Work Text:
Sogni
Oh, my life
is changin' every day.
In every possible way.
And oh, my dreams
It's never quite as it seems
Never quite as it seems
On a summer-scented night, ripe and dripping with figs and almond-oil richness, the Sirocco blew its heated, humid breath over the outskirts of Taormina, where the newly-acquired galleons of Prince Enrico's supporters drew their kind to the old Baroque palaces, like flies to the open wounds of slain deer.
Clinging to the cliffside like a quaint seashell in a child's necklace, stood the now Palazzo Grangieri, its coral-pink walls faded by the relentless Sicilian sun into a muted blush-rose. Inside, the cool, canopied shadow of the quadrangular Renaissance-style courtyard still bore the languid erosion of the centuries it had stood indolent.
At its centre, in an embrace of old maiolica tiles, the baroque fountain lingered. Its faithful marble basin, genteel despite its cracks and chips, had been discarded for something more in tune with modern sensibilities, as imbalanced as an old soldier missing a leg from a drunken brawl.
Riccardo Grangero had opened his rich, carved doors to all the important families, some pure-blooded names that had managed to stay in the good graces of the victors, but many more of his particular ilk, Babbanis and their children, rising like the first surge of a flood, dragging the reluctant with them.
There the new set would peacock all of tonight, half-collapsing under strings of pearls and scarlet ribbons, their ornate masks rimmed in feathers, and ruffles firmly affixed to their flushed, plump faces.
The music was already in motion when the first guests drifted in from the terrace, a sweep of strings laced with the slow percussion of a tamburello. Lantern light shimmered on gilded cornices and the deep green of potted lemon trees, their blossoms releasing a scent sweet enough to mask, for a time, the closeness of so many bodies.
Small blotches of individuality could be spied amongst them: a young woman in a crescent mask of silver lace; a tall man with a wolf’s muzzle carved in black wood; a knot of former pure-blood grandees holding their zibibbo as though it were a talisman. There was laughter pitched too high, the occasional hiss of whispered scandal, and a parade of eyes, some assessing, some hungry, some merely counting the pearls.
At the door, leaning lazily against the frame, stood a figure cloaked in night, all raven-black and navy reflexes. The beak disguised what one could guess to be a profile cut in blue-veined marble reminiscent of ancient statues, though his slightly worn kid leather gloves, a touch too big, and his strong lean thighs precisely sculpted in their midnight-black hose revealed more about his youth that he would probably care to admit.
Amidst all this sparkling richness, there was something grimly foreign to him, even if the mask disguised all of his face but the strong, aristocratic chin. The sensuous, curved lips and his hair, pale blond and longer than it should be, revealed more of his Patrician heritage than what his raven-feathered cap could hope to hide.
He brushed a gloved hand along the carved initials hidden beside the doorframe, the only piece of the house that still resisted its new masters. His father’s ever-amounting debts were paid, his mother's cavernous cough fared better by the sea. The rest could be endured. What could not be endured was leaving here without securing his future.
Draco Malfieri was young, handsome, and understood what his father refused to see: things had to change if they wanted them to remain the same. Change had come with Enrico Poteri's victory and now it was up to him to secure the immutability in his fate. Romula Vanesi, and the vaults she would bring to a marriage, were within reach.
This would give him the freedom he so craved to avoid becoming like his father, a man who had lost his country and estate in truth, though never in his mind, and still played the master over all of it.
“What in Santa Rita’s name are you doing here?” The hushed voice came with the heat of a hurried breath against his ear, threaded with panic. Draco turned to find a doublet of black and gold silk gleaming under the lantern light, the chestnut curls spilling beneath a sly fox mask, its whiskers twitching with subtle enchantment. Teo Notte, oldest friend, rightful guest.
Unlike him.
“You know why I’m here,” Draco murmured. “The fair Romula… my intended.”
“You’ve clearly lost your wits. If Grangieri sees you—”
“Ah, ah,” Draco cut in, his smile a flash of mockery. “Grangero. Not Grangieri, surely.”
“You know they changed it to sound more—”
“Like they are like us?”
“Yes,” Teo said with a shrug, “that.”
“Preposterous,” Draco concluded, with the finality of a man dealing his last blow with the rapier.
“Yes, quite ridiculous,” Teo assented, the fox’s muzzle dipping in mock gravity. “But still, you cannot be here. I am certain you could woo the fair Romula… elsewhere.”
“The thing is, my dearest friend,” Draco replied, leaning closer so the lantern caught in the curve of his mask’s beak, “I fear I cannot. I have chosen this night, this precise night, to bare my sins to her.”
“Your… sins?” One of the enchanted whiskers twitched upward, perfectly in time with the glint in Teo’s marine eyes. “Sant’Antonio’s balls, Malfieri! What sins could you possibly mean?”
Draco’s smile was slow, deliberate. “The kind that sound far more like virtues when whispered in a ballroom.”
"Incorrigible," the fox replied, its cunning eyes rolling, a hand urging his friend.
The dance floor had begun to draw couples in like the tide reclaiming a stretch of sand. The music, strings gliding languidly over the steady vibrato of the tamburello, coiled around the ballroom’s lemon-scented air, drawing even the reluctant into its slow whirl.
Lantern-light made the silks and satins gleam with colour as they glided; gold and vermilion, sea-green and ivory turned in careful patterns, like the myriad of tones in the coat of an exotic bird of prey left in a menagerie. Feathers shivered on mask edges, fans flicked open and shut with the precision of careful calligraphy. Laughter, bright and quick, rose in swells above the music before thinning, like a murmuration of starlings.
Moving from the door to a vantage point at the arched edge of the ballroom, Draco and Teo could see everything: the careful spacing between rival houses, the discreet exchange of sealed notes in shadowed corners, the calculated chance collisions between unwed heirs and glittering heiresses.
Draco’s gaze tracked his mark.
Romula Vanesi moved in a sweep of ivory silk embroidered with a pale gold that caught the light like honey poured over cream. Her mask was a delicate butterfly in filigree, suggesting expensive innocence. Her every turn seemed measured to display the curve of her throat, the line of her collarbone, as if she were aware of precisely which pair of eyes sought her in the crowd.
“She’s looking for you,” Teo murmured, tilting his fox’s muzzle toward her.
“She’s looking for an opportunity,” Draco replied, voice low, though his eyes did not leave her. “I intend to offer her one.”
The music shifted, strings bending into a minor key, the tamburello quickening into something almost restless. The dancers’ formations tightened, drawing close as if the change had pulled an invisible thread through all of them. Romula glanced once toward the far archway, and for the barest second, their eyes met across the crowd.
Teo caught the moment and exhaled a short laugh through his teeth. “Well. There’s your invitation.”
Draco’s gloved fingers flexed against the stone arch beside him., but his stare fell, not on his fair intended, but on a gracious figure besides her, a golden-rose dove, with long brown curls cascading gently down her back, the amorous bird masking her features.
"Teo, who is that?" Draco asked, a tinge of curiosity raising in him.
"It's a masquerade, friend. I thought this night was all for fair Romula? Where are you… Draco!"
But his friend was gone, engulfed by the undulating throng, mesmerised by a pair of glistening eyes, moving in underwater silence, like a boatman struggling to reach his shore, lightninged by pure recognition.
The crowd closed and opened again, swallowing and letting him slip between them without touching. Silk brushed his doublet, perfume drifted past in fugitive waves, bergamot and musk, violet and orange blossom, but the scent that caught and held was hers, elusive, lemon verbena, rosemary and mint.
Attraction, fidelity, virtue.
A love potion made just for him.
She moved with the dance, not quite in its pattern. Where so-soon-forgotten Romula spun with the careful precision of a courtier, this golden-rose dove followed the music as if she had borrowed the steps only for the evening, ready to abandon them at a whim. Her gown was of palest apricot, almost a whisper, but its skirts shifted like the inside of a seashell, iridescent in the lamplight. The mask, weightless papier-mâché and painted into a dove in mid-flight, caught the glow along the gilded edges of its wings.
A turn of her head and the crowd no longer mattered. Amber eyes, bright as fire through honey, locked with his across the measure. Not the coy glance of Romula’s calculated allure, but one that happened before thought, before propriety, before the inevitable. Raw and unguarded, beckoning him.
The tamburello vibrated; dancers pressed closer. She was drawn away, then nearer again, in the tide of bodies, and each time she reappeared between a sleeve of green brocade or a flare of blood-red silk, he felt the same sharp pull toward her, Theseus clinging to Ariadne's thread in the dark of the labyrinth.
Somewhere at his back, Teo’s voice tried to cut through the noise, a caution, a jest, he could not tell, but the music and the press of the masquerade swallowed it whole, an echo of the Ionian waves just beneath.
Draco stepped forward, a hunter keeping his quarry in sight.
I know I've felt like this before
But now I'm feeling' it even more
Because it came from you
Then I open up and see
The person fallin' here is me
A different way to be
Hermione had been moving with the tide of the ballroom, carried as much by the shifting press of bodies as by her own steps. The air was heavy with heat and perfume, a mingling of bergamot, violet and citrus blossom, wine, and some sharper note she knew not how to name. She had been tracing the edge of the crowd, half-hidden behind her dove’s mask, when a shiver passed through her, like the sudden prick of the spindle, making her aware that she was being seen.
It was a feeling that came before sight: a pull, subtle yet unyielding, an invisible thread tied at her wrist and drawn taut. She turned her head just so her eyes could sweep the crowd…
There he was.
The raven stood at the far curve of the room, black and midnight-blue catching the light, the beak of his mask tilting in appraisal. Even at that distance, his gaze fixed on her, narrowing the music and laughter to a single, taut point.
The dancers shifted; he vanished, swallowed by a whirl of silk and feathers. Then he was closer, moving through the murmuration as if it too obeyed the pull.
The crowd’s current brought her to him until the air between them thinned, past the raven mask, to a glint of moonlit hair escaping his cap, to the unblinking intent in his eyes. She felt herself borne into a strange world where sense had no meaning. She cared not.
His gloved hand found her ungloved one with the quiet certainty of those who claim a long-sought right. The leather was cool from the night air beyond the terrace, but beneath it she could feel the restraint in his slim fingers, folding around hers.
The press of the crowd turned them, a slow arc that brought them nearer still. His other hand brushed her free one, fingertips grazing her knuckles as if reading them like a line of script he already knew by heart.
She did not speak, nor did he, for the space between their masks was small, and the music wrapped them in a cocoon of movement. Around them, skirts flared, pearls flashed, feathers trembled, but for a moment the world was reduced to the clasp of his hands on hers and the silent recognition that passed through it. His left hand guiding her waist closed and closer to him, their heartbeats singing a duet in perfect harmony.
Hermione lifted her eyes, but there was such confident tenderness in his affectionate look and smile that she could not, whilst looking at him, say what she had to say. She lowered them, but graced him with a smile whilst he pulled her to a secluded alcove.
The alcove lay half-lit, a narrow harbour behind a curtain of lemon branches leaning in from the terrace. The music reached them in softened threads, like a dance remembered in a dream. The Raven twirled his Dove until their breaths were mingling.
“You command the room like a tide, and I am nothing but a poor mariner with no choice but to follow,” he said to her, in a hush, his cold-morning eyes shining behind the black mask.
“I fear you have mistaken me for Stella Maris to steer by,” was her hesitant reply, her voice coming out slightly breathless from the heat and the dance inside.
“A star?" He looked startled and almost indignant. "No, stars are cold and unreachable. You are like a lighthouse fire in disguise,”
“Ah!" And her smile was wide, revealing a girlish dimple. "Fire burns the careless who reach too near.”
“Then let me burn,” was his fervent plea.
He had removed his gloves and she could now feel her heart hand, very still in his. She felt blood hueing her cheeks when thinking about how his thumb pressed her pulse in exactly the right spot where her heart thundered, just like she felt it between her ears.
You. Are. Falling. Deep.
Could the Raven hear it? She bit her lower lip, the pain grounding her before continuing.
“You speak as if you know me,” and her voice rose a half note.
“I do not, but there lies my torment. I need to,” was his earnest reply.
“And if I am not what you think?” She asked, trying to sculpt her way out of his spell.
“Then you are what I could never have thought.”
Her laugh escaped her, a bubble of nervousness catching on the air. He raised his free hand like a groom lifting a bridal veil, and touched the edge of her mask. She could see his signet ring, a snake eating its tail, and thought to herself he was left-handed, someone who took the path less travelled in everything.
“Careful, there. Once you look, you cannot unsee,” Hermione warned.
“I would not wish to.”
A compulsion overtook her and she was quicker than him, slipping her fingers to the tie at the back of his head, the neat, precise bow loosening with her pull. His mask fell first, revealing the Helenic profile that housed the plush mouth with a tiny mole in the left side, boyish. She let her own ribbon fall, the dove’s wings frozen, their flight halted, and for one suspended heartbeat, there were no masks between them.
Silence clouded everything.
“A promise,” he drew closer.
“From a stranger?” Hermione asked.
“From someone burning sweetly.”
Hermione took a minute step back, her skirts rustling, knowing they were dancing at the edge of a precipice, with little time to think. He bent graciously, as if obeying some old compulsion, the space between them vanishing, their lips meeting, cool silk at first, lightly, like a pilgrim touching a relic of a lost Maria Maddalena. Then came the wave, the taste of lemon verbena and something sweeter, as the music swelled. Burning lips were pressed to hers, and at the same instant she felt herself released, the gravity ceasing to exist, whilst her invisible string braided with his.
Ah
La-ah-ya-ah
La-ya-ya
La-ah-ya-ah
Ya-ah, ah, ah
The kiss ebbed, a silk doublet coming off from a sculpted torso in the Sicilian heat, slow, reluctant, a trail of musky sweat behind it. Hermione did not move. Her eyes were still closed, and the world beyond the alcove was nothing more than a blurred hum of plucked strings and laughter. His breath lingered close to hers, carrying the faint salt of the sea that slipped in from the terrace, the lemon oil from the branches above.
He didn’t release her hand. Instead, his thumb brushed once more against her pulse, the barest graze, as if to keep time with the slowing thrum of her heart.
“Do all pilgrims kiss like this?” She wondered at last, the words slipping between them like shadows in a confessional.
“Only for the gentlest saints, I fear” he murmured, his eyes searching hers with something like hunger and something like fear. “A saint that has undone me.”
Her lips parted, but she had no ready reply; the air between them was too heavy, the night too close.
And then, the spell tore.
A burst of laughter came from the terrace, charging though their silence. The curtain of lemon branches shifted as a pair of guests wandered too near, the spill of light from the ballroom slanting into the alcove. Music swelled, heavy with brass, pulling them back into the current of the masquerade.
He stepped away first, not looking at her, only adjusting the fall of his hair while he pocketed a simple ribbon she had given him.
She stood very still, her hands folded together as if to keep the shape of his touch from escaping. Then he was gone, swallowed by silk and feathers, and she by the crowd that closed over her like the sea.
The press of the masquerade folded over him like a swarm. For a moment, Draco moved without seeing, his pulse still answering some ghost of her heartbeat. He touched his lips with his left hand, lingering on the exact pressure of her rosebud, the aftertaste of lemon verbena still in his breath. The world was all clash and colour until voices began to thread through it.
“… Grangero’s daughter. Imagine, she was right there.” The affected tone of Viola Parcasòni, her unmistakable azure hair coiled beneath an asp's mask.
“With a paramour,” a man's voice sibilated. “And the girl's father hoping to introduce his pearl this evening…” A pause. A curl of disdain. “Serves him right, for all the greasy climbing they perform around Prince Enrico.”
Draco stopped moving. The current of silk and scent parted around him. Across the floor, she stood in profile, her dove’s mask once again in place, her head tilted as if listening to some jest. Lamplight painted her curls the colour of old honey.
He knew the name. He knew the ruin. He knew what it meant in this room.
And yet, the moment the syllables reached him, something in him tightened, like the slow, sure closing of a trap he had stepped into willingly. He felt the night bending over itself, the thread between them drawn taut and unbreakable.
The cornet swelled; dancers wheeled; she was lost in their churn, but the name stayed, like the memory of her mouth.
Hermione Grangero.
The name of a queen.
I want more
Impossible to ignore
Impossible to ignore
A hand caught his sleeve, urgent and deliberate.
“Draco. We have to go. Now.”
Teo’s voice cut through the din, low but insistent, the whiskers in his russet fox mask tilting toward the nearest archway as if the walls themselves might be listening. The dancers were spinning faster now, the corno da caccia joining the cornet, urging them into a frenzy, but his friend was already threading them toward the doors.
Draco let himself be pulled, though his steps lagged, his head turning once, twice, to catch another glimpse of her. But the dove had flown, swallowed by the throng. All that was left was the ghost of lemon verbena in his mouth, searing and sweet, and the memory of her pulse beneath his thumb.
They reached the shadowed edge of the ballroom, only to be met by Romula. The butterfly mask could not hide the hard gleam in her eyes.
“Where have you been?” she hissed, voice pitched to pierce. Her hands were sharp at his elbows, turning him to face her. “Do you know who you’ve been seen with? How could you do this? Do you know how they’ll talk of me in Naples, what that will do to my father’s standing? After what I chose to ignore? Your kind has really sunken low.”
Teo stepped in, smooth as always, murmuring something about a minor delay, a misunderstanding. But Romula’s gaze stayed on Draco, searching for guilt, for shame, for anything she could bend into obedience.
She found nothing, so wounded, retorted. "My father will hear about this, Draco Malfieri."
He barely saw her. The memory of the alcove eclipsed everything. He was there. The lemon branches leaning close, the impossible pull of her eyes before the masks had fallen, the brush of her lips.
Romula’s voice became a distant echo. Teo’s tug on his arm was the only thing that moved him forward, out into the cool night where the dust-laden Sirocco was still warm against the skin.
He knew the truth: it could not be. Her new name, his house's genteel ruin, the laws of their world, all said so.
But even as he took to his horse, he leaned into the beast's ears and whispered sweetly, letting the dream take him.
"Come Ouroboros, take your pilgrim home to sleep with his saint's taste on his lips."
Impossible.
But Draco dreamed.
And they'll come true
Impossible not to do
Impossible not to do