ruedelarue

"Thanks." Scooting past, she glances up at him, just as he looks down at her. That is all.

Except...

There's such a lack of animosity in his gaze that she freezes in the door-frame, bag clutched to her chest.

—

205 words of fluff. CW: Pregnancy

“Draco?” Hermione calls from the kitchen.

No answer. She tries again from the living room.

“In the garden!”

She halts at the French doors just as he appears from behind a shrub. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think I'm doing?” he replies, crossing the lawn. “Finding you a stick to pee on.”

He presents her a twig, Y-shaped and muddy.

She holds back a laugh and shows him hers. “I already have it. Look, two lines.”

His eyes pause at the white strip in her hand. “I’m so lost.”

“I’m pregnant."

He looks back up. “Really?”

“Really.”

He gapes at her for a moment, then hurls the twig across the lawn where it lands in the shrub it came from.

A sheepish smile on his face when he turns back to her.

Gods, how she loves him.

“I love you,” she says, throwing her arms around him, creasing the pregnancy test while doing so. She doesn’t care.

He holds her tight. “I love you."

“Can we get the twig back?” she asks.

Draco moves his head around, just as he always does when her hair gets up his nose. Freed, he plants a kiss at her crown. “Whatever for?”

Theo lets out a small gasp.

"What is it?"

"Is that Draco?"

Hermione scrambles to sit up.

She follows Theo's gaze across the field, past a meadow-like stretch of flowers, to where a runner is pounding along a sandy path. Shirtless. He's pulled back the top of his platinum hair. Panting besides him, a ridiculously excited black and white dog.

"Yes, it's him," she says.

"Who in their right mind goes for a run in this heat?"

Hermione doesn't reply. She's too busy watching Malfoy run, the dog now sprinting ahead, ignoring his whistle commands.

"He has a dog," she remarks.

"That he does."

"Oh Gods, is it coming this way?"