Love and Other Misfortunes

Chapter 22

"Draco..." she said, glancing around confused. "Where is your drawing room?"

"Oh..." The tense expression on his face suddenly faded as he loosened his hold on her in order to look in the direction she was staring. His lips twitched and a hint of a blush appeared on his cheeks.. "It's—Unplottable."

His tone was deceptively composed. As though having an Unplottable drawing room were a common thing.

"It's—what?" She stared at him.

His cheeks flushed further. "I—hated it. After the war—I couldn't stand it. So many horrible things happened there. My mother renovated the whole thing but it still made me sick just passing it. So—one night—Blaise and I were quite drunk—"

The tips of his ears had turned red as he was speaking.

"And—I came up with the idea of making it Unplottable. So we performed the fidelius charm, Blaise paid some tramp he found to act as the Secret Keeper and then after we finished up we obliviated the whole night from him and sent him on his way. Now no one knows how to find it—so, functionally speaking the drawing room doesn't exist anymore."

Hermione was gaping at him, open mouthed.

"Y-you—" she spluttered.

"My father was quite irritated about it for a while. Apparently his favorite pipe and a two hundred year old bottle of firewhiskey were in there. Although—I'm fairly certain we finished that firewhiskey by the end of the night." Draco was staring at the wall of the foyer where the main entrance to the drawing room wasn't.

"Sometimes I don't even know what I'm going to do with you," Hermione said, putting her hands on her hips and eyeing him severely.

Draco shrugged. "It's not as though we needed it. We have drawing rooms in the other two wings of the manor. My father can buy a new manor if he really wants more. The house is much better without it."

"You're so overdramatic." She sighed.

"I can't help it, it's the Veela imperative," he said snarkily, closing in on her.

He pulled her down a hallway. "Never mind our drawing rooms, I want to show you my potions lab. I've got a batch of the Skele-Gro I told you about under stasis and I'm trying to decide what the proper growth accelerant would be, when I used potio nimbus it interfered with the efficacy of the murtlap tentacles. So—I'll show you what the options are on hand, and you can advise."

Draco's potions lab was down in the dungeons of the east wing. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all brightly whitewashed. There were four immaculate stainless steel tables and an entire wall of alphabetized ingredients kept behind protective wards. Cauldrons of all sizes and types hung, shining, from a bar on one side along with every variety of stirring rod Hermione had ever heard of: glass, steel, silver, iron, aluminium, copper, and a wide variety of wood. A full set of gorgeous knives lay unfurled across a knife roll beside several cutting boards and mortar and pestles in several sizes. There were several complex sets of scales on a shelf that sat below another shelf filled with empty beakers and vials of every size. A large chalkboard on wheels was filled with Draco's elegant handwriting and pulled over near the table that had the partially completed Skele-Gro variation.

A long bookshelf ran along another wall. The top two shelves were filled with uniform journals and the remaining four with potion books. Some were in mint condition and others were quite worn, as though their owner liked cracking the spines and filling their margins with notes. Hermione studied them.

"When Severus died, for some inexplicable reason, it turned out he'd named me as a beneficiary of his estate. The old books were all his," Draco explained. "A lot of these projects were too."