certainly never known.

"Prends-moi dans la bouche," Draco would whisper into her ear in his low, husky voice when they were alone together, naked in her bed, on her couch, on the floor, up against the wall. "L'eche moi, mords-moi, suce-moi."

"L'eche moi, mon bouton d'amour, mon cheri, mon Draco," she might whisper back to him, or later, "Plus profond, plus fort, plus vite, vite!"

Marie-France taught him all she knew, and Draco was a very eager student indeed. He discovered that he had remarkable aptitude in the area of sexuality, and she certainly possessed both the knowledge and the willingness to help him develop it. There were a thousand things about a woman's body and a woman's pleasure that he surely would not have learned for many more years, if ever. But she taught them to him when he was just turned sixteen, and he was more profoundly grateful than he could ever express.

Yet Draco's favorite part of it all remained the minutes after they were both satisfied, when he held her close to him, and curled her slender body against his. Strangely, she never allowed him to do this for very long. Marie-France would let him hold her for a little while, and then tell him that she wanted to sleep, turning away. She never held him in that same way. So he found that he had a strange, unsatisfied craving for the closeness that came after sex, yet was not sexual. He had as much as he wanted of everything else from her, but never enough of that. Draco did not know what that might mean, and was not sure that he wanted to think about its implications. Sometimes, too, they would talk, after one sensual bout and before the next, lying on her canopied bed with its apricot-rose and ivory hangings.

"Did you like that, what I did to you?" Draco whispered once afterwards, tracing the shape of her face with feather-light touches of his fingers.

"Yes, yes. You always ask, don't you?"

"Always. I always want to know for sure."

"And the other girls, did you please them?"

"There haven't been any others. I told you that."

"Not that you took to your bed, perhaps. But you cannot tell me that you came to me--" she smiled teasingly at him "-- a complete innocent, cheri?"

"No." Draco thought of Pansy, and set his teeth. "Just one other girl, really. We did do-- well, some things, but I never pleased her. I did try, sometimes, though."

"Ah, so you do 'ave a, what is the English word? Girlfriend."

"She isn't my girlfriend." He shook his head vehemently. "She isn't my anything. It was never like this-- it never felt like this. What we do. I never really wanted her to be anything to me. Maybe that's why I was never able to give her any pleasure. But you, Marie--when I know that I've made you feel that way, I feel that--" Draco took a deep breath-- "that you're mine, just for that moment."

A smile crossed her face then, but a strangely sad one. "And when I give you pleasure, my dragon, are you mine?"

"Yours," he told her, feeling as if they lay talking in a dream, one that had no connection to the waking world beyond it. "Yours," he repeated.

Marie-France sighed. "I 'ave always been clever, or I would not have survived. But I do not think I was ever wise. Certainement, I am not wise now," she said. And he would have asked her what on earth she meant by saying such a strange thing, except that she reached for him again, and made him hers again. And Draco found that he liked the idea of being hers. At least in this strange, suspended time that hung between school terms, an enchanted time that nonetheless had a shadow always behind it.

He walked through a world that did not seem quite real, in those weeks with Marie-France. They'll never believe this, he sometimes caught himself thinking. But he did not know who he meant, because he had no-one to tell. It was hardly the sort of news that could be shared with Crabbe and Goyle, much less any of the other Slytherins. None of their damn business, anyway. This is between us, just us. Only we have experienced it; only we should know about it. He knew, of course, that unlike himself, Marie-France must have experienced this sort of thing with many others. And although he never would have thought of resenting the lovers that had come before him, because they had made her what she was, he did sometimes wonder who they might have been.

"You love to touch, don't you?" she asked him after he had been with her for nearly two weeks.

"Yes," he said, continuing to run his hands over the backs of her knees, experimenting to find the most ticklish spots and filing the information away for later use. They were in a lull that morning; he was utterly sated with physical pleasure for the moment, but touching her pleased him every bit as much in a very different way.

"And you care for your lover's pleasure as much as your own. More, perhaps."

"I suppose I do." Draco scratched a fingernail along the instep of her foot, marking her instinctive shiver. "Yours, anyway. I can't say about anybody else's."

"Ooh, la-la!" she said teasingly. "What of that girl at your school, that Pansy?"

He shuddered. "Ugh. Never. I already told you, never. I'd give it up for life first. Thank all the gods I never really did anything much with her anyway. You were my first, Marie-France, you know that..." His hand began trailing a path up her thigh.

"Of many." She shrugged.

Draco did not answer.

"You will 'ave many others. You will forget-" she stretched luxuriously under his hands-- "your old cousin."

"Never," he said, struggling to keep his voice even. "Never." He hesitated. "Marie-France, don't you know that I--"

"Shh," she said again, as she had done on the first day she seduced him, and she stopped his talking by kissing his mouth. Draco discovered that the lull was quite, quite over. And he had no clear idea of what he would have said, anyway.

The next morning, they were eating breakfast from a tray in bed, a week-old edition of the Daily Prophet spread out in front of them. Draco glanced at it idly, spreading strawberry jam on a croissant. Muggle researchers at Stanford University in Southern California had decided that the universe was infinitely expanding, he saw. The article pondered the possible effects on the magical communities worldwide. An infinitely expanding universe may mean that quark-powered wands are the nearest thing possible to a perpetual motion machine, the article read. Hopefully, information on this issue will continue to be available from our Palos Altos sources. "Indigenous wizarding communities on this continent knew this fact several thousand years ago," a representative from the Great Sioux Nation informed the Daily Prophet. "Nice to see that the wasichu finally figured it out. And when the hell are you people going to stop calling us Sioux? We're the Lakota, you morons! If you can't be accurate, why don't you at least bring back Rita Skeeter? She was a trickster, a heyoka. Now she was fun to read--"

Skeeter's gossip columns really had been more interesting, Draco decided. Still, the article intrigued him. An infinitely expanding universe. Anything's possible, he thought. There had been something barely contained in him when he came here, like a vast flood of dark vile water trapped behind a dam, ready to break free, to smash everything in its path with indiscrimate violence. It seemed as if it had all flowed peacefully out of him, and the poison neutralized under Marie-France's touch. She's made me happy, he thought wonderingly. Happy. I never thought I could be so at peace; every frantic thing within me has been stilled, is at rest. Perhaps this impossible sensation of happiness will only expand, until it fills the rest of my life, outside these holiday weeks. Then he realized that the two phenomena could not co-exist; expansion was not static. Things changed. It gave him a slight chill. But Marie-France reached past him for the fruit bowl, and at the sight of her smile, he was warmed indeed.

"Pineapple today," he remarked, reaching for the little silver-handled fruit knife. It reminded him of the one Marie-France had bought for him in Nice, just before they had become lovers. He kept it always belted at his side-- except for moments like this, of course, when neither of them wore a stitch of clothing. "You know, Marie, I think the house-elves are getting used to my being here; they've actually remembered it for three days running now."

"Oh-- they think you belong 'ere, did you not know that?" She sank her sharp white teeth into the juicy slice he handed to her.

"Do I?" he murmured. "It's strange, so strange. I'm not sure I ever really felt that before. About anywhere, I mean."He traced her inner arm with a fingernail as she lay naked next to him, propped up on her elbows, nibbling at her pineapple. "But I sometimes do think that I belong here. This place. This house." Draco grinned mischievously. "This bed."

"What about your home?"

He considered. "No. Not really."

"Your school?"

"Mmm... I never much wanted to go there in the first place. There was another magical school I would've much preferred. Durmstrang, it was called. Honestly, though, I doubt I would have been any happier there."

"You are very young, to have known so much unhappiness," she said solemnly, and then traced a finger beneath his chin, tickling him. He giggled, and in that moment, Draco looked only like a carefree sixteen-year-old boy, thoroughly sated with pleasure, never having known a moment's pain.

"When we speak of belonging to a place," Marie-France said, "I think that is not all we mean. We are also thinking of our ties to the people who are a part of that place. What of your friends?"

Draco sucked strawberry jam from one finger. "Well, I have a lot of acquaintances. People in Slytherin House. I wouldn't shed a tear if they all dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow. Then there are these two goons who've always hung about me, Crabbe and Goyle, mostly because their parents and mine have so much to do with each other. Goyle's a perfect thug and Crabbe's probably never said more than ten words to me or anybody else in his entire life. I wouldn't call them friends. Honestly, I have more enemies than anything else. There's that moron Potter I told you about, the one who's had every bloody thing handed to him on a platter from the day he got to Hogwarts. Then there's that tribe of Weasley spawn, each one worse than the last. Thank all the gods most of them have finished school by now. Then there's--" Draco stopped; he had been about to say, Ginny. He had never called her by her first name, but it had sprung naturally to his lips now. He didn't know if he would put her in the category of friend or foe. She didn't really belong in either. He had never exchanged one civil word with her, but it sounded completely wrong, somehow, to lump her in with the enemies. Thinking about her now brought on a feeling so strange that he could put no name to it.

"Well, your parents then. What about them?" asked Marie-France.

Draco put his hands behind his head and stared up at the rose-apricot canopy of the bed, glowing from the sunlight that filtered through the lace curtains. "You liked my mother when you met her at Yule, didn't you?"

"Yes, very much." Marie-France smoothed her hand over his. "You love her, don't you?"

"Well, I-- the way I feel about her-- I don't know. I do love my mother. But she doesn't really seem like my mother, if you know what I mean. She always seemed too young to be that, too-- well, I don't really know what-- And I never felt like I could get at her, somehow. She was too far removed from me to touch."

"And your father?"

He grimaced. "Oh-- I don't want to talk about him, can we not?" Rolling over, he looked up into her face. "Odd sort of conversation to be having anyway, considering where we are and what we've been doing." A sudden chill had pervaded the room at the mention of Lucius Malfoy. He shook it off. They had another week, and it seemed an eternity; its end would never come.

"We won't speak of him," she said, "if it doesn't please you."

"What about your parents, Marie; your side of the family? I don't know anything about them."

"My parents are gone. My brothers are gone. My old home is gone..." She shook her head. "Speaking about it all would not please me."

He took one of her hands in his. "Then we'll only talk about what pleases us both. Maybe everyone else in the world has vanished anyway, and there's only us left. Nobody and nothing outside this villa, this stretch of sky and land and ocean..."

"''Ave all the house elves vanished as well?"

"Hmm," said Draco. "I suppose they have. In that case, I'd be your house-elf, you know. I'll cook for you. I can boil water, I think."

"So you would belong to me?" Marie-France asked, a strange expression in her eyes, both pleased and rueful. "I think, perhaps, that you are no wiser than I. Would you be my slave, Draco?"

"If you like." He rolled under her and let her pinion his arms over his head with her hands. She moved her hips to enclose him between her thighs, her long auburn hair falling about them both like a shimmering curtain that entrapped them in a world of sensual beauty. He closed his eyes. The earth was melting away beneath him, and he did not care.

"Would you be my master, Draco?" she whispered to him afterwards.

"If you like," he repeated, moving suddenly to pin her beneath him, holding her hands down with his own, and parting her legs almost roughly with one of his knees. There was something about her that had always eluded him, and suddenly he wanted to capture it, to tame it. He thrust into her fiercely, and she arched up to meet him, hissing with pleasure. He put a hand over her mouth and her own hand struggled free; he felt the searing scratch of her long nails down his back. He saw later that she had scraped bloody tracks into his skin. But Draco was the one who cried out like a captive at the violent force of his pleasure, a little later. No matter how deeply abandoned she became, Marie-France never quite lost control. He was to think later that perhaps he should have taken this as a warning.

"So what is it like, this school of yours, this 'ogwarts? You never 'ave told me," she said a couple of days later. Her hands played with a strand of his silver-gilt hair, as he liked her to do. They had not spoken of Lucius Malfoy's return. Draco was clinging to a belief that if they didn't, it wouldn't happen. In his saner moments, he knew that it was utterly irrational, but then he hadn't had many of those since coming here.

"Oh, school," Draco said dismissively, kissing the tips of her fingers in the way she had taught him to do. Her long deep-copper curls brushed his mouth. How he loved their softness, their color, their texture.

"What do you learn 'zere?"

Draco continued moving his lips down the delicate white skin of her inner arm. "I can't seem to remember a thing just now," he murmured. In truth, he did not particularly want to think about it. And it all seemed so unreal, like something that had taken place in another existence, before this world had been opened to him. There was still so much in this world that he had never even imagined before, although-- and the thought slipped through his mind before he could stop it-- although it was not perhaps quite what it had seemed to be, at first. There was some part of herself that she had kept back from him; he sensed it, and he always wondered what it was.

"I would like to know," she pouted. "Won't you tell me?" And because her pouts drove him wild, and he wanted to do what pleased her, he told her all he could about Hogwarts, its teachers, its classes, its students, and its secrets. She listened with a strangely hungry expression on her face.

"I am glad it is there," she finally said. "Even though it can never truly be for me, never again... it is there, now."

"What a strange thing to say, Marie." Draco felt oddly unsettled. "What on earth do you mean by that? I didn't know you went to Hogwarts. I would have thought Beauxbatons--but when did you find out that you were a Squib? Do they take Squibs there? And how--"

"Nothing, I meant nothing," she said, stroking his finely muscled thigh with its faint dusting of pale golden hair. He shivered, and was instantly distracted. "You must be a very impressive wizard, I think," she added with a smile.

"I'm brilliant at Potions," Draco said modestly. "I have a certain gift for Transfiguration. I'm rather clever at the History of Magic..."

"Show me your wand," said Marie-France.

"Well, it's about eight inches long, and very, very stiff-- at the moment, anyway-- " smirked Draco.

"Non! Non! The 'uzzer one, cheri." She giggled.

"But that's what I meant, of course." He grinned mischievously and reached for the bedside table. After four and a half years, his wand was so much a part of him that he never liked to have it very far away, although in truth he had used it very little since coming here.

Eleven inches, actually. Supple oak with the slightest give to it, powered by a core of dragon's heartstring. Draco rolled it back and forth between his fingers, feeling the little charges of power, amplified in some mysterious way by the arousal he felt for Marie-France. Strange. He'd never noticed those before.

"Can I touch it?" She stretched out her hand eagerly.

"Mon petit chou, you may touch my wand as much as it pleases you," he drawled, capturing her long, slender fingers and drawing them down to the oak.

Her beautiful face was strangely intent as she ran her touch along the wand's shaft. Her golden eyes widened and became almost-- almost-- voracious, thought Draco. The sight aroused him so much that he was having trouble concentrating on anything but his body's reaction to her, but some cool, calculating Malfoy part of him was thinking nonetheless. Something very queer's going on here. It's as if she expects something to happen-- something that's not happening. Expects it to respond to her touch, maybe? But that doesn't make any sense. She's a Squib, always was one-- or at least, that's what she told me.

The locket swung from the chain around her neck. She always wore it; Draco suddenly realized that he had never seen her without it. Was it glowing with a red light? For an instant, it almost seemed to illuminate the entire room. Draco blinked. No, surely that had been his imagination. She gripped the wand. Tighter. Tighter. A look of such intensity passed over her face that it almost frightened him.

But nothing happened. Or at least, nothing that he could see.

Her face drooped. "I should have known," she whispered quietly, as if to herself. In fact, Draco wondered if she remembered that he was still in the room at all. "Those days are over," she continued. "Over forever-- like everything else-- and they can never be brought back." With a sigh, she let go the wand. "Thank you, Draco," she said listlessly. "I only wanted to see."

Slowly, he took the wand back from her, feeling its weight a little suspiciously. It was as if he'd lent it to a Muggle stage-magician for a conjuring trick. Nothing seemed changed, but she looked tired, and for the first time he saw faint lavender circles under her eyes.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Oui." Marie-France turned to the wall.

"Do you-- did something-- what was it that just-"

Silently, she shook her head.

Draco kissed her bared shoulder tentatively. His mind was in turmoil. What had he just seen and heard? What could its meaning be, if, indeed, it meant anything at all? He almost felt that he'd stumbled across a fragment of parchment containing a few scribbled sentences of a very important story, and couldn't even begin to guess at the rest of the roll. Should he question her? Would she answer him truthfully if he did? What questions could he even ask?

Then she turned back to him, her lips warm and pliant under his, and he forgot his doubts in the fierce, mindless desire for physical satisfaction, for satiation and forgetfulness. But this time, there was something different about her performance, and his. For the first time, even as they both cried out their pleasure, his mind was distracted from her and separated from his body. Draco stepped back from what they were doing for just an instant and thought, Yes... I see, now, how it is... how this pleasure might be detached, and set apart from all human feeling. Then he was horrified at himself, and grasped Marie-France harder about her shoulders, his elegant hands clutching at her as if to make amends. That sort of thing was for those idiots at school who shagged everything that walked, always seeking out new conquests, and for the slutty girls who were constantly willing to put out for them. Between the two descriptions, ninety-five percent of Slytherin House above fourth year was pretty well covered. Not him, though; never him, he wouldn't be like that no matter what happened. But in the moment before he returned to her, he saw another face, superimposed over hers, another body, writhing beneath his.

Ginny Weasley.

"Oh God," he groaned, and hoped that Marie-France mistook it for passion.

He began to wonder about her, and what her life had been before they met. She never spoke of it. He wondered how she had gained all the experience she had. "How old were you the first time you did this?" Draco asked her curiously the next afternoon, when they were both catching their breath from playing a long and sensual game with silk scarves.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "With these?"

"No, I don't mean the scarves, I mean when you-- well, you know what I mean. When you lost your virginity."

Marie-France sighed, running one long lavender-colored scarf over the curve of her hip. "Older than you. I was nineteen. Nearly twenty."

"Oh. Why'd you wait that long?"

She looked over his head, out the window. "Many reasons. All too complicated to explain."

He ran a hand along the inside of her arm. "Was it good? Did you like it?"

"I liked it. I did not expect that I would, but I did."

"But you sound sad." Draco wasn't sure why this subject seemed so fascinating to him, but it did. "Did you, uh... did you want it to happen?"

"Not at first. No."

"Oh," was all that Draco could think of to say. "That sounds rather awful," he added lamely, after a moment's thought. He wished he had never brought the topic up, but even more than that, he suddenly, uneasily wished that he had not done what he'd done to Pansy a few weeks before. True, he hadn't gone nearly that far with her, and he couldn't believe that he ever would have; he'd honestly only meant to scare her a little, and to see if he could get her to show any sort of reaction to him. But who knew what darkness really lay within him? Draco sighed, and turned his face to the wall.

"It was not awful, not terrible," said Marie-France in a faraway voice. "You do not understand, Draco. I was not forced. Rather, I made a bargain with him... the man who took me. I offered him my virginity in exchange for... for something that I wished to have, very much."

"Uh-huh," mumbled Draco, without turning his head.

"I should not have told you," Marie-France said. "Does it cause you to think less of me? Even, perhaps, to despise me a bit?"

"I could never do that," Draco said.

She sighed as well, and played with the satin scarf, dragging it across the coverlet. Her face was very sad.

He did not know the right words to say to comfort her, to drag her out of this strange mood. So he tried to comfort her with his body instead, and his lovemaking had more of tenderness in it than ever before. And so she did seem comforted, and strove hard for his pleasure, her face very grave and searching. In a strange sort of way, it seemed to be pleasure greater than anything he had felt from her yet, because she seemed to be reaching out to touch a part of him she had deliberately left undisturbed before. But then, at the last moment, she drew back, and he did not know why. Even as she brought him to tides of ecstasy unimagined, he realized that he did not know her at all; did not know who this cousin of his, this Marie-France Tessier, truly was, because he had seen only that part of her that she wished to show him.

Afterwards, he cradled her sleeping body to his. She had fallen asleep quickly, and so relaxed into his arms as she never did for any length of time otherwise. Draco lay awake, staring into the darkness and wondering just what in the hell was happening to him. He was not himself. At least, he was not anyone that he had ever been in the past. But it didn't seem real, not really. It was as if he and she were suspended in the heart of a crystal, more fragile than any glass could ever be. The slightest breath of wind might destroy this strange thing they had built.

"Did you care for him?" whispered Draco.

"Yes," replied Marie-France. She did not ask who Draco meant, but replied as if there had been no break in the conversation.

"I thought you were asleep."

"I am not. But why did you ask me, if you thought I could not hear you?"

"I don't know," said Draco. "Did you care about him very much? The man, whoever he was?"

A pause.

"I loved him," said Marie-France.

Draco did not reply. He drew her slender arm across his chest, and sighed. He found that he did not want to know what had become of the man that Marie-France Tessier had once loved. Slowly, his mind let go its hold on the waking world.

Since Draco had come to the Villa Straylight in St. Tropez, his sleep had been deep, instant, and dreamless. But that night, he did dream. And later, when he could never quite sort through the threads of what had really happened during those weeks and what had not, he still clearly remembered that dream.

The day was very warm, and he was walking out of doors along a sandy path through a wood. The trees and flowers were strange to him. He knew he could not be in England, nor in France. There was a sort of lushness to everything that he had never seen before; the leaves were a glossier green than he was used to, the blooms a vibrant red and orange and pink. The bushes and undergrowth whispered in the wind. Ahead of him, in a tiny spring-fed pool, a woman was bathing. Her back was turned to him, and her long red hair unravelled in wet ropes over her shoulders. Marie-France. He moved through the water silently, barely rippling it, and grasped her from behind. A wave of sensation passed from him to her, linking them, and the very earth seemed to shudder under their feet. Draco was never quite sure what happened then. She had not turned to face him; perhaps she was not even touching him,. He could not see her face. And yet she had woven her arms around him and pulled his head down to her breast, and he was cradled there, wrapped in a shining web of bliss. He was not even sure that he was touching her; perhaps he was only lying with her on the bank of the pool like a babe in its mother's arms, yet he had penetrated to the very heart of her as he could never do when he made love to her, and she was laid bare to him.

"Mon amour," he groaned, insensibly. It did not seem quite real, even then; perhaps because it was a dream, and in dreams, anything may be; perhaps because he spoke a language not his own, perhaps for some other reason. But he had known what it was that he said. "Mon amour. Je t'aime. Je t'aime."

But there had only been silence in return.

Then she looked up at him, and he bit back a cry of shock. He had thought that she was Marie-France Tessier, the woman who had consumed all his thoughts for the past fortnight. But she was not. She had become Ginny Weasley, the girl he had sworn to forget, to think of no more. And then she grinned at him maliciously, and oddly enough, it was Pansy's grin.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

"Two halves of a whole. And that which is whole, cannot be divided," she said.

Her words seemed to awaken a sleeping fear in him, and he looked at her in something like horror. The lush near-tropical island-- and somehow, now, he knew that it was an island-- had turned menacing, as if the very air was a rotten cloth about to rip. "No," Draco said, trying to pull her arms from around his neck. "No." But it was too late, and he knew it already. She had touched him in a place he had kept sacrosant, and so dealt him a wound that only she could heal. And he knew suddenly that all the desire he had ever felt for Marie-France Tessier, desperate as it was, had been, was only the sad ghost of what he was really capable of feeling. I can never be satisifed with that again... Yet even as he grasped at Ginny, or Marie-France, or whoever she really was, he awoke.

Draco came awake with a gasp, his eyes snapping open. The room was dim but not pitch black. The familiar shapes of the bed, the curtains, the dresser, the Aubusson rose rug. Yes. He knew where he was. It was the room and the bed in which he had slept for the past two weeks. It must be about an hour before sunrise. And there was Marie-France next to him, lying with her face turned to the wall; when he glanced over at her, he saw that she was awake as well. He could not quite see her distinctly, only a glitter of a brown eye beneath long lashes, looking golden in this light, the curve of a cheekbone, and the long ripples of her red hair. It was a dream. Only a dream. It didn't mean anything, nothing at all. But the horror of it was still on him, and Draco shuddered. He rubbed his eyes. He felt only half-awake, as if sticky cobwebs of nightmare were still clinging to him. But wait, she was there, and she could comfort him. He wanted her to hold him, and there was only one way she was really willing to hold him; well, he wanted that, as well. With all the inexhaustible desire of a boy just turned sixteen, he suddenly wanted her, desperately. He reached out a hand to her waist, and, thrashing in the formless sea between sleep and waking, he murmured a name.

"...Ginny?"

His cousin went as stiff as a board. There was something in her eyes that seemed to represent strong emotion, but that made absolutely no sense to him. Then they closed.

Later, Draco could never be quite sure if he had said Ginny Weasley's name. If he believed he had, he would have flung wide a door of thoughts and truths that could not, of course, be opened. So he decided that he had not. Stop it. Go away, he begged the Ginny-in-his-mind, but she did not answer. But every time he made love to Marie-France, it was as if Ginny Weasley sat at the edge of the bed, watching. And the last remaining days slipped by.

They did not speak again of emotion, only of pleasure, desire, and raw carnal need. But he learned that refraining from speech did not keep a thing from coming into being. Something had changed between them during those last days, or perhaps something had been revealed. Sometimes their lovemaking had something of desperation in it, as if they were two damned souls seizing at their last morsel of pleasure before the final stroke of the clock. Sometimes a pall was cast over it, dark and heavy and sad, like an elegy. And sometimes it was fierce, frantic, as if the sheer intensity of it might burn away the last traces of Ginny from Draco's mind and memory. But she wouldn't stop haunting him, this girl who despised him, whose skin he had touched only once, in anger, and whose lips he had never kissed. He frequently thought that if she was anyplace where he could have easily reached her, he might have wrung her neck. But that probably wouldn't have gotten her out of his head, either. Ever since the dream, her spirit stood between him and Marie-France. And for that, he hated Ginny Weasley. Yet he felt something for Marie-France still, something that could not be quantified, or analyzed. Certainly, it was nothing he had ever felt before. He was never able to put a name to it. But like a plant growing towards light, plans shaped themselves in his head, in response to it.

On the next day, the last day of the holidays, he had motored down to Nice in the little red car. When he returned, his heart was pounding as if he had run the entire way, rather than feeling the still unfamiliar sensations of acceleration as the strange internal combustion engine purred smoothly along the winding roads. Draco didn't know if he was doing the right thing or not. It scarcely seemed to matter. The action had its own momentum. He didn't do things on impulse. That had never been a part of who he was. But now, he had, or in a way he had. There were more parts of his inner self than he had ever known; the tender and the treacherous, the emotional and the emotionless, the weak and the strong, all had their voice in what he had decided to do on that winter's day. All the shaky adrenaline rush had been for nothing, in a way; the mistress of records at Beauxbatons could not see him at once, and Draco was told to return at the end of the week. Of course; he should have guessed. It was their Christmas hols, as well. But when they were in session once more, he was going to find out if Marie-France Tessier had ever attended that school. It seemed the first step towards solving this mystery, and he wanted to know before he asked her. They might not be willing to share that information with him at Beauxbatons; well, he knew many ways of getting information. And he had other plans regarding that school, as well; plans that were still half-formed in his mind.

Draco wondered if all his classes would transfer. And if his French was good enough. .

He stopped at the wizarding post office in St. Tropez on the way back, and stood for a long time in the little foyer, hesitating. He looked at the shelves of post owls. In the end, he decided not to send a message to his father informing him of what he planned to do. Lucius Malfoy would find out soon enough, he'd be there tomorrow, or at least that was what he'd said all those weeks before. But it hadn't really been very long. It had only seemed so. A lifetime had passed since the day Draco had come to St. Tropez, wrapped in bitterness, hating the world and everyone in it. Everything had changed. Yet even as he thought these things, turning back towards the car, he caught a glimpse of someone out of the corner of his eye that he had half-hoped never to see again.

Pansy Parkinson was standing before the postal clerk, sending a barn owl with a little scroll tied to its leg.

The sight of her was like a dousing of cold water. Yes, it was definitely her; the slim petite form, the shiny dark hair, that characteristic way she had of tossing her head. It all brought on a host of hateful memories. She hadn't seen him, but if she turned, she surely would. Draco slipped out of the post office as quietly as he could.

Back much earlier at the Villa Straylight than he expected, he parked the car and walked along the beach, unable to shake thoughts of Pansy from his mind. What was she doing here, of all places? Had she come with his father, had Lucius returned early? Draco could think of no other explanation, but then... why had Pansy come as well? If Lucius was going to inform him at last of whatever it was he'd been doing, could she somehow be involved? And if they'd come to take him home, as they surely must have done... would he go with them? Or would he actually do what he'd half-planned to do?

Would he stay here?

He saw a spray of late salt roses that had somehow survived the recent cold, and, pulling the little knife from his belt, cut several stems, feeling the cold petals against his fingers. The color reminded him of Marie-France's cheeks. She'd like them. Damn, his wand wasn't in its holster; he must have forgotten and left it on the bedside table, that wasn't like him-- well, he'd been a bit distracted this morning, when he'd left the villa. Nothing compared to what he felt now, though.

Draco turned back towards the villa. He would see Marie-France; he would talk to her, long and earnestly, and make her understand.

He didn't want to leave her.

He couldn't leave her.

He wasn't going back to Hogwarts.

And it was not only because of the way he felt about her, whatever that actually was. It was more than the way he knew he would never be able to forget her. It was more than the way she had gotten under his skin, the way she would always haunt him... although perhaps he was getting closer to the truth of it there. He had been pulled into the aura of mystery that seemed to surround her, and he needed to find the way out... or in.

He'd been obsessed with Ginny Weasley for years by then; Draco wasn't sure why, but he could admit that, now. Yet in some way he could not begin to understand, that obsession was a part of what he felt for Marie-France Tessier, or perhaps it was the other way around. The two contained each other, and he did not understand why, or how, this could be. It was a mystery that he needed to solve if he wanted to stay sane. And seeing Pansy here had only deepened the mystery further. All these things were connected, Draco knew they were. He was grasping at the edges of a puzzle that was on the brink of unravelling in his hands. And he was going to stay here until it did.

Yes, he was determined to do so, and Draco saw no reason why it shouldn't work out as he wanted it to. He'd always gotten what he wanted, somehow. If he understood more about Marie-France, if he knew more, if he did not always feel so mystified around her... surely they would be on more even ground. Even when he was naked in her bed and holding her in his arms, there was something remote about her, like smoke slipping through his fingertips. Impossible to grasp. But he needed to grasp her. It was as if he could never really get her to stay still, could never measure and quantify what she was, and if only he could, he would say everything he wanted to say to her, and hear everything he wanted to hear from her. Everything would come clear. Of course it would. Draco hurried towards the villa; it was just around the next bend of sand, and he clutched the roses a little tighter.

When he ran over and over his memories later on, he realized that it was the last thing he clearly recalled. Because it was after that when everything began to go hideously wrong, and afterwards, he could never remember how.

He must have gotten up to the tower somehow. He definitely remembered coming down the hallway, and looking into his cousin's peach and silk room, its door halfway open, its air heavy with the scent of roses, the shaded bed clearly visible. Something was happening in that bed. He remembered thinking that he had been looking at something impossible. Something that could not be. The little salt roses fell from his hands, and he backed away from... from them, in the bed, intertwined in front of him. He ground the fragile petals underfoot, against the stone flags of the floor.

Blank.

He was standing before Marie-France now, a little later, it must have been a little later. He'd backed her all the way to the wall of the little dressing room, against the standing mirror. He saw that his reflected self had grabbed her throat with one of his hands, and very large and strong it looked against the delicate white skin where the blue pulse throbbed. His other hand held his wand.

Blank.

Marie-France stood over Draco where he lay on the floor, looking up at her incredulously. She had... hexed him? Certainly, he was sprawled in a heap, and he couldn't get up. (But wasn't she supposed to be a Squib? She didn't have a wand, so how had she done it?) There were tears in her eyes. And she moved and spoke so differently than she had in the past weeks that she seemed like a different person.

"I never meant to hurt you, Draco, dearest Draco."

Blank.

She straightened up then, and touched the locket around her neck. Something within it glowed red. Someone else stood at her side, but Draco had eyes only for Marie-France Tessier.

"Goodbye, Draco Malfoy," she said. "I should not tell you this, but how can it matter now?" She bent down to whisper her last words in his ear. "I have always loved you..."

And it was only then that Draco realized there was no longer the slightest trace of a French accent in her voice.

Blank.