My couple was Kumail and Emily from the movie The Big Sick. They break up when she realises he isn't serious about her and is continually being set up for an arranged marriage. When she is placed into a medical coma, he finds that he genuinely loved her after all.

I'm really honoured to be able to join in on this fest's farewell tour, as so many of my favourite fics come out of this over the years. Thank you to the mods who made this fest possible. I hope you like the spin I've put on it and forgive everything else.

Much thanks to beta disenchantedglow and alphas mojojojoiamhe, gigiluna11, and kahcicamera for helping me flesh out the story. Also, hop over to Tumblr to check out the awesome pretty disenchantedglow made me!

Spinning the Stars

Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all past years are,

Or who cleft the devil's foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy's stinging.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,

All strange wonders that befell thee...

-John Donne

Somehow, when you come back to life from a state of nonbeing, you expect everything to have stayed exactly the same.

It didn't.

Where she went, one second had been 1.231 seconds in real life, one minute had been twenty-one minutes, and one hour had been 370 hours. She had been gone for only one day. Over nine years had passed in the real world.

Harry and Ginny had two other kids. Bill and Fleur were grandparents. Molly had passed away in a freak accident—did Hermione have a chance to speak to her wherever she went?

Like many other questions hurled at Hermione from the moment she returned, she was hard-pressed to answer this one. Not necessarily because she hadn't seen Molly, but because once she reappeared in the present, which was simultaneously also her past future, all her memories of the elsewhen started to dissipate, like a picture set on fire, with holes appearing throughout the images, larger and larger until nebulous smoke was clearer than the image itself. It was frustrating; rage-inspiring. The only thing that could have made the lost time a worthwhile sacrifice was knowledge and even that was siphoned away from her.

Hermione had come back to the living from being petrified before. Then, it had been different. It had been like waking from a dead faint. One second she was out, the next she was awake and disoriented and in the hospital. There hadn't been any elusive floating dreams and visions of something barely there; only just out of reach.

Immortality, or some weak version of it, was not all that it was cracked up to be. Not that Hermione had ever gone looking for it. It had always been the physics of time that drew her.

Stepping back into the present (her current future) was like stepping into a time warp. When she looked around, it was filled with images of a future sometime down the road, such as a Harry with his middle slightly softer than before, or a Ginny who was now more of a mom than she used to be. The present felt more unreal to her than the elsewhen she had been.

It was as though time had completely passed her by, rounded the corner without stopping at Go. Life had zipped by on a rocket, leaving her nothing but vivid memories of yesterday, a now former life.

This had always been, of course, a distinct possibility in her line of work; from playing around with the realities of time and space, fiddling with the outermost boundaries of existentialism. Knowing that did not make the adjustment any easier.

After the press conference where she looked around and ascertained that he was nowhere in sight, she followed Harry numbly to his home. Ron—a very different version of Ron with a thick red beard and muscular arms and laugh-wrinkles at the edges of his blue eyes—had hugged her and nuzzled the top of her head affectionately, but ultimately had to go home to his wife and kids. At Harry's, they talked—or he and Ginny did, to catch her up on what had happened in the past nine— nine! —years. She listened with the same paralyzed blankness.

Inside her head, the words nine years nine years nine years drummed on a loop.

She couldn't help thinking of that time a year ago—or ten years ago, actually—when it had all begun.

Because of course Hermione Granger would find a way to stopper time if she set her mind to it.

Of course she did.

The Astromancer Most High lived on a mountainous plateau somewhere in the Middle East.

Hermione had been looking forward to this day since the first she had heard of its existence, which was roughly a year ago. Nediyar, or Unknown Peak, as it was called, was inaccessible to most people, first and foremost because it was unknown to almost everyone. Even Hermione hadn't known of its existence until she had worked in the Department of Mysteries for three years.

The Portkey deposited her at the top of the white steps just before the domed interior of the temple. The wind whooshed around her and through the empty, open chamber. Outside she could see down and around in every direction. Already, she felt a calm settle over her in the midst of all this tranquility.

It was brought to a screeching halt when she saw a lone person walking towards her wearing an older but still obnoxiously familiar smirk on his face.

"Draco Malfoy," Hermione said in shock, rocking back on her heels. Of all the people she had to see here, he would have ranked among the top ten most unwelcome. Not number one, by any means, since she had never accorded him that much importance.

"And good evening to you," he replied, his lofty nod too relaxed for him to have been taken aback by her presence.

Which meant he knew she was going to be here.

Which meant—going by his fancy gold-embroidered robes with pearl-encrusted cuffs—that he…

"Don't tell me that you're the Astromancer Most High," she said, with something like aghast disbelief spreading over every inch of her.

He raised a single eyebrow. "Why not?"

The questions shot out of her. "How did you even get this title? Why did they choose you ? Don't they know…"

Then she trailed off at the flinty look in his eyes and bit back anything else she might have wanted to add. Caution finally overcame valour.

"Do go on, Granger. I'm sure that it was easy enough to get approval to come here and that your abominably plebeian manners aren't affecting your chances at getting what you want. Time travel, isn't it? Your research project. How quaint." Sarcasm tinted every word of his reply.

Hermione flushed and swallowed back her host of insulting questions to make a belated attempt at civility. "Look, Malfoy, I didn't—nobody thinks that you—that is…" She wilted at the lordly sneer on his face as he waited for her to finish a sentence that wasn't insulting—something that currently didn't seem possible considering her word vomit.

She held up a pacifying hand and he crossed his arms, waiting with impatient hauteur and his head thrown back. With his feet spread apart, he looked about nine feet tall and quite capable of preventing her from stepping foot inside the Nediyar by force quite apart from magic.

"I didn't mean what you thought I meant," Hermione said finally in a lower, calmer voice. "I'm just surprised to see someone I know here. It's—not the most common post in the world, and I thought it'd be someone—well, older and…" She drifted off again.

"As it happens, it does take some connections to get here." He inclined his head at her in a pointed fashion. "Which I'm sure you know a lot about."

"What do you mean—oh, you mean my working at the Department of Mysteries."

"I meant close personal friendships, like the one with the Savior of England."

Was this—was he trying to insinuate favoritism when he himself got his current position courtesy of his self-professed connections? She scoffed and threw back her own head. "Last I heard, the Astromancer Most High wasn't a title given to just anyone, especially not someone who hasn't even reached his third decade."

"It's still not," he said, glowering at her. His eyes glittered with a silvery light like the oases below them. "I'm not the Astromancer Most High."

"Oh." Then, a moment later, after she had digested this news, Hermione sighed with exasperation. "Then why are you keeping me out here? Surely, you have better things to do than—"

He cut her off. "I am, however, his assistant, so follow me and let's just get what you need so you can leave." Without waiting for her to respond, he turned on his heel and strode off through the doors.

After a moment of quick reflection, she belatedly realised that the rudeness had mostly been on her part and not his, as was traditional. She flushed with mortification and hurried after him.

The outside world faded away to the echoes of their footsteps as they walked through several arches to reach a courtyard of white marble. The courtyard was open to the night sky and surrounded by an open arcade, much in the manner of a sahn within mosques. There was a hushed atmosphere in the empty space, and the glitter of the white marble reflected back the architecture in the way of a pool of water. In the middle of the courtyard, as though floating in the midst of a lake, was an octagonal pavilion with a domed roof that extended outward over the terraced area like a Japanese karahafu. In the distance, under the reflected light, it appeared as still and sentient as a caped man hunched over in watchfulness.

The walk to the pavilion across the white expanse of endless cool marble seemed to take an eternity. It was so quiet that now, along with their footfall, Hermione could hear her own breathing and the billowing of Draco's robes ahead of her in the great, still night. He walked at a furious pace and she had to hurry to keep up. Once up close, Hermione could not help but stop to gasp in awe at the beauty of the pavilion, which was much bigger than it had appeared in the distance. The building was surrounded by intricate gold lattice-work for half-walls that were connected to the roof by spiraling columns decorated with paintwork in vibrant colours and outlined with fine gold paint. The shadows made on the ground by the trellised roof trim appeared as delicate as lacework.

Everything was exquisitely rendered. Even the steps leading up to the building were edged with painted sculpting on the risers. The outer walls of the pavilion were paneled with elaborate moving images of the stories behind the constellations.

In her slack-jawed amazement, Hermione turned around to share this moment with someone and met the bored, heavy-lidded stare of Draco Malfoy. She lost her awed smile.

"Somehow I remembered you being terrified of heights, and yet here you are," he said, strolling forward around the surrounding walkway until he came to the most elaborate octagonal face, which bore the image of a swirling galaxy. It opened up at a touch from him.

Hermione followed him forward, not wanting to miss a moment of what he did here. "This isn't that high." Before she had been taken through the Nediyar, she had seen below them, down the uneven rocky edges that formed the plateau of the Most High Astromancy Circle and marveled at this holy place completely invisible to most people.

"It's called the Unknown Peak and he's the Astromancer Most High for a reason," Draco replied and lazily waved his wand in some wide motion almost as though he were readying the orchestra to play.

He stepped inside the pavilion with Hermione close on his heels. She did not want to miss a thing he did. Inside the smaller space, Hermione gazed up with breathless happiness. The domed ceiling above them was edged with cornices and set with coloured tiles to make intricate geometric patterns of turquoise, sapphire, opal, and pink.

Then, the ground shifted beneath Hermione's feet so that she stumbled and fell backwards against the wall, which seemed to shudder at her touch. Draco reached forward to grab a hold of her forearm, pulling her in towards him just before the wall she fell against disappeared, along with all the other octagonal faces. The entire pavilion sighed and began to stretch, expanding so that the half-wall that formed a railing outside pushed outward. Hermione felt the ground beneath them shake as they began to rise up into the air.

"Malfoy!" Hermione shrieked. At first, she had wanted to shake off his hand but now she was desperately holding onto his wrist with both hands. His hand seemed to be the only steady thing in this terrifying sentient building that was now the height of the Eiffel Tower and still growing. The ground seemed to disappear below them with terrifying rapidity. Within moments, the building was so high up in the air that she could hardly make out the white marble courtyard through the clouds. The rest of Nediyar, and the mountainous plateau, was now but a speck below them.

"What—is—happening!" she continued to hyperventilate at her shrillest volume.

"Would you calm yourself?" Draco asked in a very testy sort of tone, which could have been more to do with how her fingernails were digging into his skin than genuine annoyance. "You can't fall out anyway. I really wish this all didn't come as so much of a surprise to Unspeakables. Even those in a junior position," he tacked on with enough dryness that she would have felt it a comment on her status if she had been capable of processing insults at the moment.

The building finally creaked to a halt, Hermione opened first one eye, then the other to verify that the world had stopped moving before slowly removing her fingernails from Draco's hand, one finger at a time. She started to breathe again and, with her returned oxygen flow, grew embarrassed by her breakdown a moment ago.

Honestly. She was an Unspeakable, one of the youngest in history, and she had almost had a meltdown. It was just that she really did hate heights and, with survival no longer on the line as it had been in all those harrowing heights-related fiascos she participated in years ago, she never anticipated being so high in the air ever again. But she could handle it. She had it under control.

Hermione cleared her throat and nodded professionally at Draco, who grimaced back at her.

"All right then," he said, shaking out his really very poncey robes before turning away.

Hermione blinked. The panels surrounding the inner room had disappeared and they now stood on an empty platform in the middle of space, with nothing separating them from the darkness of eternity but the domed roof above. All around them, there were glowing, spinning shapes encased in glass boxes, floating in the air as if held by invisible strings.

"You're here for a neutron star." Draco now stood at a round podium at the center of the room. The podium was five feet across, and as she stepped inside, balusters rose from the ground to form protective rails around them. A long pole appeared out of thin air before Draco that, to Hermione's bemused eye, resembled a lacrosse stick.

"Um. Yes. That's right." Hermione stared with bemusement as Draco pulled on black leather gloves with what looked to be steel palms. He grasped the stick, which then grew longer and longer.

Did everything here grow longer and longer? It was as though she were surrounded by giant phallic symbols. She almost felt like succumbing to a sudden onset of the giggles, or maybe it was the altitude.

"Hey, are you watching?" Draco demanded, whipping his head around to look at her.

"Yes." She hurriedly snapped her attention back to him.

He turned back to his task and, at a signal from him, the floating glass boxes slowly sank into the ground and disappeared from view. The overhanging trellises withdrew into the domed ceiling, with the tiles making clicking sounds as they stacked up one on top of another before shrinking down to a spot at the very top and center. Gradually, she could see the entirety of the universe around them.

The transformation did not stop there. The paneled walls had already disappeared, but now the columns supporting the roof also retreated into the floor, leaving Draco and Hermione in the round podium with its meager baluster in the center of an empty white marble octagon. Hermione let out a faint whimper that she couldn't bite back.

The vastness of space hovered overhead, with the infinite expanse of the night sky stretching over them. Although the outer flooring hadn't disappeared along with the walls and now provided some modicum of comfort to her with its fifty metres of width, Hermione felt faint with a sudden surge of vertigo. She began to crouch down next to Draco to make herself shorter than the baluster.

Draco paused in the middle of unreeling a long length of rope that was coiled at the base of the lacrosse stick to gaze down at her hunched figure for a moment without speaking. She cleared her throat. He raised an eyebrow. She slowly rose to her full height and tossed back her hair as nonchalantly as she could.

"Neutron star, yes," she said, lifting her chin.

"Hmm," he said before turning back to his stick, but at least he hadn't made a snide remark. Not that she could do anything about it if he did, given that she now depended on him to get them back down to earth.

Hermione gripped the top of the baluster with white fingers. They were so high up that she could see the curvature of the earth.

"We currently have no neutron stars in the vault, so I have to catch it for you."

"Catch...a star," she repeated.

"How else did you think they did it?" he asked with a condescending scoff, as though she were a simpleton not to know this fact that had never been in anything she had ever read. "So, I'm going to spin out the bait." He held up the length of rope in his left hand, at the end of which dangled a spinning ball of black fog. "Neutrons."

Hermione blinked and nodded as though she understood. She had never in her life wished so hard that the Department of Mysteries gave out handbooks or introduced them to ideas before they sent them forth into the night to deal with unspeakable things.

Unfortunately, the terrifying shock of being so high into the firmament meant that she wasn't absorbing all the information flying at her very well. She had a million questions to ask but was also prevented from asking by her need to take slow, even breaths. She was also pretty sure she just saw the International Space Station spinning past below them.

She watched as Draco gave the stick a small, practiced turn in his palm and then he spun the bait in his left hand with slow sure circles, loosening the rope little by little so that the neutrons went farther and farther into the night. Once the bait was so far away that she could no longer see the end of the rope, Draco hefted the stick in his right hand almost as though it were a spear he was getting ready to throw. In that moment, he looked older, professional, and extremely focused.

It was a very different look on Draco Malfoy than any she had seen before and she had to blink a little too make sure it was the same person. The result was a conversational sally that was less than brilliant: "So. You're ambidextrous."

He cast her a sideways look filled with incredulity. She supposed she did sound rather like an interviewer for the Prophet.

He answered her at face value. "One of the job requirements."

Of all the things required for his job, which was apparently fishing in the outermost reaches of earth's atmosphere for swirling masses of energy or light, somehow being ambidextrous didn't seem to be the most important requirement, but she didn't comment.

They waited in silence while she saw the stars with such glaring clarity that it felt as though she had always been blind before. From down below, the stars had always seemed small and whitish-yellow from the ground. Now, she could see, maybe courtesy of the protective film around them, that they were a multitude of swirling colors. Something shining flew past them and it appeared so close to her head that she ducked unconsciously. Luckily, Draco was so focused on his task that he didn't see.

After an hour, the rope tightened, and Draco began to churn the bottom of the pole in small circles so that the rope began to coil and pull in. He moved exceedingly fast.

Suddenly, Draco swung out with the netted end at something that she couldn't see, like a flyswatter launching through the air. In the next moment, there was something in the net.

Hermione felt breathless with excitement. Her skin felt tight on her face and her hair was pulling in all directions.

It took her a moment to realise that she literally couldn't breathe. All the air had been sucked out of her lungs and even her lips felt pulled outward by an incredible force.

She watched with her eyelids forcibly pried apart as Draco, clenching his jaw against the force, shrank the stick down and reached out a steel-palmed hand to the whirling energy inside the net to pull it out. Within his two plated palms, the energy slowed and pulsed in place. Draco muttered some words under his breath and Hermione felt her lungs unclench and a rush of air rush back into her body.

Draco rotated the star between his two hands and the steel covering his palms separated from his gloves to enclose the star with force, as though sealing in a vacuum-wrapped package. It was no bigger than a Rubic's cube.

Their eyes met. For the first time in her life, Hermione was filled with so much respect for Draco Malfoy that she was speechless.

"There's your star," Draco said, unaware that anything had changed.

Hermione's tongue finally unglued itself from the roof of her mouth. "Catch a falling star," she said, swallowing back a torrent of words, questions and exclamations. She shook her head in disbelief. "I never knew it was possible."

"All things are possible with magic." His voice was dry and held a mocking edge, but she was so exhilarated she didn't even notice. "You just have to put a little time and effort into it."

"That was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life."

Draco lifted his gaze and looked all around them. The sky remained still with only microscopic undulations to reflect infinitesimal variations. One side of his lips lifted a little in the first expression of warmth she had seen from him. "It is pretty amazing."

"No," Hermione said, still shaking her head. "I meant you. That was amazing."

His head swiveled back around and he frowned at her, obviously searching for hidden insults in her compliment and then when he realised she was serious, he blushed. Draco Malfoy actually blushed. Hermione hadn't even thought he was capable of turning color.

It was a week later before she could find time to wrest herself away.

During the day, every single moment was spent in the Ministry reviewing exactly what had happened to her. The Office of the Misuse of Magical Artifacts had been five seconds away from siphoning out every last memory she had in her mind so that they could have it on personal record.

In the evenings, Ginny, now a tireless mom without a Quidditch career to take the edge off her stamina, planned event after event for her to attend.

Hermione bore it all and said all the right things. It had been the same nine years ago after she returned from Nediyar. Without the time warp, it was just the week after for her. On the surface, nothing had changed.

At a lull at the end of one of these events, Hermione took the opportunity to slip away. She Apparated to just a little ways outside the wards of a seaside cottage in Dorset. It was dark outside, being just after ten o'clock, but a bright moon shone overhead, guiding her every step as she made the way surely up the stone stairs leading from the beach to the upper level.

Sitting on the clifftop was a stone edifice with a small yard and breathtaking views in all directions. On one side, it was afforded an unfettered view of the endless sea; on the other, it was bracketed from the outside world by a magnificent sheer rock face. Standing in the yard was nothing like standing on top of the world with nothing between you and a falling star, but it was accounted one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Once, for a brief period of time, she had believed it to be a paradise on earth.

There was a light glowing from one of the windows. The front parlor. Hermione approached the cottage cautiously, willing the hope inside her to dim. It was undoubtedly another family in residence.

Nine years. Nine . Almost a decade ago. Their last conversation hadn't exactly been a bowl of roses.

The hope refused to lie down and die a dignified death.

The door opened, and she felt his presence even before she saw him. A tall, lanky figure with the most improbable shade of white-blond hair—the colour of Polaris, she had once told him—stood framed by the candlelight behind him.

She held her breath, knowing with all her heart that she shouldn't keep hoping. He hadn't been there that day at the conference, even though he was clearly in England. It might not have been important enough to him.

Nine years had passed.

She had to keep reminding herself, because it felt like just yesterday. A month ago, actually, when she saw him last.

Earlier that week at the Potters', she had managed to keep from asking about Draco just so she wouldn't keep hoping. That decision had sealed her lips from being able to ask at all.

Maybe she should have. Then she wouldn't be here.

When she drew abreast of him, she took him in and she saw as he did the same to her. Probably noting the unwrinkled face, the slim build, the unaged mien of a much younger woman. He himself looked the same with his back to the light, except there were new lines bracketing his mouth.

"You've come back," he said, and though she searched for an inflexion, she found none.

What she did find was the glint of something else in the candlelight.

The glint of a wedding ring on his fourth finger.

Her fourth project in the Department of Mysteries had been a personal project. She planned on unraveling the secret of the Time-Turner, a task that had always fascinated her.

Reverse engineering with the actual artifact was now impossible, with the world's supply of Time-Turners completely decimated by Harry's mad dash through the Ministry. The British Ministry had once housed every last one of them from around the world. They were now an extinct item.

Attempting to remanufacture one was dangerous, forbidden—and only sanctioned by the Department of Mysteries due to external politics. For her part, Hermione, like so many others who had held one within her grasp, couldn't forget the feeling of the world whirling past her, like watching a movie rewind in three dimensions.

It was all tied to the physics of time and the longevity of wizards as a whole. Wizards aged slower the more they propelled themselves at high speeds, through Apparation or Floo-travel or Portkeys. This form of travel, in turn, was all propelled by some mass that slowed the world around them as they winked in and out between the paper of reality. Velocity time dilation was a mathematical concept now accepted by even those incapable of magic. Extrapolating all this had made Hermione feel she was on the cusp of solving the fundamentals of magic.

Quarks and preons and neutrons. The very deepest secret contained within the Department of Mysteries was the so-called Nediyar, or its former name, the Tower of Babel, the infamous tower created to reach the stars.

Hermione had always considered the story to be nothing more than a myth, but then again, she had formerly believed magic to be a myth as well.

Nediyar, or Unknown Peak, was where the wisdom of the stars originated. And it was wisdom. Wisdom and mass and energy and force. It was a portal of alien powers, of energy harvested from falling stars, arguably the greatest secret in the wizarding world. Possibly even its very origin.

Unspeakables learned of its location on a need-to-know basis, and anyone else coming into contact with knowledge of the place forgot it instantly. It had been imbued with the Essence of Forgetting. No books could be written on the subject before it was instantly vanished.

"So, how did you really get the position?" Hermione asked Draco, a week later, while they were sitting at the side of the courtyard to eat their sandwiches.

At least he was eating the sandwiches, though he sat on top of the marble half-wall as though he had to be higher up in the world than everyone. She held her sandwich in her hands as she waited for him to respond.

"Magic," he said and she rolled her eyes.

She kind of knew how to handle him now. "I mean, they chose the right person." Her face fell into sincere lines even despite her secret agenda in digging out details because she had seen him in action and it was poetry in motion. Watching him was like seeing a ball of energy spinning on a preordained axis for all of eternity. Catching a glimpse of a sphere of light that glowed so bright that you couldn't look at it with your bare eyes. Pure grace. She couldn't imagine anyone else up there, at the top of the world, spinning out the bait for the stars. "You're perfect for the job."

"Wish the Department of Mysteries had thought I was good enough for them ." He spoke with enough sourness that she felt he was revealing quite a bit as to his job prospects in England after the war rather than reacting to the state of the sandwiches, which she thought were delicious. "Astromancy is a male-dominated field," he said finally. "And—" he grimaced a bit "—Purebloods only."

Hermione had yet to meet the Astromancer Most High, but she had already guessed about the maleness of the subject matter from the numerous erect symbols. She took a bite before peering at him. "What's the frown for?"

Draco shrugged. "Nothing. It's just ironic. The most advanced subject in magic is astronomy; it's also the most ancient; and it's also the most outdated in values. It's a contradiction in terms."

Hermione chewed carefully. "You're talking about being a Pureblood?"

"I would have liked to have gotten this job even without being a Pureblood in one of the longest lines of only sons, yes," he said. "It would have been a jewel in my crown to be a Muggleborn witch and be made the Astromancer Most High's Assistant." He turned to look at her then. "Isn't that why you're really here?"

"I'm really not after your job, Draco," Hermione said. "But thank you for the compliment, although I don't think you meant to give me one. I mean, it's taking all my prepossession to not take off screaming into the void. Like you said, I still don't like heights all that much."

He was silent for a very long time. They would have been able to hear each other chew except the sound of silence was filled with a great many other sounds of the great unknown. "You? Run away?" His mouth curled up in that funny lopsided way as though the thought amused him. "You'd run screaming into the void only if it were filled with all the secrets of the universe."

She took another bite of her sandwich and didn't respond. He wasn't wrong.

"If it were you, they'd probably give the job to you." When she turned to look quizzically at him, he shrugged and said, "Regardless of not being Pureblood and a male."

She raised her eyebrows at him.

"Yes, that's a compliment, Granger. Don't be obtuse."

She decided to take his compliment the way it was given, in a completely deadpan manner. "I'm glad you told me. I never would have guessed otherwise." She pretended not to see how her sarcasm made his lips curve upward into a real smile, small though it was. "The world has turned on its axis."

"Millions of worlds are turning on their axis as we sit and speak," he agreed.

It was true, in more ways than one.

"I don't want to impose," Hermione said now. She felt awkward and exposed.

The last time they spoke was grafted into her brain like epigraphs on gravestones. By being here, she felt as though she were making a statement when she had wanted to make a very different type of statement. The I-care-less-than-you statement. Though she didn't know how she was able to achieve that when she couldn't care less than he did.

He hadn't cared about her in the first place.

Yet he was here now, and the place looked empty but for him. He could have been carved from granite the way he stood framed in the doorway, as though he had been there for eons—as though he had never left this place and just stayed here as sentry on the off chance that she would come back here.

That was a foolish pipe dream.

"You're not imposing," he said, holding the door open by standing with his back to it. There was something wry in his voice, as though what he said was an understatement. "I've been here since they told me you were back. Come in."

Still she wavered.

"Please," he said and for the first time, she could see the strain in his eyes as he looked at her.

Going in calmly was only slightly more dignified than turning tail and running.

Why not go in? There was nothing more to them than two slight acquaintances, at least from the perspective of everyone. No one knew of their work relationship, because most people didn't know what she did, and they weren't supposed to know the existence of the Nediyar, much less the Astromancer Most High's assistant.

To everyone else, they were two former classmates at Hogwarts who had bickered occasionally, and always with regards to blood and superiority.

So she ducked her head and went in, tensing as she passed him, feeling that thread of awareness again when her shoulder inadvertently brushed against his chest. Her steps faltered as a rush of memories enveloped her before she ducked her head and stepped away resolutely. She released a pent-up breath of air when the distance between them lengthened.

He led the way to the kitchen where they used to sit and drink tea. This place was a luxurious seaside home with five bedrooms. A more than sufficient home for any Muggle. It was still a far cry from the grandeur of Malfoy Manor in Wiltshire, where she had never even seen the inside of the kitchen.

Hermione supposed that that right there defined the extent of their past relationship.

"Do you come here often?" she asked after a cup of tea was sitting in front of her, smoke billowing from the translucent liquid.

Like solar flares, they had said once, with their fingers linked together, watching the tendrils of ephemeral mist float up to dissipate into the air. Have you noticed that it takes two swirls of the wand instead of one to boil water on a mountaintop—? Or, What would it be like to do magic on the moon, do you think? Would verbal incantations fail to work without sound? Their conversations had often been littered with such inconsequential comparisons that no one else could ever understand. Just them.

But maybe that was all that it was; proximity and solitude and nothing more.

He paused and Hermione realised how her question could be taken. She rolled her eyes and he smiled a little. The tension broke.

"Not in recent years, no," he said.

"I suppose you have too many homes to notice an extra one lying around," she said, trying to infuse levity into this impossible situation. It should only have been tense for her alone, but she felt strain emanating from him. She bravely lifted her eyes from her cup.

He wasn't looking at her, but rather down at his hand on the tabletop. Her eyes followed his and touched on the gold band on his ring finger, watching as he tapped the fingers of that hand idly on the table. His right hand covered up his ring briefly, before clenching and then falling away. "I'm married. I suppose Potter told you?"

Hermione took a sip of the tea, which scalded her tongue, as she sought for equanimity. "He didn't, no." Another sip, equally hot, equally useless. "I didn't ask him."

"Ah." He nodded a few times, as though to himself. "I suppose you're surprised?"

She would only be surprised if— "Only if you tell me it's someone like Rita Skeeter," she said, opting for levity. "But, for an egomaniac, it's not a bad career move."

His lips quirked up at one side before he sobered. "No. It's—Astoria Greengrass."

She didn't know the girl, but she recognised the surname.

"Yeah," he said in a lower voice. "Everyone says it was the perfect match." He gave a small laugh; one of his silent ones, the kind without genuine mirth. "There's a—there's a baby on the way."

Hermione tried to swallow the knot in her throat and succeeded before saying, "What, tonight? You should probably go back now."

"No, not tonight. But soon, I gather. In...five weeks."

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked before rolling her eyes at her own question. "Silly me. Of course it's a boy. Right?"

"That's what they tell me," he said and smiled down at his cup. It was the first genuine smile he had given. "I rather understand why my mother kept trying for more children after me. I wouldn't have minded a girl at all, but a boy—is lovely too."

"What will you name him?"

"Family tradition decrees some form of constellation, but I remember how you felt about that."

She smiled behind her teacup. "What, that you were a poncey git so obsessed with his name that he took up a career in astronomy?"

"Something like that."

"I wasn't wrong."

He shook his head a bit. "No, I suppose not."

She spent a year at Nediyar, researching the actual properties of various exotic stars. Never in her entire life had she imagined that she would be able to hold in her hand a pulsating, spinning mass of energy so strong that it could level half the earth within a microsecond were it not contained by magic. That was what Nediyar was for.

Unknown Peak, as the temple of the Astromancer Most High was called, was surprisingly empty for all its space. There was the Astromancer Most High, whom Hermione never saw. Then there was Draco Malfoy.

The first time they ate together was a meal of sandwiches on a tray that he levitated over to where she was standing; notebook out, quill out, documenting every single impression of the captured stars in the Star Room. There was no need for a light in this room, not with the bright globes—or whatever shape they were in—illuminating the giant space.

"Here," he said. "Thought you'd be hungry."

"Thanks," she murmured back absently, tapping the quill against her lips. She had taken a sandwich, asked him a question about quarks, and munched on a bite. It was roast chicken, and it was quite delicious, so she told him so. It didn't occur to her until later that this was really unprecedented behaviour from the prejudiced bully she had known.

The second time was a week later, when she braved going up into the Tower again. There, she watched him catch a preon star with quarks as bait. Afterwards, they both sat down within the confines of the balustered podium, and he conjured up some champagne. She wondered if this was some oblique sort of come-on, as he lived a very cloistered life here.

But, "It's my birthday. I'm having a drink on the top of the world," was his explanation.

Nothing was less loverlike than that, so she didn't hesitate when he offered her some of the bubbly. It was rather nice, sitting on top of the world. Up here, the earth looked almost small, like it could be framed within your hands. Things that had to do with the war and the past seemed more than just hectometers away—they seemed irrelevant. Perhaps Draco thought so too, because it seemed to her that with this job, he was vastly different from the self-satisfied blond prat she had known down there.

"Aren't you going home for your birthday?" she asked.

He shrugged, which wasn't really a response.

Hermione didn't push as she knew that the aftermath of the war for the Malfoys was a touchy subject. Somehow she felt compelled to offer the knowledge that her parents suffered from the Memory Charm that she had placed on them as protection—a charm that she had learned of by theory and practiced only once. Predictably, her parents now had good days and bad days. On the bad days, they forgot that she was a witch or that magic existed. A large chunk of her childhood was gone forever from their memory. At least she still had her parents, though.

He hesitated and stared down at the bottle in his lap. He looked a lot more pensive than she felt. She felt wild, giddy, eager to share everything. Perhaps he had more experience holding his liquor. "It was a pretty bad time for everyone. And could have been worse," he said finally.

She clinked her glass against his and said with alcohol-induced sanguinity, "Truer words have never been spoken."

Later in her borrowed bed that night, with the fumes having dissipated from her head, she considered the fact that the war had changed Draco in ways that weren't immediately apparent. He absolutely was still a sarcastic arse most of the time, but she herself was also still an easily excitable oversharer. For the most part though, this older version of him was rather pleasant to be around.

They were used to spending all of their days together now. Time spent in a large, magical temple seemed to merge together, as ceaseless as time itself. Nights spent warding the stars into their glass cases were suspended in reality by the very nature of the business.

He's lonely, came the startled realisation one day. There were a lot of rumours about how he had left England, and some comments weren't exactly kind. Good riddance, she had heard applied to his departure once or twice, and she had always laughed along with everybody else. Seeing him here now, living like a monk in this empty, out of the way place, she realised that he was paying a penance all on his own, with no prompting from anyone.

"Do you ever feel you're locked up here?" she asked him once. With thousands of glass cubes around them, glowing and swirling and compressed and contained, it wasn't hard to feel as though Draco had imprisoned himself here, as surely as he systematically captured and catalogued the stars.

His response wasn't really an answer. He did that often, she found. "Just because I don't socialise? I'm socialising with you, aren't I?"

Maybe he was. He didn't need to go out of his way to join her in every meal, or take her into the Nediyar's Library to show her more secrets of the universe. He did it, without arrogance, without condescension, with just a hint of quiet pride as he looked around the place, as though sharing a secret that only the two of them knew. So far as she knew, they were two of the only three people in the world who currently had access.

With the continued non-appearance of the Astromancer Most High, there was an intimacy to their routine that was underlined by the brief skin contact they made in passing. The brush of a finger as he corrected her hold on the Star Spinner, as the lacrosse stick was called. The flutter of the hair at her temple when he leaned in and whispered an incantation. The touch at the small of her back whenever she flinched from sensory overload atop the tower.

But most intimate of all for Hermione was seeing Draco Malfoy laugh for the very first time.

He didn't smile easily, or even often, as though it were something to hide from the world. His mirth had once upon a time been moored in hateful deeds, but now they were somehow tied to the beauty of a glowing star or the whistling of the wind through the open arcade. Sometimes, they could be called out by their shared conversation alone, and those moments happened more and more until it was difficult to see him any other way.

Summer Solstice was one of the major holidays of an Astromancer's life, when the secrets of the nighttime were completely eclipsed by the mitigating rays of the sun. As the days grew longer, the magic of the night became dimmed by the powerful energy of the sun, which made it impossible to work their instruments. It wasn't unnatural for them to make plans to go hiking together through a waterfall cave and later soak their feet in a natural hot springs. With the silver mist rising from the steaming water to match Draco's eyes, it was hard to imagine being here or anywhere with anyone else.

Later in the evening, Draco took her to a small magical enclave with a population of eighty-seven people. It was a place he visited once every so often, though he claimed never to have stayed above an hour.

All the shops were closed, but they were welcomed with open arms into their celebration, which consisted of cooking entirely without magic. That one day out of the year, everyone dug holes in the ground by hand and burned stones inside the ditches to heat up the ground. Then leaf-wrapped meat were placed within the steaming hot pits, covered with sand and more hot stones to cook in its natural oven. Amidst the chatter of Kurdish, Hermione sat with Draco at her side as the sun finally sank below the horizon in reversal of the burst of light of a newborn star.

While they waited for the food to cook, the villagers sang traditional songs and gathered together for group dancing, which looked too fun not to join in. Almost the whole town lined up and held hands to skip, hop, clap, and stomp their feet first one way and then another.

Although Draco seemed unwilling to join in, Hermione still pulled him into the dancing with her. Whether her face was flushed from laughter, or the heat of the day, or from the grip of his hand on hers, she was loathe to admit to herself. Hermione couldn't keep up and neither could Draco, but he didn't let go of her hand. The two of them bumped into each other regularly whenever they turned by accident in opposite directions.

By the end of the night, she was laughing so hard she had the hiccups. He was laughing too, and for once, it wasn't silent laughter after all. She had wrung a sound from him, and it was as beautiful as the smiles all around them in this peaceful, isolated village that had never known wartime or genocide. It was as pure as the magic here, never used to discriminate or draw lines in the sand.

It was late by the time they returned to Nediyar, and the white marble expanse seemed at once cold and lonely and unbearably quiet after the festivity that evening. When Hermione half-turned in the corridor to go to her room, she saw an expression on Draco's face as he stood there watching her that was filled with longing and wistfulness, and she impetuously hugged him. He was startled, but his arms tightened around her when she tried to pull away.

The kiss started as a breath of air against her lips, a tentative request for permission that she granted by not moving away. It started out unbearably sad—like a sharing of memories, an inquiring reach outward for solace, a lingering touch of repentance. He was the one to pull away first, saying with infinite regret, "I shouldn't—you'll hate yourself in the morning."

The unspoken words there were that she hated him, and it had been true once a long time ago, but it grew less and less true with every day that passed until maybe the opposite could be more true. Maybe it was reckless, but she didn't want to stop—she wanted to find out just what else had changed with this man or who he really was so far away from everything they had ever known.

In the end, she was the one who pulled his head back down, and she realised that kissing him wasn't sad at all—it was filled with newness and hope, like being told a secret that could change the world for the better. The secret was him, the secret was them, the secret was how she had never realised the man that he could be and that, without a slight twist of fate, she never would have at all.

The secret was that he could become someone so important to her that he had eclipsed all other stars in her firmament.

It wasn't disallowed, exactly, for an Astromancer at Nediyar to be romantically involved, only that it was practically unworkable most of the time. Not that they ever considered it. It was a one-time thing, then a two-time thing, and then a three-time and maybe a temporary thing. It was never meant to be permanent, and they both knew it.

Things outside did not change. When Hermione left to go home for a visit, she was keenly aware of the difference between England and Nediyar, of people and friends who fought on the side of the right, and the lonely man on top of the world who had tried to kill the headmaster.

More practically, she was an Unspeakable and he was an Astromancer, and the two jobs were separated by a distance of more than just geography. If he was ambitious, and she knew he was, then he must aspire to be the Astromancer Most High, who was, she knew, searching for a replacement.

That replacement, if married, had to be married to a Pureblood only, a sentiment also strongly echoed by his parents even if he, right now, had changed perspectives.

As for Hermione, she had no desire to be Somebody's wife. She had plans to be a Somebody all on her own. She was going to make discoveries, and write books, plural, and see things around the world. Certainly, being on top of the world was lovely—for a while, but she hadn't fully explored the extents of earth yet to confine herself to a white marble prison.

Therefore, their priorities were perfectly aligned, and this would not last. They both knew it. It was a perfect arrangement for one year.

Until it wasn't.

As it turned out, one year wasn't enough.

As Hermione was the first to admit, plans had a tendency to go wrong when one was so emotional, as she hated to admit that she very often was.

By that time, they had traveled together extensively on their days off. They had gone to a multitude of places, but the place that Hermione liked best was the little clifftop cottage in Dorset. She hated how it seemed like her biology was betraying her, but it made her imagine all sorts of possibilities, of a married life, of children, of growing old together in a way that was decidedly Muggle. She was only twenty-six, after all, but she imagined all sorts of domestic images that later made her cringe with shame.

In a fit of lovesick domesticity, she had even imagined that she could quit her job and her ambitions and become his wife. Just that and nothing more.

In thinking back, she had fooled herself. She had mistaken the light in his eyes to shine for her and not just the availability of her. She had misinterpreted their compatibility as something deeper than forced intimacy borne of proximity. She had been wrong, wrong, wrong.

He had looked at her with something like disbelieving shock. "What? You would do that?"

It wasn't the reaction she had been expecting. "I'm leaving here in two days. How—how did you think we could keep this up?"

A shrug as though the answer should have been obvious. "Portkeys."

"It's impossible for me to Portkey back in if I'm no longer working on this project," she said. "You know that."

"I can get an exception for you. We're allowed to have—ah, paramours."

"That's what I am to you? A paramour?" It was such an old-fashioned word. She supposed he could have used something else; mistress, fuckbuddy. Either way, it all meant the same thing to her in that moment.

"I can also always Apparate out to meet you, if they don't grant my request." He spread his hands in a way that was meant to be conciliatory but looked to her like the noncommittal movements of a salesman.

She scoffed. She could see that working out even better. She would have no way of contacting him, and he would come see her when it was convenient for him. Was she then supposed to drop everything whenever he showed up? She would, in effect, become The Mistress.

What an old-fashioned concept, for a time when women had no place in anyone's world except in the world's oldest occupation. Hermione had never thought that her ambitions would come down to this level. Once, she had wanted to be Minister of Magic. Now, she was bartering for something as low as marriage and being offered something even less in exchange.

"So, I guess marriage is completely out of the question, then?" she asked on a tight, bitter laugh. Her hand was on her hip and her question was decidedly rhetorical and sarcastic.

He frowned in response. "Marriage ?" he repeated. "Er...that's—wow. But—" he broke off, but his grey eyes were flickering all over the place.

She could see his brain whirling and spinning. The thoughts were clear through the frown etched above the bridge of his nose and his little incredulous puff of air. She felt like the world's biggest fool.

This was never intended to have gone so far. He was supposed to marry a Pureblood. He had never even envisioned something at the end of a year. She had been fooling herself, mistaking his loneliness for something deeper.

"Has it ever crossed your mind that we could be married?" she asked him then, quietly, with a sinking heart.

It was so quiet that she could hear him swallow. She could hear the sound his hair made falling through his hand. She could hear the rasp of skin as he rubbed his fingers against his thumb.

His silence more than spoke for him. A year. That was their expiration date.

This was it.

She left him in that white marble courtyard and went to her temporary room, where she started to pack all her things.

She left a day earlier than planned, and he never stopped her.

A little over three weeks later, she completed her project.

It was nine years after that when she popped back into existence.

"How are your parents?" she asked. "Your father wasn't— well ... before."

Draco grimaced at that, recalling details that she remembered as well. "Ah. Not to worry. He's still alive and kicking. As it happens, he can feign chest pains with the best of them."

"That's...good, I guess," she said, for lack of anything better to say.

"It's not, really, but let's not talk about that. How did you finally do it? How did you finally stopper time?" he asked, and his cheek creased a bit when he heard his own question, heard that quote that they used to hear in Potions class, a quote they would repeat in dramatic, slow tones whenever they imitated their old professor. They hadn't been laughing at Professor Snape, not really; more like remembering him in their own way.

"It was—a miscalculation, actually," she said. She hadn't meant to slip through time, to go into another dimension. Her fingers had slipped just on the precipice of clicking the last particle into place.

"I wondered, you know," he said. "When you disappeared. If you had managed to do it after all. But then I thought, if Hermione Granger had managed to do it, then she would manage to come back." There was something in his smile when he looked at her then that she didn't like, mostly because it made her think of impossible things. "So I considered the possibility that something had gone unquestionably wrong."

"Well, now you know that Hermione Granger is mortal like everyone else and prone to mistakes as well."

He gave a little disbelieving shake of his head at that, and she flushed.

In a rush to cover up her embarrassment, she rushed into speech. "Ah. Well. To put it simply, I should have used a preon star. With the right amount of mass calculated to your body type, you can stay motionless while life continues on past. It duplicates the effect of traveling at high speed and staying near an object of high gravity and large time distortion. The secret is to release it in increments." In the end, it was as simple as that.

"And turning back time? Were you able to replicate the effects of the Time-Turner?"

"In theory, one could. You would need a stabilizing agent, something like a magnetar fragment to contain the preon star as it's slowly released in confinement. I'm almost positive that was how they encased it in the first place. But of course, traveling into the future is easier than into the past. Which was why I attempted that first." More fool her. Life had whizzed past her, leaving her stuck in her own past. She was fresh out of energy to attempt going back again. This wasn't like the movies; whizzing in and out of different times. Unlike those fictional time loops, every single attempt would be traversing into an alternate dimension, with no repeats of the past or future.

He nodded and tapped a finger next to his teacup. It was the same movement he used to do whenever he was in deep thought, whenever he had been trying to figure out a problem. It was jarring to see him doing it now, with a wedding ring on that hand.

She swallowed and looked away. "But there's never really a past. A time loop is a common misconception. If you travel to the past, it's going to be different because it's already your future."

"Yes. But you'd be changing your own narrative, no matter what dimension it is. So. Would you?" he asked. "If you could get all of those ingredients together again, an Unspeakable lab, a preon star, Magnetar fragments, all of it." There was something very still about him as he asked her, his eyes fixed on her with unblinking intensity: "Would you? Would you go back to change things? Can you imagine your own possibilities?"

Hermione gave a short laugh. "Right now, I think I'm sufficiently timed out. I have no plans to return to the Ministry right at this moment to work on that. Especially when there's no guarantee that anything would change for the better. I feel like I've missed years of my life. Everyone—everyone has gone forward and done things and I've just…" She took a deep breath and willed herself not to cry. Time was running out for her to change her own story; she knew this. In about a week's time when she handed in her resignation at the Department of Mysteries, more memories would be taken away from her for good. People did not retire from being a Unspeakable. They died as an Unspeakable. Knowing this had not lit any sort of a fire under her. She felt overwhelmingly drained. This was not like coming back from being Petrified at all.

Even if she could imagine it, there was no chance she could fix anything.

Her fingers twitched on the tabletop, and out of the periphery of her eyes, she saw his left hand reach out to touch her. She withdrew her hand quickly before he could.

"Sorry," she said, folding her hands in her lap. "Didn't mean to get all melancholy on you."

"I think you're excused. Hermione—"

"What do you do now? I know you're not the Astromancer Most High, which is a shame because you were extremely talented at catching stars—far more than you were at catching the snitch, if you don't mind me saying so, so that is—"

"Hermione," he said, breaking into her slew of run-on words.

She looked up and met his eyes for the first time since they sat down at the table.

He stared back at her with unblinking eyes the colour of the mist that preceded time travel, the indication that one was traveling faster than the speed of light. There was so much intensity in his gaze that Hermione couldn't help but be caught up in him. "I'm sorry," he said, and his very tone was meaningful in a way their entire conversation so far had not been. "I was a foolish idiot and I wasn't ready—"

This time, she was the one who cut him off by standing up. The chair made a loud scraping sound against the flagstone floor. He stood as well.

"It's for the best, you know?" she said, deliberately bright. "And—wow, I'm jet-lagged—space-lagged, is that a thing? I should go."

And before he could do anything, she rushed out of the kitchen and ran for the front door. She heard him call her name again behind her, closer, so she sped up. She was halfway down the cliffside stairs and almost— almost —to the edge of the wards when she heard a muffled curse behind her and a popping sound. Then he Apparated in front of her to grab her by the shoulders so suddenly that she almost stumbled and fell in her headlong dash.

"It should have been you," he said through gritted teeth, head bowed. "I didn't realise—not then, what a fool I was. But I did. God, I did. If only I had said the right words, or if I had realised what I was losing when you walked away, it wouldn't be like this now. We would have worked on it together, been together—I'd never have lost you.

"Years. Years I spent wondering where you were, whether you had disappeared to make me go crazy." He looked up then, and she saw that his eyes were glittering with wetness. "Only the certain knowledge that if you wanted to, you could have made me disappear instead made me sure that you didn't want to come back. I didn't know where you were. You went somewhere I couldn't follow."

She couldn't breathe; couldn't move. All her attention was caught up in his startling confession; words that she never thought she would hear him say. Perhaps that was their problem exactly. All those feelings and never a conversation to cement them.

He was saying them now. It was a torrent of speech falling from his lips as though a dam had been breached.

His hand left her shoulder to cup her jaw. His thumb trembled against her chin. "You were the love of my life. I just—what an idiot I was, what an absolute blind fool—I had to lose you to find that out. Not a day went by that I didn't regret every word of our last conversation and wished to just have followed you back here. Everybody told me I had to let go of my past to move on, but they didn't realise that you were it. You are everything that challenges me and pushes me to improve, from the very moment I met you. It just took me more than two decades to tell you." He rested his forehead against hers and she felt the pulse of it when he swallowed. "I was so afraid of losing you to your old life when your time at Nediyar ended that I never said a word—and I lost you anyway."

Hermione could feel the wetness against her face. Whether it was the sweat of exertion or the stain of tears, she couldn't tell. She marveled at the touch of him, so close again, saying all the words she had wanted to hear in those lonely weeks that had just gone by for her.

To her, it hadn't been nine years. It had been only a month since she left him behind that heartrending day. It was tempting— so tempting —to say, the hell with consequences and take what she wanted. She had him first. He belonged to her.

His mouth found hers, and his hand touched her face, her chin, the nape of her neck, and his hands were shaking. If she had ever doubted his sincerity toward her, she no longer did anymore. His breath came like stuttered pauses, and he was crying and laughing as he kissed her.

He was murmuring a litany of words as his lips brushed over her mouth, her cheeks, her chin, her hair. "Hermione. I even tried to convince myself that it was all a dream. But now you're here—and I remember it all."

She closed her eyes as she inhaled the scent of him, a smell that had lingered on everything she owned until a week ago, when she returned back to the world to find that her flat was gone, and that all her things had been relegated into a vault at Gringotts. Even the shoes she wore now belonged to Ginny.

She hadn't known. She thought it had all been on her side, that she had been a foolish, pining idiot. The fact that she wasn't should have made things better, but it somehow made everything all the more heartbreaking. Why couldn't things be different?

It was the cold slide of metal against her cheek that brought her back to herself. She opened her eyes and pulled down his left hand from her face and stood back.

"You have to go back," she said. It was the hardest thing she had ever had to say.

"No—"

"Yes. Yes, you do. You know that, right?"

"Hermione—"

She pressed her fingertips to his mouth, and her will wavered when he turned his mouth into them and kissed them. "Your wife," she said, closing her eyes against the pain. "The baby."

He took a deep breath. There was a deep line between his eyebrows as he clenched his jaw against the force of strong emotion, of polarizing conflicts. His eyes were dark and awash with regret.

She didn't say the words in her heart, the words that they avoided saying to each other in the past: I love you too. So much. So much. Instead, "Thank you," she said. "Thank you for loving me. I never was sure. I was—too rash. Things didn't end well."

He gave a shaky laugh and squeezed her hands, the only part of them that still touched. "No."

She squeezed them back and released his hands before stepping backward. "Maybe in another life, we could have had a chance," she said, taking one more step backward. It was as difficult as she imagined it would be.

Then she turned and walked toward the steps.

Behind her was silence. Then a footfall. Followed by another.

"I never told you my job now, did I?" he said behind her. She paused and turned to him with a quizzical expression on her face. He smiled at her, a lopsided, ironic smile that looked uncertain but somehow also determined, as though he had come to some sort of a decision. His eyes were no longer dark but ablaze with the bright glitter of a million falling stars. "I'm an Unspeakable."

He had a way of holding his body absolutely still when he was at attention that was like no other. He did so now, the only motion his hand stretched out across to her. She stared at it, uncomprehending at first. She lifted her eyes to stare at him; at the wry expression on his face, the kind braced for rejection; expecting it and understanding it all the while dreading it.

It was an offer across time and space, and she could see the light of the pale moon shining down on him, enveloping them in a bubble outside of time and space.

"Won't you come with me?"