Harry Potter - Series Fan Fiction ❯ Harry Potter and (the rest of) The Beast Within ❯ Snippet: Draco finds a way to express himself without words ( Chapter 12 )

During the engagement party, someone Sapphire invited arrived several days early without warning: Draco Malfoy. This went about as well as expected, and Harry was just as pleased as you would think. The catch is, Draco confessed to Sapphire that his home life was becoming dangerous, and that anywhere he might go on earth, his father could find him. She invited him to visit before packing up to move, to test his resolve and to see how he’ll get along with the newest member of the family.

Faye is a refugee from the country Sapphire’s people were at war with, and she has some resemblance to the twins and Peridot. She can only understand some English, struggles to pronounce what she does understand, and behaves much like a feral child, and no one is quite sure what she is other than ‘not human.’ For those who don’t speak the language of the Licans, her primary method of communicating is with gestures, expressions, and the occasional word in English. Speaking in general is difficult for her, and she's somewhat nonverbal. Harry suspects that bringing Faye into their home is Sapphire’s way of repenting for her actions during the war, but although he worries, he is supportive.

At the party, Draco stuck to her side mostly so Harry wouldn’t accuse him of being too close to Sapphire, and Faye quickly developed a little crush on him. Everyone but Sapphire sees this going horribly; Sapphire is mentally chanting “now, kiss!” every time she sees them together. After this, Sapphire made Draco an offer: he can live in their home as long as he keeps the peace with Harry and helps Faye learn to read and speak English. He agreed and left to pack up in secret, and has just returned. Faye, it turns out, isn’t the only one with a crush.

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Faye sat staring out the window, beyond the landscape outside and into the deepest, darkest recesses of her mind. She sighed as an image of the wizard of her dreams flashed across her memory. His hair was almost as pale as Sapphire’s and his eyes reminded her of the sky on a day when a storm was brewing. Her left ear flicked as she heard a knock at the door. Thinking it was Sapphire come to get her for lunch, she called out for her to enter, all the while wishing she knew more English. Yes, no, and various other monosyllable words would only get her so far. To her surprise, she instantly recognized the scent on the air that blew in through the door to her room. She spun about. “Dray-ko!” she said as he pulled her to her feet.

Draco smirked. “I told you I’d come back, didn’t I?” She glanced at the calendar. “I guess I am a little early,” he laughed. “Do you mind?” Faye shook her head shyly, locking her eyes on her feet and her hands behind her back, but Draco stepped into her space and tipped her chin up to meet his eyes. Despite her embarrassment she made no move to push him away; instead, she leaned into his chest. He sighed and wrapped his arms around her, and ran his fingers through her shaggy white hair. “I missed you.”

This time Faye pushed him away. “What’s wrong?” he asked. She looked up at him, pointed at his feet and hers, then the space around them, then she lifted her hands in question. Draco caught on quickly. “Not that kind of miss. I…how can I explain this...” He thought it over a moment, distracted by the sight of her upper teeth digging into the corner of her lower lip. “Right. You are close to Iris,” he explained, gesturing for words she might not know yet. “When she is gone, do you feel sad?” Faye stared at his hands poised as if rubbing his eyes, mouthed a few words in her language at her feet, then looked up and nodded. “You miss her. When she's here, you are happy, because you missed her. Well.” Draco shrugged and jammed his hands in his pockets, feeling like an idiot. “I missed you.”

This time, Faye understood, but she looked no less bewildered. She glanced around as if expecting to find someone else in the room with them, then held up her hands indicating herself; as if to say, “There's no one else here. You missed me?” Despite her difficulty communicating, moments like this - and her sassy, goofy sense of humor - were proof she wasn’t a fool.

Harry and his friends would never believe their eyes if they saw Draco with Faye; had they heard the soft, fond laugh he uttered, they wouldn't believe it was him. They, however, didn’t matter worth a knut, and their belief was worth even less. “Yes, silly,” he told Fay, “I missed you. When you have feelings for someone, you miss them when you’re apart.” He sprawled on the sofa before the window, patting the seat beside him.

Faye looked terribly confused. She stared at the floor and mouthed the word feelings, trying to reach back into her memory to divine what it meant. Draco smacked his palm against his forehead. This was what he got for trying to be smooth and just slide the confession into normal conversation; normal conversation went out the window when one of the party couldn’t understand the other. “I...am fond of you.” Faye still looked lost. “I…like you?” Nope. Still lost without a map.

Well, crap. They sat in silence for a long while, Faye bewildered and embarassed, and Draco feeling like an idiot. At last, he came up with an idea—an idea that made him feel like a sappy pussy-whipped buffoon, but an idea that might work regardless.

He cleared his throat so as to not startle her, took her right hand, and laid it palm-down on the left side of his chest. Faye blinked up at him, glanced down at his hand, then met his eyes again with parted lips. Draco summoned his courage. “Yours,” he said, pointing at her hand, or rather, his heart beneath it. “That is yours.”

Faye’s bright gray eyes dropped to the soft gray wool of his sweater, and her clawed fingers flexed slightly against his chest. Underneath her fingertips, she felt a gentle vibration in his ribcage, and when she looked back up at him, it quickened; with soft eyes, Draco lifted his free hand to brush his knuckles along her jaw, and the thudding grew even faster. Suddenly, Faye recognized the look in his eyes, the expression on his face, and the meaning behind the words she didn’t understand. She saw this feeling every day in Sapphire and Harry, in Iris and Sirius, in Peridot and Remus, and all the rest, and although she didn’t know his word for it, she knew hers.

“Passen?” she asked quietly, briefly tapping her free hand over her heart. Finally, Draco remembered reading that word in the translation dictionary Sapphire gave him the first day of the party, although he wasn’t entirely sure of the meaning; he spent hours reading through the various definitions to distract him from Potter's glares. He could tell Faye knew what he meant, though, and he couldn’t decide if that was exciting or frightening.

“Yes, Faye.” He took her free hand in his own and held it loosely. “Passen. I have passen for you.”

There was doubt in her eyes for a moment as she searched his for the emotion he was referring to. Finding it fenced in by fear and anxiety, she smiled up at him. “I…passen…Dray-ko.” She smiled shyly, looking for realization in his stormy blue eyes. First she saw shock...probably that she’d said an entire sentence at once, even if it was a jagged mix of English and her language.

Draco grinned like an idiot—because he felt like an idiot—and leaned forward to rest his forehead in her hair. “And I passen you, Faye.” At this point, he couldn’t care less if passen meant like, love, or want to have wild monkey sex with, so long as she felt it for him.

“It means care for.”

Draco and Faye jerked apart at the unexpected voice by the door. Sapphire looked more tired than usual, but hardly remorseful. “Guess I was kinda quiet,” she admitted, seeing the glare on Faye’s face. “Sorry.” She sat down at the desk in the corner and leaned down to rub her leg; she reinjured that leg when she tackled George during the party, and it was taking its time to heal. “Draco,” she said, “welcome back. And Faye?” She grinned, and said in their language, “You are becoming talkative!” Faye blushed and ducked to hide her face behind Draco’s shoulder. “No embarrassment, little cat. It is good. Now…” She switched to English. “…we just need to teach you more English.”

Draco gave another un-Draco-like smile, and remembered how he had treated people who needed help before. That was in his old life, though. In this life, he wasn’t bound by his parents’ generational snobbery or their plans for him. In this life, if he wanted to dedicate his time to helping a shy, uneducated, traumatized immigrant acclimate to her new home, by golly, he could, and he would. He thought back to the dictionary again, combed through the words he remembered, and carefully constructed a sentence to illustrate his eagerness; it might sound like gibberish for all he knew, but he knew as much of it as Faye knew of English.

“When I did end?”

Sapphire's eyes widened but her smile froze on her face; she sighed, thinking hard of how she could answer that without bruising his ego. In the end, she only came up with one answer: "Mother Lica, give me strength."